Expansion of unemployment insurance will be a major part of the U.S. government’s response to COVID-19’s disruption of the labor market, as Jason and Niki detailed last week. Reacting to record numbers of claims, many states are waiving or relaxing waiting per... More »
Most of the leading Democratic candidates for President have argued for raising the federal minimum wage to $15.00 per hour to ensure that Americans working full-time can earn a living wage (as Pete Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar, Bernie Sanders, and Elizabeth Warre... More »
Home healthcare workers provide essential care to some of the most vulnerable members of our society. Despite the important services these workers provide, jobs in the home care industry are generally characterized by low pay and difficult working conditions. ... More »
As the debate over the employment status of Uber drivers continues, one employment benefit raises a set of questions not presented by the others: overtime pay. Uber has suggested that if it is forced to reclassify its drivers as employees, it will cap its driv... More »
On April 1, 2019, the U.S. DOL proposed a new interpretation of joint employer liability under the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA). DOL’s four-factor test focuses exclusively on whether an entity “actually exercises the power to” hire and fire, supervise and c... More »
Last spring, the California Supreme Court sent shockwaves through the gig economy with its ruling in Dynamex Operations West, Inc., in which it held that the so-called ABC test is the appropriate one for determining whether a worker is an independent contracto... More »
This January, undocumented dairy worker José Arias secured a million-dollar settlement in a Fair Labor Standards Act retaliation suit against the dairy’s lawyer. The settlement follows a 2017 ruling from the Ninth Circuit that extended the scope of retaliation... More »
On Thursday, Illinois state lawmakers passed a bill that will raise the state’s minimum wage to $15 per hour by 2025. The $15 minimum wage was a campaign staple and top legislative priority for Democratic Governor J.B. Pritzker, who announced in a statement t... More »
This week, United Teachers Los Angeles called their first strike in decades. While the parties are negotiating over wages and staffing, a central issue in the dispute is the much bigger question of underfunding of the public school system. Teachers are askin... More »
The federal government shutdown is precipitating a wave of lawsuits and talk of sick-outs and strikes. That should be no surprise when approximately 400,000 federal employees are being required to work without pay. Wait, “required.”? Talk of being “forced” or ... More »
Jobs don’t fall prey to higher minimum wages, according to researchers at U.C. Berkeley. Completing the first comprehensive empirical study of its kind, Sylvia Allegretto, Anna Godoey, Carl Nadler, and Michael Reich analyzed the impact of incremental wage incr... More »
A coalition of legal organizations in Boston, including Greater Boston Legal Services (“GBLS”), Justice at Work, the Harvard Legal Aid Bureau (“HLAB”), and Volunteer Lawyers Project, in collaboration with community groups in Boston, is bringing justice to vict... More »
February 17th, 2019