Posts tagged ftc
Unions want it to be ‘game over’ for the secret ballot
January 17, 2023 // The Employee Rights Act is a worker-centric bill that will make sure people considering unionization are able to do so without the intimidation and coercion associated with card check organizing. If the CWA is offering good value for potential members, it should not be afraid of a private vote.
Op-ed: Congress should be wary of Labor agency’s plea for more cash
December 21, 2022 // Still, even as the NLRB is claiming it does not have the resources to carry out its mission, Abruzzo through a series of memos has instructed the agency to pursue legal theories that take time to research instead of letting staffers simply enforce agreed-upon law. For instance, she issued a memo telling agents to guard against “ unlawful threats and coercive activity ” by employers, which sounds reasonable until one considers that Abruzzo views employee meetings on unionization, mandatory companywide meetings to discuss unionization where employees are fully compensated for their time, as borderline coercive. The NLRB could also cut down on the use of official time. Official time is when union workers are paid their taxpayer-funded salaries to do union work rather than the government jobs they were hired to do.
Op-ed: FTC on the Gig Economy: The Glass is Almost Empty
October 12, 2022 // The FTC does, of course, have a legitimate role to play in challenging unfair methods of competition and unfair acts or practices that undermine consumer welfare wherever they arise, including in the gig economy. But it does a disservice by focusing merely on supposed negative aspects of the gig economy and conjuring up a gig-specific “parade of horribles” worthy of close commission scrutiny and enforcement action. Many of the “horribles” cited may not even be “bads,” and many of them are, in any event, beyond the proper legal scope of FTC inquiry. There are other federal agencies (for example, the National Labor Relations Board) whose statutes may prove applicable to certain problems noted in the gig statement. In other cases, statutory changes may be required to address certain problems noted in the statement (assuming they actually are problems). The FTC, and its fellow enforcement agencies, should keep in mind, of course, that they are not Congress, and wishing for legal authority to deal with problems does not create it (something the federal judiciary fully understands). In short, the negative atmospherics that permeate the gig statement are unnecessary and counterproductive; if anything, they are likely to convince at least some judges that the FTC is not the dispassionate finder of fact and enforcer of law that it claims to be. In particular, the judiciary is unlikely to be impressed by the FTC’s apparent effort to insert itself into questions that lie far beyond its statutory mandate.