Maddy Joseph is a student at Harvard Law School.
Retailers are expected to hire slightly fewer temporary workers this holiday shopping season. Although Target plans to hire thousands, Wal-Mart plans to hire none, promising instead to increase existing workers’ hours to accommodate the anticipated surge in shoppers. According to the Times, the decline in hiring versus last year is driven by e-commerce, low industry profit margins, and a tighter U.S. job market.
A recent Bloomberg report about the retail industry, which employs eight million workers, complicates this narrative of the “retail apocalypse,” blaming the industry’s woes — including slower job and wage growth than other industries — on the fact that “long-standing [retail] chains are overloaded with debt — often from leveraged buyouts led by private equity firms.”
The San Francisco Chronicle profiles Samaschool, a non-profit that tries to teach people how to be gig workers. Its offerings include an online course offered for free through San Francisco’s Office of Economic and Workforce Development and a weeks-long in-person course “cover[ing] topics such as personal branding, customer service, setting price, taxes and finances, and networking.”
In the New York Review of Books, Diane Ravitch reviews two recent books — Nancy MacLean’s Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America and Gordon Lafer’s The One Percent Solution: How Corporations Are Remaking America One State at a Time — about the alliance among business interests and conservative intellectuals and politicians. Attacks on and the decline of labor unions are key to the story. Lafer focuses on how the umbrella organization that coordinates business industry lobbying has been, in Ravitch’s words, “particularly interested in discrediting labor unions,” as the “only political bodies” that might be able to stymie corporate policy efforts.
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September 18
Senate Democrats introduce a bill to nullify Trump’s executive orders ending collective bargaining rights for federal employees; the Massachusetts Teachers Association faces backlash; and Loyola Marymount University claims a religious exemption and stops recognizing its faculty union.
September 17
A union argues the NLRB's quorum rule is unconstitutional; the California Building Trades back a state housing law; and Missouri proposes raising the bar for citizen ballot initiatives
September 16
In today’s news and commentary, the NLRB sues New York, a flight attendant sues United, and the Third Circuit considers the employment status of Uber drivers The NLRB sued New York to block a new law that would grant the state authority over private-sector labor disputes. As reported on recently by Finlay, the law, which […]
September 15
Unemployment claims rise; a federal court hands victory to government employees union; and employers fire workers over social media posts.
September 14
Workers at Boeing reject the company’s third contract proposal; NLRB Acting General Counsel William Cohen plans to sue New York over the state’s trigger bill; Air Canada flight attendants reject a tentative contract.
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.