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New Harvard Law Review Piece on Grad Student Unions

Benjamin Sachs

Benjamin Sachs is the Kestnbaum Professor of Labor and Industry at Harvard Law School and a leading expert in the field of labor law and labor relations. He is also faculty director of the Center for Labor and a Just Economy. Professor Sachs teaches courses in labor law, employment law, and law and social change, and his writing focuses on union organizing and unions in American politics. Prior to joining the Harvard faculty in 2008, Professor Sachs was the Joseph Goldstein Fellow at Yale Law School.  From 2002-2006, he served as Assistant General Counsel of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) in Washington, D.C.  Professor Sachs graduated from Yale Law School in 1998, and served as a judicial law clerk to the Honorable Stephen Reinhardt of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. His writing has appeared in the Harvard Law Review, the Yale Law Journal, the Columbia Law Review, the New York Times and elsewhere.  Professor Sachs received the Yale Law School teaching award in 2007 and in 2013 received the Sacks-Freund Award for Teaching Excellence at Harvard Law School.  He can be reached at [email protected].

There’s a new piece of student writing in the most recent Harvard Law Review that offers a different take on the Board’s Columbia University decision regarding graduate student union rights.  The piece focuses on the Board’s use of empirical evidence in the decision, applauds it in part, but criticizes the Board for what the piece calls “cherry picking.”  Worth reading.

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Ruelas v. County of Alameda — California Pretrial Detainees Denied Minimum Wage for Corporate Labor (Part 3)

In Ruelas v. County of Alameda, the Supreme Court of California denied pretrial detainees’ state minimum wage claim, reasoning that section 4019.3 of the state’s Penal Code — capping jail laborers’ wages at two dollars per day — instead governed.  The first part of this three-part series discussed the California Supreme Court’s holding and reasoning.  The second part gave a history of California’s constitution and jail labor in the state, concluding that the two-dollar daily wage cap could not have applied to plaintiffs, who were pretrial detainees performing unpaid labor for a corporation.  

Ruelas v. County of Alameda — California Pretrial Detainees Denied Minimum Wage for Corporate Labor (Part 2)

In Ruelas v. County of Alameda, the Supreme Court of California held that pretrial detainees forced to labor for a corporation are ineligible for a minimum wage under the state’s Labor Code.  The court construed Penal Code section 4019.3 broadly, interpreting it as incompatible with California’s Labor Code. The court concluded that the Penal Code prevents pretrial detainees from earning more than two dollars per day for their labor, absent a local ordinance.  

How Three Simple Labor Laws Helped Unions Organize Amazon and UBER in Canada

In early July,  the British Columbia Labour Relations Board (BCLRB) certified UFCW-Canada as the bargaining representative for over 500 UBER drivers in the province’s capital city of Victoria.  A few days later, the BCLRB issued another decision that certified the union Unifor (formerly the Canadian Auto Workers) for a bargaining unit of hundreds of employees employed at an Amazon distribution centre […]

Ruelas v. County of Alameda — California Pretrial Detainees Denied Minimum Wage for Corporate Labor (Part 1)

Pretrial detainees in Santa Rita Jail are forced to labor for Aramark, a food-preparation company that provides meals to third parties outside of the jail. Neither Aramark nor the county pays detainees for their labor.  In 1990, California amended its constitution to allow companies to contract with prisons — facilities run by the state or federal government that detain convicted offenders — for labor, so long as prisoners were paid comparable wages to non-inmate laborers.  

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