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Supreme Court’s Janus case 5 years later: Workers are invoking their rights
A common argument made by unions and their allies is that workers want to belong to unions but that big business uses all manner of…
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Biden Labor pick Julie Su claims she cannot recall her Prop 22 vote
Acting Labor Secretary Julie Su claimed multiple times Wednesday that she could not recall how she voted on California’s Proposition 22, the ballot initiate…
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Romney slams Labor nominee Su’s ‘so severely lacking’ record
Julie Su, the White House’s pick to replace outgoing Labor Secretary Marty Walsh, had her first of two Senate hearings Thursday. Sen. Mitt Romney…
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Freelancers Find Little Sympathy from Left In Fight over Worker ‘Misclassification’
Kim Kavin is a freelance writer and an activist in the current political fight over the issue of worker classification. As co-founder of the activist…
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In Chicago’s Mayoral Runoff, It’s a Question of Which Union Wins
In Chicago’s upcoming mayoral race, the question is not whether organized labor will win, but rather which public sector union walks away with bragging rights.
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Michigan’s Right To Work Repeal Is a Repeal of Individual Rights
If right to work laws are so bad than why do their critics have such a hard time talking about what precisely the laws do? …
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DOL Nominee Julie Su An Aggressive Enforcer, Inept Manager
President Biden’s announcement Tuesday that he would nominate Department of Labor Deputy Labor Secretary Julie Su to replace departing Labor Secretary Mary Walsh is…
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Walsh Skates out of the Biden Administration
The news that Marty Walsh will be stepping down as Secretary of Labor seems to reflect the diminished agenda that Joe Biden will have…
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Philip Howard’s Not Accountable Focuses on Reform of Public Sector Unions
Of the 14.3 million people that the Department of Labor says are currently union members, almost half, 7.1 million, work in public sector jobs.
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Unionization Is Down to 10.1 Percent of the Workforce, Lowest Level on Record
The Department of Labor annual survey of union density, released today, shows that unions have fallen to just 10.1 percent of the overall workforce,…
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Customers, Not Regulators, Should Hold Southwest Accountable
Southwest Airlines’ scheduling meltdown over the holiday weekend has prompted Capitol Hill lawmakers to propose hearings and federal regulators like Transportation Secretary Pete…
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Bailout Suggests It’s Time to Rethink Multiemployer Pensions
President Biden announced last Thursday that the government would give $36 billion to bail out the multiemployer Teamsters Central States Pension Fund. It is…
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Biden Hits the Brakes on Possible Railroad Strike
President Biden’s call on Monday for Congress to intervene in contract negotiations between railroad workers and the industry to prevent a strike is…
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Somebody Better Hit the Brakes Soon in Railway Dispute
Three railroad unions have now voted to reject a contract negotiated by the Presidential Emergency Board (PEB) that had been accepted by eight other…
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NLRB Seeks to Gag Amazon Management
The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) recently alleged that Amazon chief executive office Andy Jassy violated federal labor laws by publicly saying that he…
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Mandatory Union Fees are Junk Fees
The White House yesterday called up federal agencies to target “junk fees” charged to consumers, arguing that these hidden costs are exploitative and drag…
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Workers Should Be Able to Hear from Both Sides Before Union Votes
Workers at an Amazon fulfillment center in Albany, New York, opposed forming a union by a nearly two-to-one margin last week. It was the…
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Illinois Ballot Measure to Allow Unions To “Keep Our Foot on the Gas”
Here’s a riddle: Why would unions in Illinois promote a ballot measure to establish a right to collective bargaining when that state is…
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FTC To Use Algorithms in Bid to Hobble Gig Economy
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has announced that it will use its “full authority” to investigate “unfair, deceptive, and anticompetitive practices” by so-called gig…
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Why Railway Unions Oppose the Deal Biden Helped Arrange
The Chamber of Commerce today urged Congress to step in and impose a settlement should talks between the rail industry and the its…
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NLRB Proposes Third Rewrite of Joint Employer Rule in Four Years
As expected, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) has proposed a new version of the “joint employer” rule, which establishes when a…
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Starbucks Alleges an NLRB Whistleblower Reveals Election Shenanigans
A challenge by Starbucks to a recent union election overseen by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) includes a remarkable claim by the company: There…
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How the Inflation Reduction Act Favors Unions over Taxpayers
The word “prevailing” appears 27 times in the text of the misleadingly named Inflation Reduction Act, which was passed by Congress Sunday and…
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How to Make Official Time Even Worse
“Official time” is the practice of allowing members of public sector unions to conduct union business while getting paid for the regular government job…
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Regulators Going off the Rails on a Crazy Train
One year after a supply chain crisis caused shortages across the nation, the Biden administration is trying to prevent railroads from modernizing and automating.
