Workplace Prof Blog

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NYC LERA: NYC’s Worker Protection Laws and its Impact on the Workplace

Bill Herbert (Hunter College, CUNY) tells us about the upcoming NYC LERA program NYC Workplace and Labor Law Update: A Look at NYC’s Worker Protection Laws and its Impact on the Workplace, April 26, 2022, 6 – 7:30 pm ET. Here's a description:

NYC regulatory agencies are charged with administering and/or enforcing municipal workplace laws intended to protect workers across various industries. These laws apply to workers of different socio-economic groups, tackling matters such as pay equity, workplace safety and other worker rights and protection issues. Our panel will address recent enforcement initiatives and its impact on employers, employees and the workplace.

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Business, Forced-Labor in China, and the ILO

Janice Bellace (U. Penn. - Wharton) and George Dragnich (DC LERA) published yesterday an op-ed in “The Hill” entitled A path for business out of the China forced labor dilemma.  Here's Janice's description of the op-ed:

It addresses the China Uyghurs forced-labor situation and the role the ILO could play. It is written to attract the attention of companies by pointing out why companies might want to explore this possibility and explaining one way employers could pursue this route could be in June at the International Labour Conference.

George and I wrote this to draw attention to the ILO and its role regarding the abolition of forced labour. As you know, in the U.S., the media nearly always totally ignore the ILO. Even though Kevin Cassidy in the Washington office of the ILO has done terrific work in trying to close this recognition gap, it is an uphill slog. For instance, truly annoying is when they are discussing ILO labor standards (as was done recently in an article about the Xinjiang situation) and they refer to "a UN agency" rather than "the ILO." Since the dilemma facing companies has received coverage recently, we thought this and the timeliness of the issue would be “the hook” for a piece (since newspapers and other media typically want to see what will attract readers to the item, what will hook them in).

George and I both believe that the ILO has an important role to play and in fact, the most useful role with regard to the abolition of forced labour in Xinjiang. We hope this op-ed piece makes a helpful contribution.

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DC LERA: Collaboration between Immigrant Worker Centers and Unions

Thanks once again to Tequila Brooks for sending word of DC LERA's program Labor’s New Kids on the Block: Collaboration between Immigrant Worker Centers and Unions. It will be online, April 21, 2021, 11:00-noon. Here's a brief description:

Join DC LERA for a conversation between Dr. Ben Kreider, Policy Consultant, and Discussant Carlos Jimenez of the AFL-CIO about immigrant worker centers, new forms of organizing, and collaboration between immigrant worker centers and unions. Dr. Kreider will be presenting his dissertation research on the subject.

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Travis on Rethinking the Post-Pandemic Workplace

Michelle Travis (San Francisco) has posted on SSRN her article (forthcoming 64 Wash. U. J. L. & Pub. Pol'y ___ (2021)) A Post-Pandemic Antidiscrimination Approach to Workplace Flexibility. Here's the abstract:

The dramatic workplace changes in the wake of the global pandemic offer courts both an opportunity and an obligation to reexamine prior antidiscrimination case law on workplace flexibility. Before COVID-19, courts embraced an essentialized view of workplaces built upon a “full-time face-time norm,” which refers to the judicial presumption that work is defined by long hours, rigid schedules, and uninterrupted, in-person performance at a centralized workspace. By applying this presumption to both accommodation requests under the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 and to disparate impact claims under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, pre-pandemic courts systematically undermined antidiscrimination law’s potential for workplace restructuring to expand equal opportunities for individuals with disabilities and for women with disproportionate caregiving responsibilities. This Article demonstrates how employers’ widespread adoption of flexible work arrangements in the wake of COVID-19—including telecommuting, modified schedules, temporary leaves, and other flextime options—undermine these prior decisions and demand a new analysis of antidiscrimination law’s potential to advance workplace flexibility.

I think Michelle is exactly right: "with [57%] of U.S. employers now offering their employees flextime or remote work options as a result of [COVID], it is no longer tenable for courts to define work as something done only at a specified time and place." We can do better.

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New Book: Worldwide Labor-Related Responses to COVID

Legal Responses to COVID-19 Around the World surveys the labor-related responses of 50 countries to the COVID-19 pandemic. The book currently is available only on kindle, but will be available in hard copy within a week or so. Beyond the book's content, the table of contents provides a really nice list of labor scholars throughout the world.

Here's the complete cite: Legal Responses to Covid-19 Around the World, Cláudio Jannotti da Rocha, Flávia Fragale Martins Pepino, & Rafael Lara Martins, eds. (Lex-Magister [Brazil], 2020) . Disclosure: I contributed the U.S. chapter.

