Workplace Prof Blog

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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Duff Rethinks Workers' Comp

Michael Duff (Wyoming, en route to SLU) has just posted on SSRN his new article (forthcoming Kentucky L.J.) Fifty More Years of Ineffable Quo?: Workers' Compensation and the Right to Personal Security. I usually edit down abstracts to one paragraph, but one paragraph won't do justice to this critically important article. Here's the full abstract:

During the days of Covid-19, OSHA has been much in the news as contests surface over the boundaries of what risks of workplace harm are properly regulable by the federal government. Yet the original statute that created OSHA—the Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970—was not exclusively concerned with front-end regulation of workplace harm. Just over fifty years ago, the same Act mandated an investigation of the American workers’ compensation system, which consists of a loose network of independent state workers’ compensation systems. The National Commission created by the Act to carry out the investigation issued a report of its findings in 1972 and concluded that American workers’ compensation was neither fair nor adequate. The Commission made nineteen “essential recommendations” for the system’s improvement. The federal Department of Labor shifted into high gear to monitor state compliance with the recommendations under implicit, but vague, threat of workers’ compensation federalization if progress was not achieved. In what is perhaps the most interesting part of the story, nothing changed. Today, the Department of Labor no longer monitors workers’ compensation’s attainment of any benchmarks, although some organizations monitor workers’ compensation “trends.”

Lost in discussions of workers’ compensation is any sense of a baseline. Why does this matter? Because workers’ compensation was conceived as a “Grand Bargain” or “quid pro quo,” in which workers surrendered tort rights for adequate statutory benefits. This article contends that the absence of investigation as to whether workers’ compensation benefits are too low has effectively unmoored workers’ compensation from the faintest echoes of the tort rights for which it was exchanged. The article seeks to provoke discussion of what it means, as a matter of both policy and constitutional law, for a state to dispossess injury remedies by converting workers’ compensation from a reasonable substitute remedy for tort to a pale, anti-destitution law relegated to functioning as a form of “welfare.” The article explores the phenomenon of permanent partial disability benefits paid to workers for injuries according to bizarre schedules that are not to any degree based on workers’ lost earning capacity nor on any rational criteria that anyone can identify. Permanent partial benefits—the largest component of workers’ compensation indemnity benefits—are arbitrary.

In its essence this article is about whether state legislatures have carte blanche to annihilate meaningful remedies for workers wrongfully injured in the workplace. Furthermore, to the extent that state legislatures pursue such objectives, the article presses for recognition of a Blackstonian “absolute” right to personal security. Evisceration of remedies not only makes workers poorer, but also leads to their insecurity because they work for actors with insufficient incentives to act safely. The solution to the problem is for legislatures to be more transparent about the relationship between workers’ compensation benefits and foregone negligence remedies—particularly because the original Grand Bargain was struck at a time when negligence affirmative defenses would instantly defeat tort claims, a situation that no longer obtains. The time for benefit inscrutability and ineffability is over.

Well-done, Michael -- I can't agree more.

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Teaching Workplace Health & Safety

Alvin Goldman (retired, U. Kentucky) asked me to share this link, of Hazel Dickens singing about Black Lung, that would be a great introduction to covering the topic of employee health and safety. Thanks, Alvin!

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[Un]Vaccinated Workers in the Labor Market

Chris Albertyn (Albertyn Arbitration, Toronto) has sent the position paper Vaccinated and Unvaccinated Workers in the Labor Market, drafted by labor law academics in Israel. Here's the introduction:

Covid-19 poses numerous challenges to the labour market. The most recent are dilemmas concerning the appropriate regulation of access to work for unvaccinated workers, and the possible infringement of labour rights that may ensue. Being the first country in which large scale vaccination took place, there is a heated debate within Israel on this topic. As part of the public discourse, 17 labour law experts from academic institutions around Israel have written the position paper presented below:

We, a group of leading labour law scholars from Israeli law faculties, have been closely monitoring the public and legal discourse around the access of unvaccinated workers into workplaces. We are concerned that at this time, when a large share of the adult population in Israel is being vaccinated, there are calls to terminate the employment of workers who are not. To this end, we wish to emphasize a few basic principles of labour law and human rights that lie at the heart of Israeli law and international labour law. These principles should guide regulation on this issue, whether it is negotiated by the parties to collective labour law, the legislature, or in the labour courts' judgements.

