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Guest Post: If Fair Share Fees are “Tyrannical,” What About Taxes?

Oct 26, 2015 Andrew Strom

Andrew Strom is Associate General Counsel of SEIU Local 32BJ. All of us have had the experience of the government spending our tax dollars to promote ideas we oppose. Most of us have probably not thought that these expenditures violate the First Amendment’s prohibition against “abridging the freedom of speech.” Supreme Court justices across the political […]

Uber: A Platform for Discrimination?

Oct 22, 2015 Benjamin Sachs

As Uber tells it, Uber is not an employer but a technological platform connecting drivers and passengers. This categorization – highly contested – has a number of well-known advantages for Uber: it allows the firm to avoid responsibility for minimum wage and overtime pay, for workers comp and unemployment insurance, and for providing healthy and safe working […]

Is Uber Legal?

Oct 22, 2015 Jon Weinberg

This coming Wednesday at noon, the Harvard Law Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review will host a panel at Harvard Law School on the legality of Uber. The discussion will feature Professor Sachs and Shannon Liss-Riordan, the attorney representing Uber and Lyft drivers in major California class action lawsuits, as well as other gig economy workers in […]

Gig News — October 20, 2015

Oct 20, 2015 Jon Weinberg

This post is part of an ongoing series on labor and the gig economy. Oregon’s Bureau of Labor and Industries released an advisory opinion concluding that Uber drivers should be classified as employees and not independent contractors. Portland Business Journal reports that the opinion was issued despite the fact that no complaints were filed in […]

The Summit: Voice and Leverage

Oct 13, 2015 Benjamin Sachs

Last week, President Obama convened the Summit on Worker Voice at the White House. It was an impressive event, in part because of how much energy clearly had been dedicated by the highest levels of the administration to a discussion of revitalizing “worker voice.” The President himself spoke not once, but twice. The Vice President, Valerie Jarrett […]

White House Summit on Worker Voice

Oct 6, 2015 Benjamin Sachs

I’m heading to D.C. tonight to participate in a panel at tomorrow’s White House Summit on Worker Voice. The panel (which includes Mark Barenberg from Columbia Law School, Dorian Warren of the Roosevelt Institute, and Rep. Bobby Scott) will focus on how the law might change to better facilitate worker voice. As I see it, this […]

Guest Post: A Further Observation about Justice Scalia and Friedrichs

Oct 5, 2015 Catherine Fisk

Catherine Fisk is Chancellor’s Professor of Law at the University of California, Irvine. Given Justice Scalia’s consistent view that public employees have minimal free speech rights, doctrinal consistency should require him to reject the First Amendment challenge to union fair share fees in Friedrichs. As Professor Sachs points out, Justice Scalia (joined by Justice Kennedy) […]

An Observation about Justice Scalia and Friedrichs

Oct 1, 2015 Benjamin Sachs

In the run-up to the oral argument in Friedrichs we’ve paid a lot of attention to Justice Scalia’s concurrence in Lehnert v. Ferris Faculty Ass’n. But, to date, we’ve largely ignored another Scalia opinion that deserves much more attention. That opinion is Justice Scalia’s dissent in Rutan v. Republican Party of Illinois. The question in Rutan was whether the First Amendment allowed Illinois to […]

Amazon's new "Independent Contractors"

Sep 29, 2015 Benjamin Sachs

As Jon wrote in the News and Commentary this morning, Amazon has started a new delivery service called “Amazon Flex.” The service, as the WSJ reports, will allow people to “sign up for shifts through an app that prompts them to fetch packages from mini-warehouses and take them to customers’ homes in as little as one hour.” The […]

1099 as Antitrust?

Sep 29, 2015 Benjamin Sachs

There’s an interesting post up on interfluidity arguing that independent contractor status should be awarded selectively, in a manner designed to incentivize competition in the gig economy. The basic idea is that there is a substantial risk that gig economy firms like Uber will become monopolists because of a particular kind of cycle, or “network effect.” The […]

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OnLabor

Law. Workers. Organizing.

OnLabor is a blog devoted to workers, unions, and their politics. We interpret our subject broadly to include the current crisis in the traditional union movement (why union decline is happening and what it means for our society); the new and contested forms of worker organization that are filling the labor union gap; how work ought to be structured and managed; how workers ought to be represented and compensated; and the appropriate role of government — all three branches — in each of these issues.

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