Here's the publisher's description:

This is a collection of papers from 50 countries (6 continents) about the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic on the economy, employment, contracts, business, people’s income, health, courts and dispute resolution systems. The book’s purpose is to allow current and future generations to find, in one place, information about the legal responses to Covid-19 around the world.

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Acevedo & others on Regulating the Gig Economy

Congratulations to Deepa Das Acevedo (Alabama) on the publication of her edited volume Beyond the Algorithm: Qualitative Insights for Gig Work Regulation (Cambridge University Press, 2020). Here's the publisher's description:

In Beyond the Algorithm: Qualitative Insights for Gig Work Regulation, Deepa Das Acevedo and a collection of scholars and experts show why government actors must go beyond mass surveys and data-scrubbing in order to truly understand the realities of gig work. The contributors draw on qualitative empirical research to reveal the narratives and real-life experiences that define gig work, and they connect these insights to policy debates being fought out in courts, town halls, and even in Congress itself. The book also bridges academic and non-academic worlds by drawing on the experiences of drivers, journalists, and workers' advocates who were among the first people to study gig work from the bottom up. This book is a must-read for anyone interested in gig work, the legal infrastructure surrounding it, and how that infrastructure can and must be improved.

Look for a paperback edition to be published in about six months, priced at about $35-40.

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CA Provides Counsel for Low-Wage Workers Forced to Arbitrate Wage Claims

California Governor Gavin Newsom has signed a law -- SB 1384 -- that augments the authority of the state's Labor Commissioner, an office that typically handles wage claims for low-wage and unrepresented workers in what are called "Berman Hearings". The text of the new law follows the page break below. This new law authorizes the Commission to represent financially strapped workers when a court has compelled arbitration under a mandatory arbitration agreement, if the Commission decides the case has merit. The Commissioner already has this authority for poor claimants in regular civil cases if the individual already has prevailed. The law responds to systemic problems shown by research that individual employees who are obliged to arbitrate claims pro se, without counsel, lose most of the time.

Below the break is the legislative counsel's digest and the test of the statute.

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Continue reading

A Tip Against Taking Tips

Matthew Miller-Novak (Barron Peck Bennie & Schlemmer) sends this guest post describing a recent case:

Restaurants should proceed with caution when handling their employees’ tips. Recently, an Ohio bartender filed a class action against Local Cantina in the Southern District of Ohio for violations of the Fair Labor Standards Act (“FLSA”). See, Smith v. Local Cantina, LLC et al, Case No: 2:20-cv-03064 (S.D. Ohio 2020). The lawsuit alleges that: (1) Local Cantina paid its frontline workers a salary of $1,000 a week but failed to pay them overtime rates; and (2) Local Cantina took all the servers’ tips for itself. Although Local Cantina argues that its servers made more money in this manner, Local Cantina’s decision was likely not lawful.

First, it is well established that a salary alone does not exempt an employee from the overtime requirements of the FLSA. For example, an employee does not fall under the “administrative exemption” unless she has managerial duties with independent decision-making authority. Thus, a waiter or bartender is not exempt from overtime rates regardless of her salary’s size. Regarding the employees’ tips in this case, the FLSA does permit restaurants to institute tip-sharing systems (with proper notice). However, the “Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2018,” which Congress passed, and President Trump signed on March 23, 2018, amended the FLSA’s tip-sharing rules. The amendment expressly stated that employers and managers are not permitted to take employees’ tips. Therefore, under the new language of the FLSA, employers cannot take an employee’s tips for itself or its managers regardless of whether the employer takes the minimum wage tip credit or pays the tipped-employee an amount equal or greater than the minimum wage.

Therefore, regardless of how much an employer pays a customarily-tipped employee, the employer should always pay time-and-a-half for overtime hours, and the employer should not help itself to its employees’ tips or give those tips to its managers.

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Using Hurricane Data to Predict Covid-19 UI Clams

A group of authors from the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago and the University of Indiana have just posted on SSRN Using the Eye of the Storm to Predict the Wave of Covid-19 UI Claims. Here's the abstract of this timely article:

We leverage an event-study research design focused on the seven costliest hurricanes to hit the US mainland since 2004 to identify the elasticity of unemployment insurance filings with respect to search intensity. Applying our elasticity estimate to the state-level Google Trends indexes for the topic “unemployment,” we show that out-of-sample forecasts made ahead of the official data releases for March 21 and 28 predicted to a large degree the extent of the Covid-19 related surge in the demand for unemployment insurance. In addition, we provide a robust assessment of the uncertainty surrounding these estimates and demonstrate their use within a broader forecasting framework for US economic activity.

