Displaced Workers: America's Unpaid Debt (original) (raw)
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Journal of Individual Employment Rights, 1995
Numerous proposals to end employment at will and restrict wrongful dis charge suits have been offered. Advocates contend that employers have an incentive to support such legislation, just as employers had an incentive to support workers' compensation laws. However, such legislation has made little headway. This article takes a close look at the analogy with workers' compensation and argues that legislation to end employ ment at will is unlikely to succeed unless it, like workers' compensation, involves a broad shift in employment law with principled appeal to employers as well as employees. It suggests that provisions affirming duties for employees as well as employers have the potential to break the current legislative impasse. Nearly twenty years ago, Clyde Summers wrote an influential article in which he argued it was time for a statute to protect employees from unfair dismissals not covered by labor law or civil rights law [1]. Since then, court cases in most states have carved out certain exceptions to the employment-at-will doctrine that an employer can dismiss employees for any reason or no reason [2-3], but legislative action has taken place only on a limited basis. The lack of action has not been for lack of trying. Numerous articles have been written that propose and outline legislation dealing with the issue of wrongful discharge [3, 4-17], and numerous bills on the subject have been introduced in state legislatures [7, 11,18-19]. While there are significant differences among the proposed bills, with some proposals designed to win employer support [3, 8, 20] and others less concerned with acceptability to employers [1, 10], in general the proposals have a similar structure. Most proposed legislation contains provisions ending employment at will in favor of a standard under which there must be a valid reason ("good cause" 15
A Call out of Seir: The Meaning and Future of US Labor Law
Law & Social Inquiry
The Cambridge Handbook of US Labor Law for the Twenty-First Century decries federal labor law for forsaking American workers and undermining American unions. Its contributors seek a reformed labor law for the current century. In this review essay, I examine the handbook’s contention that federal labor law has failed. To assess the merits of the claim, we must test the foundations of its contributors’ assumptions—about the labor movement, about the place of the labor movement in the political economy of American capitalism envisaged by labor law, and, indeed, about law itself. To do so, I turn to earlier, critical research on the character of American labor laws, notably Joel Rogers’s seminal 1990 essay “Divide and Conquer,” and also to work of my own. To put it crudely, I ask how much labor law reform actually matters.
Sixth Annual North American Labor History Conference, October 18–20, 1984—Wayne State University
International Labor and Working-Class History, 1985
This year the conference theme was "The Human Impact of Deindustrialization: History and Theory." The purpose was to bring together people dealing with the contemporary crisis-from labor, business, and community programs as well as academic economists, sociologists, and political scientists-and historians who have done research on regional economic decline and its implica* tions. The hope was to develop a broader and more theoretical understanding of the problem. If reactions from participants and the audience are any indication, the dialogue turned out to be quite fruitful. We began with views from the trenches. Ed Mann, former president of Youngstown's steelworkers' Local 1462, retraced the road to oblivion of work in steel in his city. The lessons that he drew were numerous: the ease with which a great company can withdraw its capital from an area and move it elsewhere (indeed out of the industry altogether); the mistake made long ago by unions in not fighting more vigorously against management rights clauses in their contracts; the International's inability to respond meaningfully to the shock of plant closings other than by working for "a decent funeral"; the massive reverberations that run through the entire community when shutdowns occur, and the need to recognize "community rights" in planning future labor strategy; and finally the need for the rank and file to realize that they "have to take care of themselves." These themes, in different forms and from different angles, reappeared throughout the conference. Thaddeus Radzialowski (Southwest State, Minnesota) examined the story of the Weirton employee buyout, stressing the long history of paternalism in this company town as a key explanation for the extraordinarily generous terms offered to National Steel and the guarantees-20 percent compensation cuts, no raises and no strikes for six years, and management domination of policy-offered to investors. Peter Friedlander (Wayne State) then mapped the complex recent history of deindustrialization in Metropolitan Detroit, demonstrating above all the widening socioethnic net of unemployment and socially disintegrative poverty. The white working class of outer Detroit and various suburbs along the industrial corridors of the area is
Human Resource Management, 1986
Challenges and Choices Facing American Labor, edited by Thomas A. Kochan. Cambridge, Mass.: The M.I.T. Press, 1985. No price listed. The preface to this book indicates that the volume is a product of an M.I.T. conference on " U S. Industrial Relations in Transition" at which threescore union &ci& and academics discussed a set of research papers. Thirteen of the papers appear in the book, together with selected participants' comments and an opening essay that highIights recent shifts in the industrial relations environment, alterations of corpo
The Declining Fortunes of American Workers: Six Dimensions and an Agenda for Reform
New Institutional Economics eJournal, 2016
At the turn of the century, I undertook an assessment of the then current state of workplace rights and obligations. I concluded that the balance of power between employers and workers was “badly skewed” in favor of employers. This article revisits that topic for the purpose of assessing twenty-first century trends through the lens of six workplace dimensions. They are: workforce attachment, union-management relations, employment security, income inequality, balancing work and family, and retirement security. An examination of these dimensions reveal that the status of U.S. workers has significantly declined during the first sixteen years of the twenty-first century. This article then sets out a proposed agenda for reform designed to recalibrate the current imbalance in the respective fortunes of employees and employers.