New York City’s Transport Workers Union (TWU) Local 100 endorsed Mayor Bill De Blasio’s proposed Brooklyn-Queens Connector (BQX)—a sixteen-mile, 24/7 streetcar planned to run along the East River.  The project is controversial in part because of how expensive it would be.  John Samuelson, TWU’s president, said that the project would facilitate “several hundred jobs.”

Yesterday, Teamsters working at Vistar Foodservice’s distribution facility in Ontario, CA began an unfair labor practice strike.  Vistar delivers food to movie theater chains throughout southern California.  The strike was undertaken in order to protest Vistar’s decision to give some workers a raise, but withhold a raise for others.

On Friday, the D.C. Circuit upheld the NLRB’s revision to the formula it uses to calculate backpay awards to workers who have been unlawfully terminated.  The D.C. Circuit panel ruled, unanimously, in the case against King Soopers (a division of the Kroger supermarket company) that King Soopers had to pay a former employee’s “search-for-work” expenses.  The rule laid down by the Board requires the NLRB’s general counsel to demonstrate that the unlawfully terminated employee’s expenses are reasonable.  Philip A. Miscimarra, who Trump appointed Chairman of the NLRB this past spring, was the lone dissenter in the NLRB’s 3-1 ruling.  In Miscimarra’s view, the rule would produce a windfall to claimants whose interim earnings equal or surpass the sum of their lost earnings and search-for-work expenses.

On Wednesday, the EEOC will meet, in honor of the 50^th anniversary of the Age Discrimination and Employment Act (ADEA).  The meeting will feature speakers like Laurie McCann of the AARP Foundation Litigation, and Jacqueline James of Boston College’s Center for Research and Education.  The Commission will consider the state of age discrimination and the future challenges it poses.  Also on Wednesday, a subcommittee of the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Education and the Workforce will hold a hearing on three Republican bills:  The Employee Rights Act (which we have previously discussed); The Workforce and Democracy Fairness Act; and The Employee Privacy Protection Act.