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Global Labor Responses to Covid-19

The Italian Labour Law E-Journal has published a special issue describing the global labor responses to covid-19. Here's a description:

This special issue of the Italian Labour Law e-Journal intends to provide a systematic and informative overview on the measures set out by lawmakers and/or social partners in a number of countries of the world to address the impact on the Covid-19 emergency on working conditions and business operations. The aim is to understand which labour law norms and institutions and which workplace arrangements are being deployed in the different legal systems to tackle the global health crisis. Another aim is to find whether and to what extent the established body of laws is proving able to cope with the problems raised by the current extraordinary situation or whether, on the contrary, new special regulations are being introduced. The national reports may be subject to updating in case of major changes.

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Charting a global way forward: COVID-19 special edition of the ABA Int'l LEL Newsletter

The ABA International Labor & Employment Law Section has published a Special COVID-19 edition of its Newsletter, describing the myriad different responses that countries have taken to adjusting LEL laws to respond to the virus. Here's a description:

COVID-19 is now a truly global pandemic and is affecting hundreds of millions of people at both deeply personal and professional levels. Countries are attempting to respond in different ways, from quarantines to special health care initiatives to financial stimulus packages. Countries also are responding in myriad ways that affect workers and workplaces.

This special edition of the newsletter contains a series of short articles describing how several countries from throughout the world are using workplace laws to combat the spread of COVID-19 and to mitigate its effects on workers and workplaces. Though our survey is not comprehensive, it nonetheless provides a snapshot of the often thoughtful and creative ways that countries are responding to the crisis. We hope it will provide guidance not only to the international labor and employment attorneys who regularly read this newsletter, but also to policymakers worldwide considering how their countries might best restructure workplaces and protect workers in a time of crisis to mitigate both the devastating health effects of the virus and its disruption of the economic activity on which we all depend for our livelihoods.

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Clean Slate Project Issues Report

Thanks to Jon Harkavy for word that the Clean Slate for Worker Power project has issued its final report A Clean Slate for Worker Power: Building a Just Economy and Democracy. Here's a brief excerpted description from Kelsey Griffin:

An initiative of Harvard Law School’s Labor and Worklife Program — called Clean Slate for Worker Power — released its final report Thursday calling to overhaul American labor laws and increase workers’ collective bargaining power. Law School Faculty members Sharon Block and Benjamin I. Sachs led the project. The initiative brought together leading activists and scholars to recommend policies aimed at empowering working people.

The report claims that an extreme concentration of wealth in the hands of few people has created economic and political inequality in the United States. It argues that current labor laws have fostered systematic racial and gender oppression. It also asserts that labor laws exclude vulnerable workers from vital labor protections and devalue the work performed by these workers.

Block and Sachs said they believe addressing this economic and political inequality would require a completely new system of labor law, rather than simply adjusting current policies. The report recommends that labor laws better enable working people to build collective organizations to increase their leverage with employers and in the political system. The policy recommendations aim to increase worker representation and inclusion by expanding the coverage of labor laws for independent contractors, as well as undocumented, incarcerated, and disabled workers. The report lays out an array of options for alternative worker representation in addition to labor unions, such as work monitors — employees who would ensure compliance with federal labor regulations.

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Colorado Makes Significant Wage Theft a Felony

Special thanks to Richard Fincher (arbitrator & adjunct - Cornell ILR) for sending word (via the Employee Rights Advocacy Institute and Construction Dive) that Colorado has enacted a bill making wage theft a criminal offense. Under the Human Right to Work With Dignity Act, unscrupulous employers who intentionally withhold more than $2,000 in wages could be found guilty of felony theft. 

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Trafficking Added to Forced Labor Claims in Saipan Casino Case

Thanks to Aaron Halegua, who has been working on this case, for updating us. Here's an excerpt from the Associated Press story:

Seven Chinese men allege in a lawsuit that they were victims of a forced labor scheme while constructing a Saipan casino.

The casino and its contractors violated U.S. trafficking laws by exploiting the workers, the lawsuit said. Saipan is part of the U.S. Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands.

The lawsuit was filed in December. It was amended Friday to add trafficking claims and to include casino owner Imperial Pacific as a defendant.

...

According to the lawsuit, the men were subjected to 12-hour workdays, dormitories without showers or air-conditioning and a dangerous construction site.