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Keeping Up With COVID, Legally Speaking

This semester, the law students in Professor Lea VanderVelde’s Employment Law course have been doing cutting-edge research into how the pandemic is impacting work laws, as it re-arranges workplaces, requires business closures, transforms the ways we get goods, decimates the service sector, and sickens millions of workers.

As students studied the traditional topics in the employment law curriculum, they also researched how the COVID-19 pandemic was impacting these laws. They were introduced to the sources that experts in the field use to keep up on fast-moving changes, such as reading on-line sources like the Daily Labor Report, white papers of leading law firms, and current state and federal agency guidelines from the Department of Labor and EEOC.

“The sudden emergence of COVID-19 forced considerable changes in many aspects of life—and Professor Vandervelde’s paper addresses its impact on some key areas of employment law. Professor Vandervelde’s course provided us with the proper foundation to effectively address the pandemic’s effect in this area of law. It was an honor and a privilege being a part of this research,” said Iowa Law student Kevin Kim.

This research allowed VanderVelde’s students to witness change as it happened, to reflect on the likely direction the law would take, and to assess the pandemic’s lasting influence on employment law.

Each student produced a different report analyzing how the issue was changing under the new circumstances.

“The opportunity to write a paper involving employment law and the COVID-19 pandemic was my favorite part of this class with Professor VanderVelde. It gave me a chance to apply employment law doctrines I have learned in class to current events. This was not only a fantastic way to test my understanding, but it also provided a practical application of the same processes attorneys and legal scholars undergo,” said 2L Nicholas Day.

By studying their chosen issue over several weeks, students were able to watch changes as they evolved, a method that excellently prepares them for the field of employment law as it exists and prepares them to anticipate the changes to come.

Topics, complete with bibliographies, included the latest thinking on the following questions:

1. How previous pandemics changed the baseline of employment laws.
2. Implications of the pandemic on the gig economy.
3. How COVID-19 has impacted OSHA.
4. How will unemployment compensation funds be sustained under higher unemployment claims in various states, and what requirements are likely to be waived.
5. Occupational-specific issues, such effects on public school teachers, medical licensure due to tele-practicing of medicine, and even whether the cancellation of college and national football are likely to affect current efforts to re-classify student players as employees.
6. The pandemic’s effect on wage theft, and sick leave.
7. How work-from-home affects monitoring employees and recording hours and whether work from home re-classifies employees as independent contractors.
8. Employee privacy including what questions employers can ask? How much employers can mandate changes in their employees’ social lives and whether employers can legally mandate vaccinations?
9. Do whistleblowers alerting others to dangerous practices get protection against retaliation?
10. What is the legal significance of classifying workers as essential workers?

Altogether, the students’ reporting produced a 90-page white paper on where employment law stands at the current moment, and how one would expect it to change. You can read their research here.

CAS (thanks to Lea & Peyten Little)

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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Arnow-Richman on Remote Work & Temporary Termination

Rachel Arnow-Richman (Florida) has just posted on SSRN a pair of timely articles related to the pandemic: Temporary Termination: A Layoff Law Blueprint for the COVID Era (forthcoming ABA JLEL) , and Is There An Individual Right to Remote Work? A Private Law Analysis (forthcoming Wash. U. J. L. & Pub. Policy). Here are the abstracts:

