Today’s News & Commentary — September 29, 2017

The Supreme Court will consider whether agency-fee agreements in the public sector are constitutional.  Read our round up of coverage on the cert. grant in Janus v. AFSCME here.

In other Supreme Court news, at Slate, Daniel Hemel explores Murphy Oil‘s potential impact on workers’ ability to pursue wage claims against their employers.  Oral arguments in three consolidated cases, including Murphy Oil, are on Monday.  Check here for more on the cases.

Customers who staffed a for-profit consignment shop in exchange for the opportunity to shop before others could were employees under the FLSA and were entitled to wages.  Earlier this week, a D.D.C. judge upheld DOL’s determination that “consignor/volunteers” were employees, given their expectation of benefits in exchange for work, how integral their labor was to the business, and the degree of control the business had over volunteers, among other factors.

After a unionization vote at a Mississippi Nissan plant failed, the UAW filed a complaint with the NLRB alleging that Nissan “continues to maintain an employee surveillance, data collection and rating system that records employee union activity and rates workers according to their perceived support or opposition to the UAW.”  Bloomberg obtained the complaint and has a summary.

Drawing on a recent report from the Century Foundation, a story in The New Republic argues that workers and unions should adopt a constitutional rights-based strategy to protect activities like strikes and union organizing.