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U.S. Women's Soccer Team Members Sue Over Pay Discrimination

Today--International Women's Day--every current player on the U.S. Women's Soccer team filed a sex discrimination suit against the U.S. Soccer Federation. The suit is also seeking class status that would cover players as far back as 2015. This is essentially the next step in an earlier complaint filed by players with the EEOC in 2016. The violations claimed are under the Equal Pay Act (paying women players less than male players for substantially the same work) and sex discrimination under Title VII (based on disparate wages and treatment in comparison to male players). The Washington Post summarizes some of the factual allegations listed:

In the lawsuit, the women claim that in 2016, U.S. Soccer made more than $17 million in unexpected profits thanks largely to the women’s team, while paying the women players substantially less than their male counterparts. According to the lawsuit, a comparison of pay schedules for the two teams shows that if each team played 20 exhibition games in one year, members of the men’s team could earn an average of $263,320 each, while women’s players could earn a maximum of $99,000.

The lawsuit also highlights differences in World Cup bonuses for the two teams. After 2014 World Cup, U.S. Soccer paid out a total of $5.375 million in bonuses to the men’s team, which lost in the round of 16. In 2015, U.S.Soccer paid out $1.725 million in bonuses to the women, who won their World Cup, the lawsuit states.

One interesting element is that many of these conditions are rooted in a 2017 collective-bargaining agreement, which U.S. Soccer is sure to cite. However, traditionally, there was an expectation that unions can't waive Title VII and similar rights. Of course, there also used to be the same expectation when it came to mandatory arbitration clauses covering Title VII and similar claims, which the Court later abandoned. So stay tuned. 

-Jeff Hirsch

New Salary Basis Test for Overtime Eligibility

Yesterday, the Department of Labor announced its much anticipated proposed new overtime regulation. This goes to whether employees can be considered exempt from overtime as administrative, executive, or professional employees. The only real change is to the minimum salary threshold required to count an employee as exempt from overtime (that is, no matter what employees' duties are, if they don't make the minimum, they must get overtime if they are otherwise qualified). As readers will remember, the Obama DOL increased the salary threshold to about $47,000 a year initially, and added a measure that would have it change automatically based on average wage increases; this rule was then put on hold by a district court, largely based on a holding that the DOL relied to much on salary and not enough on employees' duties.

The new proposed rule increases the minimum salary, but only to $35,308 per year (up from the current, Bush II-era $23,660 per year that is in place after the decision striking down the previous increase). It also raised the "highly-compensated employee" rule, which makes it easier to exempt employees making over a certain amount, from $100,000 a year to $147,414. The DOL did not propose an automatic increase to these salary levels, but committed to reviewing them regularly (I'll believe that when I see it).  Moreover, it left the duties test untouched.

As is the usual practice, this announcement kicks off the comment period, after which the DOL will produce a final rule. And, as is also the norm these days, there will be lawsuits. Some will argue that the increase in salary goes to far, while others will argue that the rule still makes it too easy to exempt employees. Expect mixed messages from the district courts, which parties will handpick to try to get more favorable rulings. The key, therefore, will be to wait for the appeals courts to step in. So, we should see something of a final word on the final rule in, I'd guess, a couple of years from now.

-Jeff Hirsch 

 

Minor League Baseball Players Working Without Pay

USA Today Sports has an interesting article on minor league baseball players and their low--and, during major league spring training, nonexistent--pay. Major League Baseball classifies minor league players as being involved in "short-term seasonal apprenticeships." The article does a nice job showing why that's a stretch, to put it mildly. How has MLB pulled this off? Lobbying, and lots of it. The article explains some of the special legal maneuvers at play (pun intended):

Minor league players earn salaries that amount to less than minimum wage for up to seven years on their first pro contracts, and the rigorous spring-training schedule doesn’t exactly allow time for moonlighting.

After a lobbying effort by MLB, last year’s $1.3 trillion congressional spending bill — signed into law by Donald Trump in March — included an amendment to the Fair Labor Standards Act to exempt minor-league baseball players from federal minimum-wage protection. The so-called Save America’s Pastime Act, originally introduced in 2016 by a pair of congresspersons who received campaign donations from MLB’s PAC, appeared on page 1,967 of the 2,232 omnibus 2018 spending bill.

This winter, the league endorsed a bill in the Arizona House of Representatives to extend the federal exemption into state law in Arizona, the spring-training home for half of Major League teams. Representative T.J. Shope, who sponsored the bill, told the Arizona Capitol Times in January that spring training is “essentially a tryout,” even though all players training in every camp are already under contract with their organizations.