Remote Work: One of the gnawing legal questions of the COVID-19 pandemic is the status of remote work. Since the expiration of the first round of government shut-down orders in the summer of 2020, companies have been calling workers back to the job, prompting serious concerns about the risk of workplace transmission. As a consequence, many workers have asked to continue the remote arrangements their employers adopted when forced to close under executive orders. Some employers are acceding to these requests; others are not. This brief essay, prepared for the ABA Journal on Labor & Employment Law, considers this problem from a private law perspective. It concludes that public law offers little protection to individual employees other than those with qualifying disabilities. Companies, however, may be in breach of contract if they terminate employees who have enforceable job security rights for refusing to return to in- person work. Rather than rely on guesswork, the prudent and compassionate choice for employers is to continue temporary remote arrangements to the extent feasible. 

Temporary Termination: This paper, prepared for a forthcoming Washington University of Saint Louis symposium on COVID-19, responds to the pandemic-induced unemployment crisis with a strategy for addressing temporary, economic-based terminations. Workplace regulation has long neglected workers separated for economic reasons, leaving the problem to the social welfare system, which is now overwhelmed by record numbers of unemployment applicants. In prior articles, I have drawn on comparative law models to argue for laws requiring employers to provide mandatory advance notice of termination or commensurate severance pay to laid off workers. Building on that work, and drawing specifically on Canadian law, this paper argues for recognizing “temporary separation” as a distinct legal status that confers individual rights to affected employees within the context of a comprehensive law of layoffs. Under this system, all employees terminated for economic reasons would be entitled to advance notice or its equivalent in severance pay. However, employers could suspend such obligations by classifying workers as temporarily separated. Affected individuals would retain their status as employees, obtain fast-track access to unemployment benefits, and enjoy a right to reinstatement when their jobs resume. Should the employer choose not to recall a temporarily separated worker, or if the lack of work becomes permanent, the employer would be required to fulfill its deferred severance obligation. 

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Slinn on Protected Concerted Activity in Canada & the U.S. During a Time of COVID

Sara Slinn (York - Osgoode) has posted on SSRN her timely and well-written article Protected Concerted Activity and Non-Unionized Employee Strikes: Worker Rights in Canada in the Time of COVID-19, 57 Osgoode Hall L.J. ___. Here's the abstract: 

During the pandemic employees in the US have engaged in a wave of strikes, protests and other collective action over concerns about unsafe working conditions, and many of these involved non-unionized workers in the private sector. Similar employee protests were notably absent in Canada. This article examines the differences in labour legislation between the US and Canada which may help to explain these diverging experiences, primarily: the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) section 7 protection for concerted activity, and the NLRA section 502 ability for a good faith strike due to abnormally dangerous conditions for work. This article outlines and compares the situation of, and consequences for, three categories of workers engaging in a strike over fears of workplace safety: unionized employees, non-unionized employees, and non-employees, such as independent contractors under the NLRA compared to under the Ontario Labour Relations Act (OLRA), as generally representative of Canadian labour legislation. In the final section, this article considers how a statutory provision similar to the NLRA protected concerted activity provision might be incorporated into Canadian labour legislation such as the OLRA. It also considers some more fundamental questions that such changes might prompt policymakers to reconsider, including: the focus of our statutory system on “organizing” collective action to the exclusion of “mobilizing” collective action, and questions about the potential role of minority unionism in our labour legislation system.

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Private Right of Action for OSHA

Michael Duff, Thomas McGarity, Sidney Shapiro, Rena Steinzor and Katie Tracy have published a piece through the Center for Progressive Reform on the need to provide a private right of action under OSHA. An excerpt from the executive summary:

Over the last several decades, through a concentration of economic and political power by corporate executives and their allies in government institutions, workers have been systematically disempowered and silenced. Two important results of this dynamic are that the nation's workplaces are not nearly as safe or healthy as they need to be to protect all workers, and workers lack the power they deserve to speak up against exploitation without fear of significant retaliation.

