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].
As we noted yesterday, a judge in Indiana has held that the state’s right-to-work law is unconstitutional. The holding is based on Article I, Section 21 of the Indiana constitution, a provision that reads: “No person’s particular services shall be demanded, without just compensation.” It turns out that Tennessee, also a right-to-work state, has an analogous constitutional provision. Article I, Section 21 of the Tennessee constitution states that “no man’s particular services shall be demanded, or property taken . . . without the consent of his representatives, or without just compensation being made thereof.”
The constitutional problem that the judge identified in Indiana comes from the intersection of the state’s right-to-work law and federal labor law. Again, federal law requires that unions represent all workers in a bargaining unit equally. But the Indiana law – like all right-to-work laws – allows workers to refuse to pay dues to the union for that representation. Hence, federal law requires unions to provide services for which state law enables employees to refuse to pay.
At least one judge believes that Indiana’s constitution makes this unconstitutional. On this theory, so does Tennessee’s.
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April 19
Alabama and Louisiana advance anti-worker legislation; Mercedes workers in Alabama set election date; VW Chattanooga election concludes today.
April 18
Disneyland performers file petition for unionization and union elections begin at Volkswagen plant in Tennessee.
April 18
In today’s Tech@Work, a regulation-of-algorithms-in-hiring blitz: Mass. AG issues advisory clarifying how state laws apply to AI decisionmaking tools; and British union TUC launches campaign for new law to regulate the use of AI at work.
April 17
Southern governors oppose UAW organizing in their states; Florida bans local heat protections for workers; Google employees occupy company offices to protest contracts with the Israeli government
April 16
EEOC publishes final regulation implementing the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act, Volkswagen workers in Tennessee gear up for a union election, and the First Circuit revives the Whole Foods case over BLM masks.
April 15
The Supreme Court ruled in favor of bakery delivery drivers in an exemption from mandatory arbitration case; A Teamsters Local ends its 18-month strike by accepting settlement payments and agreeing to dissolve