An American Approach to Social Democracy: The Forgotten Promise of the Fair Labor Standards Act

There is a growing consensus among scholars and public policy experts that fundamental labor law reform is necessary in order to reduce the nation’s growing wealth gap. According to conventional wisdom, however, a social democratic approach to labor relations is uniquely un-American—in deep conflict with our traditions and our governing legal regime. This Article calls into question that conventional account. It details a largely forgotten moment in American history: when the early Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) established industry committees of unions, business associations, and the public to set wages on an industry-by-industry basis. Alongside the National Labor Relations Act, the system successfully raised wages for hundreds of thousands of Americans, while helping facilitate unionization and a more egalitarian form of administration. And it succeeded within the basic framework of contemporary constitutional doctrine and statutory law. By telling the story of FLSA’s industry committees, this Article shows that collective labor law and individual employment law were not, and need not be, understood as discrete regimes—one a labor-driven vision of collective rights and the other built around individual rights subject to litigation and waiver. It also demonstrates that, for longer than is typically recognized, the nation experimented with a form of administration that linked the substantive ends of empowering particular social and economic groups to procedural means that solicited and enabled those same groups’ participation in governance (to the exclusion of other groups). Ultimately, recovering this history provides inspiration for imagining alternatives to the current approach to worker participation in the American political economy and to administrative governance more broadly

An American Approach to Social Democracy: The Forgotten Promise of the Fair Labor Standards Act

There is a growing consensus among scholars and public policy experts that fundamental labor law reform is necessary in order to reduce the nation’s growing wealth gap. According to conventional wisdom, however, a social democratic approach to labor relations is uniquely un-American—in deep conflict with our traditions and our governing legal regime. This Article calls into question that conventional account. It details a largely forgotten moment in American history: when the early Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) established industry committees of unions, business associations, and the public to set wages on an industry-by-industry basis. Alongside the National Labor Relations Act, the system successfully raised wages for hundreds of thousands of Americans, while helping facilitate unionization and a more egalitarian form of administration. And it succeeded within the basic framework of contemporary constitutional doctrine and statutory law

Human computer interaction for international development: past present and future

Recent years have seen a burgeoning interest in research into the use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in the context of developing regions, particularly into how such ICTs might be appropriately designed to meet the unique user and infrastructural requirements that we encounter in these cross-cultural environments. This emerging field, known to some as HCI4D, is the product of a diverse set of origins. As such, it can often be difficult to navigate prior work, and/or to piece together a broad picture of what the field looks like as a whole. In this paper, we aim to contextualize HCI4D—to give it some historical background, to review its existing literature spanning a number of research traditions, to discuss some of its key issues arising from the work done so far, and to suggest some major research objectives for the future

The union is the message: messenger work and messenger organizing in the same-day courier sector

Work in the same-day courier sector is a precarious form of employment. Workers in this sector are also treated as self-employed and hired as independent contractors. The relationship with the firm for which they work, however, is hardly distinguishable from an employment relationship. Messengers are among a growing number of workers in Canada who can be labeled as disguised employees. To explore the phenomenon of disguised employment, I use a case study approach informed by critical political economic theory and a purposive approach to labour and employment law to examine work in the same-day courier sector in Toronto with a focus on a subpopulation of workers in this sector: bike messengers. I examine the causes and consequences of self-employment in the same-day courier sector, analyze messengers' work and argue that their employment status entails misclassification. In an increasingly market-mediated society we are witnessing a proliferation of unprotected work relationships with disguised employment being one manifestation of this development. Fortunately, some unions are trying to organize workers in disguised employment relationships. In this dissertation, I also examine an attempt by the Canadian Union of Postal Workers to organize workers in Toronto's same-day courier sector. I explore the processes and implications of organizing disguised employees and examine how organizing these workers relates to and can inform the project of union renewal in Canada. Gaining employee status, however, is no guarantee of successful organizing. The same-day courier sector is highly competitive and is dominated by small, decentralized employers. Organizing in such a sector is a formidable task. Under the collective bargaining regime, unions have to organize workers workplace by workplace. However, this is proving to be ineffective in highly competitive sectors dominated by small employers, and organizing efforts will likely only result in limited success. As I argue, unions can develop innovative strategies and tactics to organize workers. However, with the many structural obstacles unions face, these strategies and tactics can often fall short of their goals. To facilitate unionization in the same-day courier sector, the collective bargaining regime needs to be overhauled to mandate, or at least promote, multi-employer bargaining

Emerging Financial Markets and Early U.S. Growth

Studies of early U.S. growth traditionally have emphasized real-sector explanations for an acceleration that by many accounts became detectable between 1815 and 1840. Interestingly, the establishment of the nation's basic financial structure predated by three decades the canals, railroads, and widespread use of water and steam-powered machinery that are thought to have triggered modernization. We argue that this innovative and expanding financial system, by providing debt and equity financing to businesses and governments as new technologies emerged, was central to the nation's early growth and modernization. The analysis includes a set of multivariate time series models that relate measures of banking and equity market activity to measures of investment, imports and business incorporations from 1790 to 1850. The findings offer support for our hypothesis of "finance-led" growth in the U.S. case. By implication, the interest today in improving financial systems as a means of fostering sustainable growth is not misplaced.

Emerging Financial Markets and Early U.S. Growth

Studies of early U.S. growth traditionally have emphasized real-sector explanations for an acceleration that by many accounts became detectable between 1815 and 1840. Interestingly, the establishment of the nation's basic financial structure predated by three decades the canals, railroads, and widespread use of water and steam-powered machinery that are thought to have triggered modernization. We argue that this innovative and expanding financial system, by providing debt and equity financing to businesses and governments as new technologies emerged, was central to the nation's early growth and modernization. The analysis includes a set of multivariate time series models that relate measures of banking and equity market activity to measures of investment, imports and business incorporations from 1790 to 1850. The findings offer support for our hypothesis of finance-led' growth in the U.S. case. By implication, the interest today in improving financial systems as a means of fostering sustainable growth is not misplaced.

Cooperation, Conflict, or Coercion: Using Empirical Evidence to Assess Labor-Management Cooperation

Since the 1980s there has been strong interest in labor-management cooperation. That interest was reflected even in government attention, for example, through projects by the U.S. Department of Labor\u27s Bureau of Labor-Management Cooperation. Under the leadership of Undersecretary Stephen Schlossberg, the Bureau\u27s Laws Project examined the impact of labor law on labor-management cooperation. The Dunlop Commission issued a report strongly in favor of labor-management cooperation, and National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) Chair William B. Gould has spoken favorably of it. More recently, the government issued a report on state and local initiatives in this area

Rethinking Labor Law Preemption: State Laws Facilitating Unionization

I want to travel, against the flow of traffic, down what many consider a one-way analytical street. My thesis is that, contrary to prevailing wisdom, the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) does not wholly preempt the states\u27 ability to adopt laws facilitating unionization and enhancing employee leverage in collective bargaining with employers