Two recent circuit court decisions highlight how much the composition of the Board and the courts affects rights protected by the National Labor Relations Act. One case, MikLin Enterprises v. NLRB, addressed whether workers at a Jimmy John’s franchise had los... More »
In his hearing yesterday before the Senate Appropriations Committee, Labor Secretary Alex Acosta announced that DOL’s Wage and Hour Division (WHD) will reinstate the practice of providing “opinion letters.” These letters are legal interpretations of the laws t... More »
The pace of nominations and appointments to the Department of Labor, National Labor Relations Board, and other federal labor agencies is expected to continue to accelerate. Following the nominations earlier this week of Marvin Kaplan to the NLRB and Patrick P... More »
Donald Trump and the Republicans in Congress love to refer to regulations as “job crushing.” When Trump spoke recently at the Conservative Political Action Conference he not only said that companies can’t hire because of regulations, but he also said that “we... More »
We still have a lot to learn about Alex Acosta, Donald Trump’s new nominee for Labor Secretary, but one case he ruled on during his brief stint at the National Labor Relations Board suggests that, not surprisingly for a Trump appointee, he is likely to favor e... More »
When Judge Neil Gorsuch accepted his nomination to the Supreme Court, he professed modesty about his role on the Court, if he is confirmed. He proclaimed that it is the role of judges to “apply not alter the work of the people’s representatives.” But, unfort... More »
I reported on Saturday that at the very moment Donald Trump was at the Capitol delivering his Inaugural Address promising a better life for the working class, a staffer was inside the Department of Labor taking information off the DOL website. The first to go... More »
People have been writing the obituary of the labor movement at least since the 1980s. These doomsayers fall into two camps. One the one hand, there are those who are eager to squelch worker power. A typical example is Virginia Foxx, the new Chair of the Hou... More »
President Trump’s first afternoon in office was short on major developments for labor rights. The big news was that shortly after noon, a U.S. Department of Labor webpage about LGBT rights suddenly disappeared from the government’s website. You can read the ... More »
Now that Republicans in Congress are about to get a President who will sign their bills into law, they are eager to overturn even the most modest pro-worker measures that President Obama’s appointees were able to implement. One of the top items on the choppin... More »
The D.C. Circuit once observed that “[i]t is a fact of life in NLRB lore that certain substantive provisions of the NLRA invariably fluctuate with the changing compositions of the Board.” In 2000, the Clinton Board found that teaching and research assistants ... More »
In 1912, when the labor leader Eugene V. Debs ran for President for the fourth time as the Socialist Party candidate, in his acceptance speech he spoke of a day when “the right to work shall be as inviolate as the right to breathe the breath of life.” But, in... More »