The handling of the coronavirus pandemic is emblematic of several decades of choices by our national and state leaders that prioritize short-term profits ahead of people. At this very moment and in plain view, President Trump and his Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), conservatives in Congress, and many state leaders are failing to protect workers from the potentially fatal risks of COVID-19. Significantly, this increased burden is not equally shared by all. Black, Latinx, and other people of color are disproportionately represented in many occupations that make up the low-paid, high-risk jobs, such as health services, child care, public transit, grocery clerks, janitorial services, and meatpacking, which are deemed essential during the pandemic. . . .

Agencies like OSHA should play a key role in setting policies that ensure health, safety, stability, and power for workers in addressing workplace hazards. But since 1970, Congress and the White House have hollowed out the agency, denying it resources and trimming its authority, leaving it in a weak state. The failure has been bipartisan. Republicans have been overtly hostile to OSHA, and Democrats have often lacked the political will to pursue progressive standard-setting and enforcement policies. . . .

Fixing the current system requires an updated and vastly improved labor law that empowers workers to speak up about health and safety hazards, rather than risk their lives out of fear of losing employment and pay. It also requires that workers be empowered to fight back when government agencies fail to enforce safety and health requirements. Our vision is to guarantee all workers a private right of action to enforce violations of the OSH Act, coupled with incentives for speaking up and strong whistleblower protections to ensure workers can and will utilize their new authority. In addition, this private right of action should cover the millions of workers who are currently unprotected by OSHA, including misclassified independent contractors, agricultural workers, and public sector workers in states under federal OSHA’s jurisdiction. Congress should also ban mandatory arbitration as a condition of employment, since the purpose of such arbitration requirements is to disempower workers by denying access to the courts. Finally, Congress should require that all states and territories that operate their own occupational safety and health programs in lieu of federal OSHA incorporate a private right of action into their state plans. . . .

Check it out!

Jeff Hirsch

Webinar: Global Governance & Worker Protection During the Pandemic

Desiree LeClercq (formerly Director for Labor Affairs at the Office of the United States Trade Representative; currently en route to Ithaca NY to teach at the Cornell ILR School) writes to tell us:

LERA has been hosting a series of webinars free to members and non-members that examine various labor elements of the COVID pandemic. This Thursday, May 28, from 10-11am, I will be moderating a panel on ""Global Governance During Pandemic: Implications of Force Majeure and National Emergency for Worker Rights Protections." Panelists will include representatives from the ILO, the World Bank, the World Maritime University, Solidarity Center, and Sustainable Enterprises. In case of interest, the link to register and receive the Zoom link may be accessed at: https://lera.memberclicks.net/lera-webinar-series--ler-during-covid-19.

This looks like a terrific program!

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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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Chapman Law Review Call for Papers--OSHA and Other Acts of 1970

Chapman Law Review is holding a call for papers for their next symposium issue: "A 50-Year Retrospective on Major Laws of the 91st Congress." The focus will be on legislation that came out of that period, including OSHA (also the National Environmental Policy Act, the Organized Crime Control Act, the Housing and Urban Development Act, and more). Abstracts of 1,000-1,500 words, along with a current CV, are due June 1, 2019 to Caroline J. Cordova ([email protected]). Deadline for completed papers is August 26, 2019. 

 

You can get more info here: Call for Papers - Chapman Law Review.

 

-Jeff Hirsch

Secunda on Hybrid Federalism, OSHA, and the Right to Disconnect

Paul Secunda (Marquette) just posted on SSRN his article (46 Pepperdine L. Rev.) Hybrid Federalism and the Right to Disconnect. Here's the abstract:

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) administers the Occupational Safety and Health Act (OSH Act). OSHA specific workplace and health standards do expressly preempt the entire field of workplace safety and health law, but where such standards do not exist or states developed their own OSHA plans, nor does it merely set a floor either. A type of “hybrid federalism” has been established. Here, by “modified” or “hybrid” federalism, this article refers to a strong federal-based field preemption approach to labor and employment law issues, but tied to a conflict preemption approach. Applying this hybrid preemption approach to the employee right to disconnect problem provides the best opportunity to address the growing epidemic of overwork through electronic communications in the United States.