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A Closer Look at The Guardian’s “The Uber Files”
On July 11, 2022, The Guardian published an expose of rideshare giant Uber’s business practices, based on a trove of leaked documents it obtained. However,…
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Supreme Court EPA Ruling A Warning Shot to Agencies like NLRB
The Supreme Court’s ruling in West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency that the EPA exceeded its authority under the Clean Air Act is…
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Federal Agency Tries to Extend Reach with Joint Employer Standard
The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), the federal labor law enforcement agency, is likely planning to vastly expand its reach through a rulemaking on something…
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Biden Says He Wants to Be the “Most Pro-Union President in the History of the United States”
Flattering the audience is one of the handiest tools a person has when giving a speech. It’s a simple way to establish a positive tone…
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As Gas Prices Rises, Ridesharing Industry Adjusts
Rideshare companies are currently feeling the pinch from high gas prices, but some of their drivers are weathering the change better than others. High gas…
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Dead Man’s Switch: Biden Administration Fights Railroad Automation
Of all modes of transportation, one would think that railways would be at the leading edge of automation. After all, they don’t use public roads,…
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EEOC Nominee Kalpana Thinks Transparency Is an Important Value, Less Clear on Need to Abide by It
The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission may become a lot less accountable in its decision making than it was under the Trump administration should President Biden’s…
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Court Tells NLRB Sometimes a Joke Is In Fact a Joke
In a significant win for common sense, a federal appeals court has found that sometimes a joke is just a joke, even when it…
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Let’s Not Allow Davis-Bacon to Further Clog Job Arteries
The Biden administration is proposing to make government contracting even more expensive by revamping the Davis-Bacon Act. This law requires that related workers on…
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House Staffers Can Now Unionize
The House of Representatives on Tuesday approved, for the first time ever, allowing congressional staff to form unions. This will be an interesting experiment. How…
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Unions Are Getting Smarter by Returning to Old-School Organizing Tactics
A new wave of union activism has swept the country in recent months with workers at Starbucks, Amazon, and even Apple pushing to organize. The…
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NLRB General Counsel Calls for End to Secret Ballots in Workplace Elections
The general counsel for the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) is calling on the agency to unilaterally adopt “card check” rules for all union…
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NLRB General Counsel Targets Mandatory Attendance Meetings
National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) general counsel Jennifer Abruzzo is taking aim at “captive audience meetings” held by employers, arguing that it is unfair…
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Amazon Union Wins in Staten Island with Backing of 32 Percent of Workers
Key to understanding the union organizing win at Amazon’s Staten Island facility is that there were enough workers who wanted a union, or at…
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Weil, That Was a Close One!
David Weil, the Biden administration’s pick to be the administrator of the Department of Labor’s (DOL) Wage and Hour Division, was rejected by…
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The Best Thing the Department of Labor Can Do for Freelancers is Keep the Trump-era Rule
In a surprising move, a federal court has thrown out the Biden administration’s attempt to throw out the Trump administration’s new rule to determine…
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Biden Administration Seeks to Redefine Word “Prevailing”
The Biden administration has come up with an innovative way to aid its union allies: redefining the word “prevailing” to mean its opposite. The…
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Inflation Numbers Show a Minimum Wage Hike Is Still A Bad Idea
Like a slasher movie villain who refuses to die, the push to raise the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour seems to have a…
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How Newt Gingrich Laid the Groundwork for Congressional Staff Unionizing
The current effort by congressional staff to unionize builds on a legal groundwork laid decades ago by Republicans. In fact, the idea was…
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The One Area Where Voting Rights Isn’t Sacred: Union Elections.
There is one area of voting rights where many Democrats don’t seem to want every voice to be heard: union elections. Democratic lawmakers have accepted…
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Unions Likely Received $36 Million in Improper PPP Loans
It is possible that labor unions improperly received more than $36 million in “loans” under the federal Paycheck Protection Program (PPP). The program was intended…
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Even Most Democrats Favor Right to Work Laws
For being so controversial, right to work laws are pretty popular. A majority of states, 27, have them and even Democrats will give…
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Rising Pay Undermines Push for Increasing the Minimum Wage
A Department Labor report released Friday shows wages rising 4.5 percent, evidence that the Biden administration’s plan to raise the federal minimum wage…
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Biden’s Vaccine Mandate Is Still a Bad Idea Even If Properly Enacted
The best that can be said about the Biden administration’s decision to withdraw the executive order for its COVID-19 vaccine mandate and instead try to…
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As Numbers Stagnate, Unions Continue to Look to Congress For Salvation
The Department of Labor’s latest statistics confirm that the union movement in the U.S. remains stagnant and slowly declining. Only 10.3 percent of U.S.
