Posts tagged Labor Law
REPORT: How government unions work against interests of private-sector unions, taxpayers
January 22, 2025 // First, there is no archetypal profit motive in the government sector. Congress passed laws promoting collective bargaining in the private sector to prevent the exploitation of workers by employers who were seeking to increase their profits through long work hours and poor working conditions.
Business groups sue over California’s new ban on captive audience meetings
January 4, 2025 // The law violates these protections by "discriminating against employers’ viewpoints on political matters, regulating the content of employers’ communications with their employees, and by chilling and prohibiting employer speech," the lawsuit said. Employers "have the right to communicate with their employees about the employers’ viewpoints on politics, unionization, and other labor issues."
Senate Democrats fail to secure NLRB majority under Trump in razor-thin vote
December 11, 2024 // A Democrat-led push to secure a majority on the National Labor Relations Board until 2026 fell short on Wednesday, as Senate Republicans and two independents blocked the nomination of Lauren McFerran to continue serving on the labor board.
After two years without a contract, unionized Chipotle workers call for nationwide boycott
December 5, 2024 // In August, the National Labor Relations Board found that Chipotle violated labor law for allegedly telling employees it couldn’t provide raises because they were unionized. Chipotle does tend to pay its workers above minimum wage. Anisa Smith was hired in October for $13.25 an hour — almost $3 more than Michigan’s minimum wage. She said she agreed with her manager that she could work Monday through Thursday while her daughter is at school.
Challenging Exclusive Representation: A Fight for Free Speech and Union Accountability; Disunion: The Government Union Report podcast
November 14, 2024 // Osborne and McGrath delve into the legal implications of exclusive representation, where a union speaks for all employees in a bargaining unit, including non-members, and restricts individual negotiations. They discuss how exclusive representation in New York grants significant union power, even allowing the union to pursue anti-Israel stances as part of its collective bargaining scope. This case, they suggest, could reshape public sector labor rights and potentially dismantle exclusive representation if the Supreme Court agrees to hear the case and finds that it infringes on employees’ rights to free speech and association.
Teamsters Test the Bounds of the NLRB’s Cemex Decision, Seeking to Unionize Amazon Workers Without an Election
November 13, 2024 // Teamsters allege that Amazon’s failure to voluntarily recognize the union or timely file an RM Petition warrants the issuance of a bargaining order requiring Amazon to bargain with the union. Although the procedure employed by Teamsters permits the union to bypass procedural steps in order to quickly gain recognition and begin bargaining, Amazon’s willingness to litigate in order to prevent the organization of its facilities makes it unlikely that Teamsters will be at the bargaining table anytime soon.
Can Distributed Organizing Unionize Millions?
September 17, 2024 // Together with similarly bottom-up union campaigns like Starbucks Workers United (SBWU) and the reformed UAW’s organizing across Southern automakers, EWOC has demonstrated the viability of a new strategy of seeding unionization efforts, rather than passively waiting for workers to reach out (“hot-shopping”) or exclusively organizing pre-chosen workplaces (“strategic targeting”). Along these lines, Svoboda describes EWOC’s proactive efforts to provide organizing tools to as many workers as possible as “planting seeds of worker power.”
Op-Ed: Public Sector Unions Should Only Speak for Their Members
September 3, 2024 //
The Accidental Success of the NLRA: How a Law about Unions Achieved Its Goals by Giving Us Fewer Unions
August 30, 2024 // The Wagner Act was passed to promote labor peace. It aimed to keep commerce flowing by promoting collective bargaining, and thus unionism. Taft-Hartley reversed one part of that policy: it helped make unionism, and thus collective bargaining, less common. But by doing so, it finally achieved labor law’s original goal. The labor market today is more peaceful than at any time in the last century. And that peace owes in large part to the relative scarcity of unions. That lesson is worth keeping in mind in contemporary debates. Today, voices on both sides of the aisle laud the benefits of unionism. They speak of unions as vehicles of workplace democracy—a productive way for workers to express their collective discontent. But unions have not always funneled discontent through peaceful channels: when given too much power, they have disrupted the avenues of commerce.
SkyWest Airlines facing federal lawsuit over alleged ‘fake company union’
August 14, 2024 // SkyWest Airlines, the largest regional airline in North America, is facing legal action over an alleged “fake” company union that the airline operates and the allegedly retaliatory firings of flight attendants who were engaged in union organizing efforts. A lawsuit was filed by the Association of Flight Attendants (AFA-CWA) in October 2023. The US Department of Labor also filed a lawsuit last month against the company over the “company union”, alleging SkyWest Inflight Association (SIA) did not perform its legal duties as a representative agency and barred two employees from running in an election for leadership positions due to their support for an independent union at the airline.