This hybrid approach has two essential characteristics under OSHA. First, as a default standard, a federal general duty clause that requires all covered employers to maintain a workplace free of hazards that may cause serious injury or death and cannot be feasibly abated. Second, OSHA also has promulgated specific workplace safety and health standard over the last five decades that set more detailed and specific requirements for numerous health or safety dangers in the workplace. The specific standards occupy the field and all contrary state or local safety and health regulations are preempted. Yet, employers can still seek a permanent variance from any OSHA standard if they can establish that they have another method to achieve the same goal as the permanent standard. Second, the OSHAct also permits states to develop their own plans and submit them for approval to OSHA. Twenty-seven states have taken advantage of this option to one degree or another and have plans approved by OSHA. While these state-approved plans must be “at least as effective” as the federal OSHAct, some states, like California and Virginia, have been more aggressive in regulation and have regulated areas that the federal OSHAct has not. This Article maintains that a combination of general duty clause federal enforcement and individual state enforcement is the most effective way of providing a broad-based right to disconnect standard until a federal permanent standard can be promulgated.

In a forthcoming book chapter, Charlotte Garden argues similarly that NLRA preemption should be reformed to let state and local governments enact more worker-friendly labor laws.

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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

 

French Labor Reform

The NY Times has a story on Muriel Pénicaud, the French labor minister who has been leading the charge of reforming France's labor regulations. Macron, the French President, has been trying to get reforms through for a while but has been largely stymied by protests (you've got to hand it to the French, their capacity to protest may exceed even their cooking talent). As a result, Pénicaud has been embarking on a long series of negotiations with unions and businesses. Stay tuned for what the final results may be.

Also--shameless plug warning--if you want to compare France's legal and social welfare protections for dismissed workers, check out this article that I co-authored with Sam Estreicher, Comparative Wrongful Dismissal Law: Reassessing American Exceptionalism, 92 North Carolina Law Review 343 (2014). We compared not only the laws as written, but also how they operate (e.g., average win rates, average/maximum/minimum awards) for twelve countries, including the U.S.

-Jeff Hirsch

$13.9 milliion USDOL settlement for Chinese casino workers in Saipan

Following up on previous posts here and here describing safety and wage violations against Chinese workers building a casino in U.S.-Saipan, Aaron Halegua has this update:

On March 5, 2018, the U.S. Department of Labor announced that settlements totaling $13.9 million and covering over 2,400 workers with four Chinese contractors building the Imperial Pacific casino in Saipan. Many of these workers paid $6,000 or more to labor brokers in China, incurring significant debts with high interest rates, based on false promises of high-paying jobs in the United States. Instead, upon arriving in Saipan, the workers were stripped of their passports, forced to work long hours under dangerous conditions, and paid below minimum wage. OSHA also imposed significant fines against these contractors and the Department of Justice prosecuted several managers of these companies. News of the settlement was published by numerous media outlets, such as the Associated Press, New York Times, Washington Post, and South China Morning Post, and included a quote from Aaron Halegua, a lawyer and NYU research fellow who assisted the workers in this process and has written about the situation in Saipan elsewhere. Aaron discussed the importance of the settlement and necessary measures to prevent similar abuses from happening again. Specifically, he recommended that the casino, at a minimum, require contractors to purchase surety bonds, train workers about their rights, and hire a third-party monitor to oversee safety and labor conditions. One of the challenges will be distributing the settlement monies as almost all of the workers are now back in China.