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The Bizarre Logic of the NLRB’s Decision in the Amazon Union Case
The National Labor Relations Board’s (NLRB) order overturning the workers’ rejection of a union at an Amazon facility in Bessemer, Alabama, and ordering…
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The Invisible Hand, Not Washington, Is Easing the Supply Chain Crisis
The supply chain crisis is showing signs of receding. This is happening not because of any action by the White House or Congress. The market…
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Build Back Better’s $1.5 billion Gift to Unions
Hidden in the Biden administration’s Build Back Better plan is a provision that amounts to a $1.5 billion gift to unions. It is intended to…
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We Wanna Negotiate This – Unions Cool to Biden Vaccine Mandate
The nation’s top unions have reacted coolly to the Biden administration’s proposed vaccine mandate, with many rejecting the administration’s unilateral approach and saying that workers…
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There Is Less to Biden’s Ports Deal than It Appears
President Biden on Wednesday announced that the two main ports on the West Coast will start operating 24 hours a day to help address…
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Why Don’t U.S. Ports Operate 24/7? Ask the Unions
There has been a massive backlog for months now of cargo ships waiting to drop their goods at West Coast U.S. ports. As I…
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America Needs More Truckers on the Road
Severe backups and bottlenecks in the nation’s ports, particularly on the West Coast, have created severe logistical and supply problems throughout the country. This is…
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Fighting Income Inequality Won’t Help Workers
I just learned of the latest forthcoming study focusing on the issue of income inequality, this one promising to explain how regulations can exacerbate…
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Are Unions Losing Hope for the PRO Act?
In a sign that unions are losing hope that the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act can pass Congress, they are now…
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Unions on Biden’s Vaccine Mandate: That’s Not in Our Contract
President Biden’s vaccination mandate announcement on Friday has drawn a notably cool reaction from unions. While none appear to have come out against it, few…
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The Cost of Uncertainty in Dealing with the Pandemic
If there is one thing that businesses want more than anything else when it comes to regulations, it is predictability. That’s one case where what’s…
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Mexican Workers Deserve Secret Ballot Elections; So Do U.S. Workers.
Today, U.S. labor leaders applauded Mexican workers for getting rid of an allegedly corrupt union at a General Motors (GM) plant in Silao, in…
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Weil Is a Poor Choice to Lead Labor Department’s Wage and Hour Division
Lawmakers should reject President Biden’s choice to serve as administrator of the Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division, a major federal law enforcement…
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The Meaningless Symbolism of Raising the Minimum Wage for Federal Contractors
The Biden administration is planning to increase the minimum wage for federal contractors to $15 an hour, but there is much less to this than…
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With PRO Act, Congress Readies National Version of California’s AB5 Fiasco
California’s AB5 law, which was meant to prevent worker misclassification, faced a popular backlash when it disrupted the livelihoods of freelancers and gig…
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Does DOL Nominee David Weil Believe in Guilty Until Proven Innocent?
David Weil, a Brandeis University professor and President Biden’s nominee to head the Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division seems to believes that protecting…
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Biden Is Right to Call for Rolling Back Occupational Licensing and Non-Compete Agreements
President Biden’s executive order today calling for occupational licensing and employment non-compete agreements to be rolled back is a good idea that could benefit…
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How the Unemployment Rate Rose While the Economy Added Jobs
The Department of Labor’s (DOL) seemingly contradictory report Friday that the nation’s unemployment rate had risen marginally to 5.9 percent, up 1/10th of a…
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Missouri Employers Must Jazz Up wages to Avoid St. Louis Blues
Employers are struggling to fill jobs in Missouri and that’s a good thing. It means wages and benefits in the state will rise and workers…
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Justices Affirm that Collective Bargaining Rights Shouldn’t Trump other Rights
The Supreme Court was correct in its 6-3 ruling today in Cedar Point Nursery v. Hassid that a California regulation granting union organizers access…
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The Way to Maximize Worker Freedom: Combine Right to Work and Micro-Unions
The Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act, a pro-union bill currently awaiting action in the Senate, includes a lot ideas to coerce individual…
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The PRO Act Would Erode Individual Workers’ Rights
Suppose a piece of legislation was presented as an expansion of rights, when in fact it narrowed those rights. That ought to stir up some…
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This Week in Ridiculous Regulations
The economic recovery continues, but Congress is still intent on passing unneeded stimulus and infrastructure spending. Inflation is also up, and five antitrust bills are…
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The Paycheck Fairness Act’s Solution to the Gender Pay Gap: Make It Impossible to Defend Against Claims of Discrimination
Congress hit a wall this week on the Paycheck Fairness Act, which narrowly failed 49-50 on a Senate vote on Tuesday to break…
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New Job Numbers Show a Positive Trend
The Department of Labor’s (DOL) new jobs report is the latest proof that rolling back the restrictions imposed by the COVID-19 outbreak remains the…
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Railway Unions Want Minimum Crew Numbers
Cars are learning to drive themselves on U.S. highways. Unmanned aerial drones are fueling the expansion of e-commerce. Railways have been trying to…
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California App Drivers Seem Happy that Proposition 22 Passed
Ever since Proposition 22’s lopsided November victory in California, critics of that ballot initiative have pushed the narrative that voters were confused by it…
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Latest Jobs Report Shows – Again – that Economy Can Heal Itself
The Department of Labor’s (DOL) latest job numbers are being treated as gloomy news because overall unemployment marginally increased to 6.1 percent…
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Biden Administration Says Lets Keep the Rules for Contract Work Vague and Confusing
In a move that surprised no one, the Biden administration announced today it was officially rolling back the Trump administration’s rule under the…
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Is Biden Planning New Payroll Taxes?
