Catherine Fisk is the Barbara Nachtrieb Armstrong Professor of Law at UC Berkeley Law, where she teaches and writes on the law of the workplace, legal history, civil rights and the legal profession. She is the author of dozens of articles and four books, including the prize-winning Working Knowledge: Employee Innovation and the Rise of the Corporate Intellectual Property, 1800-1930, and Labor Law in the Contemporary Workplace. Her research focuses on workers at both the high end and the low end of the wage spectrum. She has written on union organizing among low-wage and immigrant workers as well as on labor issues in the entertainment industry, employee mobility in technology sectors, employer-employee disputes over attribution and ownership of intellectual property, the rights of employees and unions to engage in political activity, and labor law reform. She is the co-author, with UCI Law Professor Ann Southworth, of an innovative interdisciplinary casebook, The Legal Profession. Her current public service includes membership on the SEIU Ethics Review Board, the Board of Directors of the Wage Justice Center, and committees of the Law & Society Association. Prior to joining the founding faculty of UC Irvine School of Law, Fisk was a chaired professor at Duke Law School, and was on the faculty of the University of Southern California Gould School of Law and Loyola Law School in Los Angeles. She practiced law at a boutique Washington, D.C. firm and at the U.S. Department of Justice. She received her J.D. at UC Berkeley, and an A.B., summa cum laude, from Princeton University.
The theory of this unfair labor practice charge is that employer policies limiting the right of employees to engage in concerted activities for mutual aid and protection violate employees’ NLRA section 7 rights and also their rights to free exercise of religion. While the section 7 theory is familiar, the freedom of religion theory is novel, but it may be plausible. The major world religions celebrate the spiritual significance of work and communitarian values. It appears from the charge that Hobby Lobby’s policy purports to require employees to use the corporate dispute resolution system rather than collective action to challenge unfair working conditions, and employees believe that compliance with the employer’s policy violates their religion. First Amendment jurisprudence has not given religious people the right to challenge the enforcement of neutral laws of general applicability even where the laws restrict their ability to engage in conduct they believe to be required or encouraged by their religion. And the Title VII prohibition on religious discrimination likewise offers employees little protection against being required to adhere to neutral employer policies.
But the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, the Supreme Court said in its recent Hobby Lobby decision, amends all federal statutes—including, presumably, the NLRA—in this way: federal statutes that substantially burden the free exercise of religion may be enforced only if the statute is narrowly tailored to serve a compelling government interest. So, if Hobby Lobby says its Mutual Arbitration Agreement is enforceable under the Federal Arbitration Act and that the FAA trumps the NLRA’s protections for concerted activity, employees can argue that any interpretation of the FAA that substantially burdens their religious freedom to organize must be narrowly tailored to serve a compelling governmental interest. It’s not clear whether the government has a compelling interest in allowing employers to require employees to waive their religiously inspired rights to organize.
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Catherine Fisk is the Chancellor’s Professor of Law at University of California, Irvine.
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March 16
Starbucks' union negotiations are resurrected; jobs data is released.
March 15
A U.S. District Court issues a preliminary injunction against the Department of Veterans Affairs for terminating its collective bargaining agreement, and SEIU files a lawsuit against DHS for effectively terminating immigrant workers at Boston Logan International Airport.
March 13
Republican Senators urge changes on OSHA heat standard; OpenAI and building trades announce partnership on data center construction; forced labor investigations could lead to new tariffs
March 12
EPA terminates contract with second-largest union; Florida advances bill restricting public sector unions; Trump administration seeks Supreme Court assistance in TPS termination.
March 11
The partial government shutdown results in TSA agents losing their first full paycheck; the Fifth Circuit upholds the certification of a class of former United Airline workers who were placed on unpaid leave for declining to receive the COVID-19 vaccine for religious reasons during the pandemic; and an academic group files a lawsuit against the State Department over a policy that revokes and denies visas to noncitizens for their work in fact-checking and content moderation.
March 10
Court rules Kari Lake unlawfully led USAGM, voiding mass layoffs; Florida Senate passes bill tightening union recertification rules; Fifth Circuit revives whistleblower suit against Lockheed Martin.