In a major gig economy development, London’s transit authority announced today that it will revoke Uber’s operating license. Among the reasons cited for the revocation are problems in the way Uber conducts background checks of its drivers. Employment law may be lurking right below the surface here: Uber often resists better background-check procedures as part of its efforts to skirt t... More »
Yesterday, Washington’s State Attorney General Bob Ferguson sued The GEO Group, operator of one of the largest private immigration detention centers for paying thousands of detainees $1 per day instead of the minimum wage. The GEO Group claims the center, operating under contract with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, has a volunteer work program and rates specified by the federal g... More »
Bloomberg reports that some labor unions are teaching workers how to handle visits from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Unite Here! has organized sessions around the country to teach hotel workers their rights and how to “effectively stonewall” ICE agents. Unite Here! also plans to make decreased collaboration with ICE a priority in upcoming collective bargaining negoti... More »
Today, the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions will hold a hearing on the Trump administration’s Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) nominations. Janet Dhillon and Daniel Gade are the nominees. Dhillon, who is currently the general counsel of Burlington Stores, began her career at a large corporate law firm before transitioning in-house. She was tapped to ... More »
Last Thursday, a new union of nontenure-track faculty at Northwestern University filed a charge with the NLRB that accused the university of violating labor laws by refusing to bargain over a first contract. The Chicago Tribune reports that the NLRB certified the election in May 2017, after months of delay caused by contested ballots, but that Northwestern has appealed the results. “Should the f... More »
Gallup Senior Economist Jonathan Rothwell synthesizes data challenging the notion that globalization and manufacturing’s decline explain President Trump’s electoral victory. When controlling for demographic factors, Mr. Trump was only three percent more popular among manufacturing workers than non-manufacturing workers. Current supporters of the president are less concerned than their countrymen... More »
Over at HuffPost, Sharon Block details how even though Silicon Valley is finally beginning to address issues of sexual harassment and gender and racial bias, low-wage workers of all genders and races are still getting left behind. She argues that “the most important explanation for why Uber and similar companies feel free to ignore the plight of their low-wage nonprofessional workers is thei... More »
Among the scariest images of Hurricane Irma were two collapsed cranes at construction sites in Miami. If you’re wondering why Miami doesn’t have stricter laws regulating construction cranes, the answer is that when Miami enacted a law requiring cranes to withstand 140 mile per hour winds, the Associated Builders and Contractors, an association of non-union construction companies sued and stopped ... More »
The back-to-back storms, Hurricane Harvey and Irma, have strained the U.S. pool of rescue workers. The workers are not limited to first responders employed by government agencies or non-profits dedicated specifically to natural disasters. Over 70 members of the Los Angeles Fire Department are set out to work on Hurricane Irma relief right after an intense two-week effort in the Houston area in t... More »
By Sharon Block and Benjamin Sachs Serious thinking about labor law reform seems to be coalescing around a few themes. One of these is the possibility of allowing state and local intervention into the rules of union organizing and collective bargaining. Pursuing that goal would mean reconsidering the preemptive effect of federal labor law. This theme was clearly reflected in our Labor Day opinio... More »