Today’s News & Commentary — January 5, 2018

After the recent slashing of the corporate tax rate, companies continue to announce bonuses for workers.  Jet Blue (whose flight attendants filed for an NLRB election in December) and Southwest join the list.  Yet the union representing Southwest’s technical workers pointed out that some workers, who are awaiting an overdue collective bargaining agreement, haven’t had a pay raise in several years.

Bloomberg Law talked with new NLRB GC Peter Robb for a piece that recaps many of the Board’s actions since Trump’s inauguration and predicts where the Board might go next.

While we wait for the Supreme Court’s decision in Murphy Oil, Epic Systems, and Earnst and Young, Simon Lazarus takes up the cases for The American Prospect, wondering:

With stakes as high as these, why has there not been more attention paid to the Epic Systems trilogy?  Likely, much of the answer is that the Chamber and its allies have largely got away with spinning the case as simply a minor extension of the conservative majority’s three decades of decisions weakening restrictions on contractual mandatory arbitration provisions.

The Atlantic asks, “Why is the U.S. So Bad at Worker Retraining?”  Federal job training programs continue to be popular among policymakers as means of addressing labor market disjunction, but studies have found job training programs to be unevenly effective and particularly ineffective for blue collar workers.  Employer-side solutions might be a better way to address accelerating globalization and automation, the article hints.

Inspired by a recent report about the rising number of nurses who are men since the 1960s, the Upshot interviewed a dozen male nurses in the Pacific Northwest, a region with nursing recruitment programs that target men.