August 11th 2022
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New York Governor Andrew Cuomo signed legislation yesterday that is aimed at protecting public workers’ rights in advance of the Supreme Court’s potentially adverse ruling in Janus v. AFSCME Council 31. The new law allows unions to deny full benefits to workers...
Sometime in the next few weeks, the Supreme Court will issue its decision in Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, one of the most closely watched cases of this Term. In that case, Jack Phillips, the co-owner of the Masterpiece Cakeshop, argues...
Mark Janus’s lawyers are desperate to have the Court decide Janus v. AFSCME without considering any facts. Janus is an Illinois state employee, who is represented by AFSCME Council 31. Like all other employees in his bargaining unit, he is required to pay fair...
The Supreme Court heard oral argument on Monday in Janus. Analyses report that, as expected, there were pointed questions for AFSCME and Illinois by Justices Alito and Kennedy; the four liberal justices took every opportunity to highlight the potential effects of...
Last week on the blog, we wrote about why the NLRB should withdraw the Hy-Brand decision (here and here)---in short, because a Board member who voted for the result, William Emanuel, should have recused himself (his former law firm represented one of the companies...
The Supreme Court has posted the transcript of this morning's oral argument in Janus. Notably, Justice Gorsuch, expected to be the deciding vote, did not speak during the argument. We'll have more coverage of the oral argument later this...
In advance of Monday's oral argument in Janus, Bloomberg and the New York Times consider what might become of public sector unions if Abood is overruled. In These Times has a long feature on the advocacy groups who are funding not only Janus but also other efforts...
Janus v. AFSCME will soon decide the constitutional fate of fair-share fees for public sector unions. These fees support unions’ collective bargaining work on behalf of employees they are legally required to represent but who are not union members. Most prognosticators expect the Supreme Court to hand the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation (NRTWLDF) a win on its claim that such fees violate the First Amendment rights of non-union workers. Yet, as I develop further below, the history that led to Janus offers three thin rays of hope to the labor movement.
Most of the coverage of Janus v. AFSCME, like this recent piece in USA Today, simply (and perhaps correctly) assumes that the five Republican appointees on the Supreme Court will use the case to overturn Abood v. Detroit Board of Education, the 1977 case upholding...
A group of over two dozen economists and law and economics professors filed an amicus in Janus in support of the respondents. The brief argues that "decades if not centuries of economic theory and empirical evidence" establish that many who pay agency fees are not...
Several leading professors of labor and employment law have filed an amicus brief in support of the respondents in Janus. The brief, authored by Samuel Estreicher, was filed by Cynthia Estlund, Estreicher, Julius Getman, William Gould, Michael Harper, and Theodore...
Public Citizen filed a lawsuit on January 19th asking Department of Labor and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration to turn over copies of forms employers were required to file with the government. In 2017, for the first time, OSHA required companies...