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Chinese Casino Company Takes Over U.S. Island; Launders $; Flouts Labor Laws

Thanks to Aaron Halegua for passing along this feature story from last week's Bloomberg BusinessWeek about a Chinese casino in Saipan. It gives a very compelling account of the labor and safety issues concerning the Chinese construction workers there. And, these issues became the subject of many questions during a Senate hearing earlier this month about a bill concerning the future of a CNMI-specific guest worker program. For those who want further information about the labor situation in Saipan and the response by the federal authorities, see Aaron's short piece in ChinaFile.

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Secunda on the Right to Disconnect

Paul Secunda (Marquette) has just posted on SSRN his article (8 Notre Dame J. Int'l & Comparative L. (2018)) The Employee Right to Disconnect. Here's the abstract:

U.S. workers are increasingly finding it difficult to escape from work. Through their smartphones, email, and social media, work tethers them to their workstations well after the work day has ended. Whether at home or in transit, employers are asking or requiring employees to complete assignments, tasks, and projects outside of working hours. This practice has a profound detrimental impact on employee privacy and autonomy, safety and health, productivity and compensation, and rest and leisure. France and Germany have responded to this emerging workplace issue by taking different legal approaches to providing their employees a right to disconnect from the workplace. Although both the French legislative and German corporate self-regulation models have their advantages, this paper puts forth a hybrid approach using existing U.S. safety and health law under OSHA to respond to this employee disconnection problem. Initially under the general duty of clause of OSHA, and then under OSHA permanent standards and variances, this article provides a uniquely American approach to establishing an employee right to disconnect from work.

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Widiss on Workplace Effects of Intimate Partner Violence

Deborah Widiss (Indiana) has just posted a new book chapter on SSRN: Addressing the Workplace Effects of Intimate Partner Violence, in Violence and Abuse in the Workplace (Cary Cooper & Ronald Burke eds., forthcoming 2018).

Here's the abstract:

Although most physical violence against intimate partners occurs in the home, intimate partner violence (IPV) also affects workplaces. It often causes absences, productivity losses, and employee turnover; less commonly, perpetrators physically attack their intimate partners at work. This book chapter discusses best practices for decreasing workplace disruptions and the risk of workplace violence caused by IPV, and it explains legal standards that may apply. The primary focus is the United States, but research and legislation from other countries is also included. It also identifies websites that provide research, model policies, and other tools for organizations seeking to address IPV, including resources regarding employment of perpetrators of IPV.

This topic feels especially salient given the role of family violence in recent high profile shootings. This chapter looks like a helpful resource, and I'm looking forward to the book's release.

MM

Morantz on What Unions Do for Regulation

What do unions do for regulation? That's the subject of Alison Morantz's recent and timely review of the research literature: "What Unions Do for Regulation," Annual Review of Law and Social Science 13 (2017): 515-534. Here's the abstract:

The question of how organized labor affects the content, enforcement, and outcomes of regulation is especially timely in an era in which protective laws and regulations are being scaled back or minimally enforced and union membership is in decline. This article surveys literature from a wide array of regulatory domains—antidiscrimination, environmental protection, product quality, corporate governance, law enforcement, tax compliance, minimum wage and overtime protection, and occupational safety and health—in an effort to identify common findings on what unions do for regulation. Literature on the topic has taken up five questions: how labor unions affect the passage of protective laws and regulations; how they affect the outcomes that regulators target; how they affect the intensity of regulatory enforcement; the specific activities and channels of influence they use to influence regulated outcomes; and the role they play in self-regulation. Drawing on empirical literature from the domains listed, I review and analyze literature on each of these questions and offer several conclusions and suggestions for future research.

 

Morantz's main conclusion: There's a lot of support in the research literature for thinking that, "in most contexts, unions' tendency to strengthen workers' collective voice and mitigate market imperfections predominates their tendency to exert monopoly power and engage in economic rent-seeking." The best evidence of this comes from studies of how unionization strongly correlates with lower rates of serious and fatal workplace injuries. Some prior research also shows that unions tend to lower overall wage dispersion, which may indirectly reduce pay discrimination against women and racial minorities.

 

--Sachin Pandya