President Biden will reportedly use address to Congress tonight to tout his American Families Plan, a major part of which is paid family leave.
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The One Place Progressives Want the Vote Suppressed: Union Elections
Big business has a new weapon to use against organized labor: mailboxes. That is what the Retail, Wholesale, and Department Store Union (RWDSU) claims is…
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DOL On Independent Contractor Rule: We Were Wrong but We Cannot Explain Why
The Biden administration put the Department of Labor (DOL) in the awkward position of having to withdraw its new rule regarding when workers…
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Maybe Workers Just Aren’t That into You, Unions
Labor unions are second only to Donald Trump when it comes to crying foul over election outcomes they don’t like. The National Labor Relations Board…
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Are Janus Violations a RICO Matter?
Ever since the Supreme Court’s 2018 ruling in Janus v. AFSCME that public sector workers cannot be forced to financially support unions, labor groups…
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The PRO Act’s Extremely Broad “Whistleblower” Provisions
The Senate confirmed former Boston Mayor and ex-union official Marty Walsh as the new Labor Secretary Tuesday by a vote of 93-2.
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Yes, Let’s Debate Taking Rights Away from Workers
Legislation doesn’t get much simpler than the National Right To Work Act. Introduced by Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul and South Carolina Rep. Joe Wilson…
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Biden Administration Wants to Decide When Freelancers Are “Legitimate”
The Department of Labor (DOL) announced Thursday, March 11 that it was rescinding a rule issued by the previous administration on when workers…
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House Passes Legislation to Limit Individual Worker Rights
The House of Representatives passed legislation late Tuesday to significantly limit individual workers’ rights. That is, granted, not how the Protecting the Right…
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Teacher Union Resistance to School Openings Keeping Moms out of Workforce
The closure of schools and the resistance by teachers’ unions to reopening them is having the spillover effect of forcing more women out of the…
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Congress Should Read the Fine Print on Sami’s Law
Whether a person is an employee of an app-based ridesharing company like Uber or Lyft under U.S. law has been a major hot button issue.
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Alternate Minimum Wage Proposal Suggests Punishing Business Is the Real Goal
Fans of raising the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour have come up with a workaround for the Senate Parliamentarian’s ruling Thursday that that…
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Are Democrats All or Nothing for a $15 Minimum Wage?
Can congressional Republicans bid down the Democrats’ and Biden administration’s push for a $15 an hour minimum wage? That’s what Republicans lead by Sens.
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California’s Khanna Says Businesses that Cannot Pay $15 Wages Are Dying Anyway
California Congressman Ro Khanna has a message for businesses that say they cannot afford to pay a $15 minimum wage an hour for their workers:…
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Biden Administration Presses Forward with Attack on Gig Economy Companies
The Biden administration last week continued its effort to help its union allies by officially withdrawing a Trump-era Labor Department guidance letter to businesses…
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Biden Picks Top Union Attorney to Enforce Labor Rules
The Biden administration announced this week that it was nominating Jennifer Abruzzo to serve as acting general counsel for the National Labor Relations Board…
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CBO Restates the Obvious: Raising the Minimum Wage Costs Jobs
The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) on Monday reaffirmed something we already knew but that bears repeating: Higher minimum wages costs jobs. The CBO’s…
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January Jobs Gain Threatened by Prospect of Minimum Wage Hike
The Labor Department’s report Friday that the unemployment rate was 6.3 percent in January, down 0.4 points from the previous month, is good news that…
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Biden Administration Begins Bid to Create Nationwide Version of California’s AB5
On the same day that President Joe Biden’s nominee for Labor Secretary, Boston Mayor Marty Walsh, told a Senate committee that he would…
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Questions for Marty Walsh
President Biden’s pick for Labor Secretary, Boston Mayor Marty Walsh will get his first Senate hearing on Thursday. Walsh is a former union head…
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Be Skeptical of Studies that Say Minimum Wage Hikes Are Painless
Do economists downplay the negative findings in their research on the minimum wage? That’s the implication of a new working paper on the issue for…