A Stag Hunt Account and Defense of Transnational Labour Standards---A Preliminary Look at the Problem

Transnational labor standards are modeled as cooperative solutions to the class of strategic dilemmas known as Stag Hunts, in which all actors would gain from a cooperative solution, but only if all cooperate. If you think a partner will defect, your best strategy is also to defect. Intuitively, India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh will all be better off if none of their children work and all go to school; however if one defects from this agreement it will capture a stream of foreign investment linked to child labor. Understanding Stag Hunts explains why transnational labor standards are found both in genuinely international instruments (such as ILO conventions) and in bilateral trade agreements (since small groups can reach cooperative solutions in experimental Stag Hunts, while large groups cannot), and why multilateral standards are better than unilateral U.S. standards (because defection from a Stag Hunt makes rivals\u27 defection rational). The Stag Hunt model sharpens the inquiry, but does not resolve, the question of the appropriate role of sanctions in the enforcement of labor standards

Labor Arbitration of Discrimination Claims After 14 Penn Plaza v. Pyett: Letting Discrimination Defendants Decide Whether Plaintiffs May Sue Them

Published in cooperation with the American Bar Association Section of Dispute Resolutio

Who Speaks for the Working Poor?: A Preliminary Look at the Emerging Tetralogy of Representation of Low-Wage Service Workers

Recent advocacy campaigns for low-wage service workers in New York City reveal a new pattern of representation by legal avocacy groups (like National Employment Law Project or law school clinics), governmental actors (like the state Attorney General or New York City Council), and immigrant rights groups. Such campaigns have won important economic and legal victories for Mexican workers in Korean greengroceries, West African delivery personnel for supermarkets and drug chains, and domestic workers. They have not, however, institutionalized workplace or political representation for these groups. Unions have either been passive, outmaneuvered, or played negative roles in these campaigns. This pattern of representation is likely to continue, but, given the incentives of the various actors, unlikely to produce stable patterns of representation

Employment Discrimination in a High Velocity Labor Market

Silicon Valley employers employ few African-Americans, Latino/as, or older workers, yet do not fit the usual paradigms of employment discrimination: they exhibit no taste for uniformity and do not employ job tournaments or internal labor markets. A new model of employment discrimination attributes disparate hiring in Silicon Valley to a combination of: demands for specific skill sets at hiring (the opposite of the subjective criteria that have long beguiled scholars of discrimination) and concomitant refusal to train; hiring through networks of personal contacts; and rewards to career paths that alternate employment with self-employment. Overcoming the disparate impact of these employment practices will require institutions going well beyond current employment discrimination law

First National Maintenance Corp. v. National Labor Relations Board: Eliminating Bargaining for Low-Wage Service Workers

The Supreme Court decision finds an employer privileged not to bargain with the union over a decision to eliminate a portion of operations (by not renewing a contract with a particular customer), undertaken entirely for economic reasons turning not at all on labor costs, and without animus to the union. No such case has ever been presented to the National Labor Relations Board, and interviews with the principals reveals that these were not the facts of First National Maintenance either. The case was a carefully-constructed hypothetical that omitted key facts, such as the employer\u27s history of illegal conduct to avoid recognizing the same union at other locations. Subsequent Board cases reveal that all real-world examples of employers that refuse to bargain over downsizing, also involve some combination of union animus, planning to do the work at another location, or attempts to avoid bargaining over clearly bargainable issues. The application of FNM to such cases remains conjectural. The drafting of the opinion is traced through Supreme Court memoranda and drafts and reveals no clear decision on the issues that actually arise. Issues that arise today involving union representation of janitors arise outside the FNM framework, notably whether to follow Canadian practice and typically find janitors employed, jointly or individually, by the owners of the building they clean