Fred Messner is a student at Harvard Law School.
On an otherwise slow day for labor news, the Wall Street Journal reported this morning that white-collar professionals may finally be catching a break. According to wage data tracked by the Atlanta Fed, “[p]ay for finance, information and professional employees rose 4.4% in January from a year earlier, outpacing 4% wage growth for” workers overall. Whereas last year’s wage gains generally concentrated in lower-wage sectors, the effects of a tighter labor market have begun to reach even the higher-wage segments of the workforce. With workers scarce and demand hot, some employers—those in finance and law, in particular—have granted dramatic raises and paid eye-popping bonuses in the early months of 2022. Job-switchers, in particular, have most effectively translated their greater bargaining power into material gains, but even workers remaining in the same job have benefited. As the Atlanta Fed explained, “[a]nnual wages for people staying in their jobs grew by 3.7% last month, up from 3.1% in January 2021.” While the deeper implications of professional-managerial class prosperity are complex, the recent data is the latest sign that leverage in the economy is shifting, however fleetingly, from firms to individual workers.
Kevin reported yesterday on the “Starbucks unionization wildfire” that continues to rage across the country. As he explained, the company has begun to fight back with a host of well-worn anti-union tactics. Yesterday, the coffee giant escalated further by firing Cassie Fleischer, one of the most prominent organizers at the Buffalo Starbucks that set the unionization drive in motion and a member of the larger Starbucks Union’s bargaining committee. According to Fleischer, the company fired her after she reduced her availability to make time for a second job, telling her that she “no longer met the needs of the business.” The NLRB has previously found Starbucks to have violated the NLRA by discharging union supporters on various pretexts, and experienced observers have suggested that Fleischer’s discharge may be similarly pretextual.
Daily News & Commentary
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September 12
Zohran Mamdani calls on FIFA to end dynamic pricing for the World Cup; the San Francisco Office of Labor Standards Enforcement opens a probe into Scale AI’s labor practices; and union members organize immigration defense trainings.
September 11
California rideshare deal advances; Boeing reaches tentative agreement with union; FTC scrutinizes healthcare noncompetes.
September 10
A federal judge denies a motion by the Trump Administration to dismiss a lawsuit led by the American Federation of Government Employees against President Trump for his mass layoffs of federal workers; the Supreme Court grants a stay on a federal district court order that originally barred ICE agents from questioning and detaining individuals based on their presence at a particular location, the type of work they do, their race or ethnicity, and their accent while speaking English or Spanish; and a hospital seeks to limit OSHA's ability to cite employers for failing to halt workplace violence without a specific regulation in place.
September 9
Ninth Circuit revives Trader Joe’s lawsuit against employee union; new bill aims to make striking workers eligible for benefits; university lecturer who praised Hitler gets another chance at First Amendment claims.
September 8
DC Circuit to rule on deference to NLRB, more vaccine exemption cases, Senate considers ban on forced arbitration for age discrimination claims.
September 7
Another weak jobs report, the Trump Administration's refusal to arbitrate with federal workers, and a district court judge's order on the constitutionality of the Laken-Riley Act.