March 6th 2021
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President-elect Joe Biden’s victory promises to reshape American policy and regulatory priorities throughout the administrative state.This weekend, BloombergLaw outlined some anticipated reforms for the incoming Department of Labor. Most pressing across the federal...
Whole Foods employees filed a class-action lawsuit alleging the company violated federal employment antidiscrimination law when it punished workers for wearing Black Lives Matter masks, apparel, and pins to work. The lawsuit alleges employees were sent home without...
Major airlines are threatening massive layoffs if air travel does not increase soon. United Airlines gave notice to 36,000 employees—nearly half of its US workers—that they may be laid off by October if federal aid expires, Bloomberg reports. Similarly, Southwest...
Civil unrest in France continued and even expanded this weekend, as French police arrested over a thousand protesters. A large police presence seemed better able to control the violence this weekend, the fourth weekend in a row in which the Yellow Vests (as...
Jobs don’t fall prey to higher minimum wages, according to researchers at U.C. Berkeley. Completing the first comprehensive empirical study of its kind, Sylvia Allegretto, Anna Godoey, Carl Nadler, and Michael Reich analyzed the impact of incremental wage increases...
For over a century, workers and their organizations have struggled to raise labor standards and expand employee rights and benefits. Whatever the benefits to workers and the society, to any one private firm those laws represent a tax on employing human labor, and part of the calculus in decisions to contract out work or to replace people with machines. A logical though dispiriting response to plausible predictions of escalating net job losses would be to find ways to unburden the employment relationship.
The challenge of automation is in many ways continuous with the challenges of “fissured” work – to use David Weil’s influential formulation. In particular, both trends are driven in significant part by the costs and risks of employing human beings. According to investment banker Steven Berkenfeld, CEOs these days ask, “’Can I automate it? If not, can I outsource it? If not, can I give it to an independent contractor?’ Hiring an employee is the last resort.”
The labor world took notice when Andy Stern emerged from a years-long deep dive into the future of work, and concluded that the future will bring a lot less work. His book, Raising the Floor, helped to spur a debate over the universal basic income (UBI), including on this blog. But the underlying issue of technology-related job loss has not yet engaged the close attention of labor and employment law scholars. That should change. Even more than firms’ flight from direct employment through fissuring, their replacement of human labor with ever more capable and cost-effective technology threatens the foundations of economic and social life, and calls for a reexamination of prevailing approaches to regulation of employment.