Shope told For The Win by email that the Arizona bill did not pass and “was probably dead before it began.” It didn’t get out of committee, meaning it never reached the statehouse floor for a vote.

That dead bill, like the inclusion of the Save America’s Pastime Act in the 2018 budget, undoubtedly reflects Major League Baseball’s efforts to combat a lawsuit first filed in 2014. Spearheaded by St. Louis-based attorney and former minor-league pitcher Garrett Broshuis, the suit seeks to apply federal minimum-wage laws to the salaries of minor leaguers. Pro players in low minor-league levels make as little as $1100 a month, only get paid during the regular season, and do not receive overtime compensation.

“MLB has signed these players up to seven-season employment contracts,” Broshuis said by phone this week. “They’re enjoying the benefits of controlling these players for seven years. On the contract, it calls them employees. They have a responsibility to treat them as normal employees should be treated. They can’t enjoy the benefits of it and not be required to meet the responsibilities that come with it.

Even if you're not a sports fan, this issue is a good reminder that wage and classifications issues didn't start with Uber. In fact, I see a lot of parallels with other industries that manage to dangle low probability/high reward opportunities in front of individuals who will work for nothing, whether as an apprentice, volunteer, or intern (I'm looking at you, fashion and entertainment industries).

Definitely read the article, as it provides a lot of detail about what's going on and the severe disparities that exist on the same field.

-Jeff Hirsch

Emerging Technology in the Workplace: AI, Robotics, Virtual Reality, & Monitoring

I normally try to avoid too much self-promotion on the blog, but I wanted to post a new draft article of mine. Hopefully the topic is of interest, but I post it mainly because I'd love comments and thoughts, which you can send me directly (I'm going through the journal submission process now, but still need to work on some things, especially citations). The article is called Future Work and is available on SSRN. The abstract:

The Industrial Revolution. The Digital Age. These revolutions radically altered the workplace and society. We may be on the cusp of a new era—one that will rival or even surpass these historic disruptions. Technology such as artificial intelligence, robotics, virtual reality, and cutting-edge monitoring devices are developing at a rapid pace. These technologies have already begun to infiltrate the workplace and will continue to do so at ever increasing speed and breadth.

This Article addresses the impact of these emerging technologies on the workplace of the present and the future. Drawing upon interviews with leading technologists, the Article explains the basics of these technologies, describes their current applications in the workplace, and predicts how they are likely to develop in the future. It then examines the legal and policy issues implicated by the adoption of technology in the workplace—most notably job losses, employee classification, privacy intrusions, discrimination, safety and health, and impacts on disabled workers. These changes will surely strain a workplace regulatory system that is ill-equipped to handle them. What is unclear is whether the strain will be so great that the system breaks, resulting in a new paradigm of work. 

Whether or not we are on the brink of a workplace revolution or a more modest evolution, emerging technology will exacerbate the inadequacies of our current workplace laws. This Article discusses possible legislative and judicial reforms designed to ameliorate these problems and stave off the possibility of a collapse that would leave a critical mass of workers without any meaningful protection, power, or voice. The most far-reaching of these options is a proposed “Law of Work” that would address the wide-ranging and interrelated issues posed by these new technologies via a centralized regulatory scheme. This proposal, as well as other more narrowly focused reforms, highlight the major impacts of technology on our workplace laws, underscore both the current and future shortcomings of those laws, and serve as a foundation for further research and discussion on the future of work.

Thanks.

-Jeff Hirsch

 

Federal Employees Sue for Being Forced to Work Without Pay During Shutdown

The American Federation of Government Employees has initiated a suit on behalf on of two federal corrections officers who have not received earned overtime pay. The class is likely to grow substantially if the shutdown continues past Jan. 5, as that's the next regularly scheduled payday. Indeed, it is estimated that over 400,000 employees have been deemed essential and are required to continue working during the shutdown.

Like a similar suit brought during the 2013 shutdown by the same law firm--Kalijarvi, Chuzi, Newman & Fitch--the employees are claiming FLSA violations. What I hadn't realized is that despite a win in the 2013 suit, 25,000 employees still haven't received damages (they were awarded liquidated/double damages). If anyone knows why, I'd love to hear it. In any event, the prospect of double damages for over 400,000 employees for heaven knows how many hours of work would, I hope, give politicians extra incentive to get this resolved. That said, no matter how big an FLSA award might be, it still pales in comparison to a $5 billion wall . . . .

-Jeff Hirsch