In ruling on a case involving the rights of telephone company employees to wear union t-shirts while they were working, Brett Kavanaugh began his opinion with the observation that “common sense sometimes matters in resolving legal disputes.” But, as the case ... More »
This piece was originally published by the Biden Forum. There is no doubt that workers’ bargaining power is on the decline. Workers aren’t seeing the increase in wages that they’ve been waiting for since the end of the Great Recession. Notwithstanding historic... More »
In 2010, a trainer at SeaWorld drowned when the killer whale she was working with during a performance “grabbed her and pulled her off the platform into the pool, refusing to release her.” The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) investigated ... More »
Yesterday, President Trump nominated Brett Kavanaugh to replace retiring Justice Anthony Kennedy on the Supreme Court. Kavanaugh currently serves as a judge on the United States Appeals Court for the District of Columbia Circuit. He was nominated to the D.C. ... More »
“[S]peech on public issues occupies the highest rung of the hierarchy of First Amendment values, and is entitled to special protection.” Snyder v. Phelps, 562 U.S. 443, 452 (2011) (citation omitted). Nearly every brief filed in Janus v. AFSCME advocating for t... More »
After the oral argument in Epic Systems Corp. v. Lewis, I wrote that the five Republican appointees on the Supreme Court would have to put their thumbs heavily on the scale for the employers to prevail. Sadly, it was no surprise that this is exactly what happe... More »
In 1964, Congress outlawed discrimination in employment based on race or sex, yet there is still a significant gap in the wages paid to white men compared to wages paid to other groups. Last year, the City of Philadelphia tried to address this wage gap by pas... More »
Two weeks ago, the Supreme Court decided Encino Motorcars, LLC v. Navarro, one of those “boring” cases that no one pays attention to. The question in the case was whether service advisors at car dealerships are exempt from the Fair Labor Standards Act ... More »
Sometime in the next few weeks, the Supreme Court will issue its decision in Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, one of the most closely watched cases of this Term. In that case, Jack Phillips, the co-owner of the Masterpiece Cakeshop, a... More »
Peter Robb, the NLRB General Counsel appointed by President Trump, has a change agenda for the agency. He recently took two actions that have garnered a great deal of attention among Board watchers. His announcements regarding a significant reorganization of... More »
So far, President Trump has appointed a Supreme Court Justice, Neil Gorsuch, who may cast the deciding vote to upend decades of settled labor law in two major cases, Epic Systems Corp. v. Lewis and Janus v. AFSCME; he has nominated dozens of right-wing lawyers... More »
Mark Janus’s lawyers are desperate to have the Court decide Janus v. AFSCME without considering any facts. Janus is an Illinois state employee, who is represented by AFSCME Council 31. Like all other employees in his bargaining unit, he is required to pay fa... More »