Better family leave and support policies could incentivize millions of workers to rejoin the workforce, according to research published by the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. Labor participation rates in the United States have fallen considerably in recent years, in contrast to those of other advanced industrial nations like Canada. While much of this divergence can be attributed to demog... More »
Following a yearlong search for a second home, Amazon has finalized plans to split its new headquarters, “Amazon HQ2,” between Arlington, VA and Long Island City, in Queens. States and cities across the country offered Amazon billions of dollars in tax breaks to entice the company to build its second headquarters in their city. While HQ2 is expected to split about 50,000 new jobs betwe... More »
After winning back the House of Representatives in last Tuesday’s election, House Democrats plan to grill President Trump’s Department of Labor about its policies regarding tipped workers. In December, the DOL proposed a rule allowing employers who pay tipped workers the minimum wage to take their workers’ tips. According to the Economic Policy Institute, such a policy change would cost tipped w... More »
Graduate student workers at Georgetown University voted overwhelmingly to unionize with the Georgetown Alliance of Graduate Employees (GAGE), an AFT affiliate. Following an agreement reached between the union and the university, the election was overseen by the American Arbitration Association, rather than the NLRB. Student workers at Georgetown join an increasing number of graduate student work... More »
After more than 20,000 workers walked out last week in protest of the company’s handling of sexual misconduct, Google announced that it would no longer require claims of sexual harassment or assault to be funneled into secret forced arbitration—one of the walkout’s key demands. Microsoft and Uber have also recently ended their use of mandatory arbitration only in cases of harassment and assa... More »
In its first opinion of the term, the Supreme Court unanimously (8-0) ruled in favor of the employees in Mount Lemmon Fire District v. Guido, holding that the Age Discrimination in Employment Act (ADEA) applies to all public employers regardless of employee headcount. The ADEA defines an employer as “a person engaged in industry affecting commerce who has twenty or more employees” but says it “al... More »
This past summer, law professors, labor activists, and union organizers on the cutting edge of their fields gathered at Harvard Law School to answer an ambitious question, put forth by Harvard Law Professor Benjamin Sachs: “If we were to build labor law in 2018, how would we build it?” The gathering was the launch of the Harvard Labor and Worklife Program’s 18-month effort to fix our broken labor... More »
The picture for robust protection of workers’ rights at the federal level is not a pretty one these days. In the Obama Administration, there were three basic components to our strategy to advance worker protections: (1) prom... More »
As covered here before, in the past four years all states but one have passed ‘Uber laws’ that regulate Transportation Network Companies, or TNCs, and 6 states passed Marketplace Contractor (MC) laws that regulate platform workers. This post will survey the current state of affairs in state TNC and MC legislation, focusing on two of the most debated issues, preemption of local government regulatio... More »
Louis Brandeis famously wrote “publicity is justly recommended as a remedy for social and industrial diseases. Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants; electric light the most efficient policeman.” We now live in a... More »