Teaching Big Brother to be a team player: Computer monitoring and quality

Computer monitoring should not be seen as a way of gathering information about workers, per se, but rather as one part of a production and quality strategy that provides needed information to a diverse team of workers. In its most powerful and effective form. computer monitoring is the use of computers to collect. process, and provide feedback information about work with the intent of improving performance and developing employees. Unfortunately, computer monitoring has also been used to punish employees. Here, a study of a successful computer monitoring system at Hughes Aircraft Company is described. The study shows that computer monitoring can facilitate integrated production and quality control strategies withouf negative effects on employee quality of work life. Managers who wish to design and effectively use computer monitoring systems should: (1) Use the monitoring system to provide feedback data to the workforce-not to gather social information (e.g., time taken for bathroom breaks): (2) Determine the type of data that employees believe will help them and be willing to adapt the system as they get ideas about how to use the data; (3) Design a system that gathers integrated data-data that will allow for useful comparisons between, as well as within, specific tasks; and (4) Realize that computer monitoring is only as noxious as the management system itself

A Supreme Stretch: The Supremacy Clause in The Wake of IRCA and \u3ci\u3eHoffman Plastic Compounds\u3c/i\u3e

[Excerpt] Recently, the issues of immigration and immigration policy have garnered intense debate in the United States. Much of what Americans have discussed relates to border security, sanctions against employers who knowingly hire undocumented workers, and temporary and permanent paths to legalization for undocumented workers. This debate often overshadows a meaningful discussion about the future of workplace rights for undocumented workers who, despite their undocumented status, currently work in the United States and at times suffer labor and employment law violations in their workplaces. Unfortunately, the national immigration debate has not incorporated this discussion. Moreover, the current proposed federal immigration bills neither address nor clarify what effect they will have on the workplace rights of undocumented workers. Similar to Professor Cunningham-Parmeter’s article, this article focuses on one aspect of the new legal landscape for undocumented workers in the United States since the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2002 decision in Hoffman Plastic Compounds, Inc. v. NLRB. One central element of this new legal landscape is ongoing confusion about what effect, if any, immigration policy has on federal and state labor and employment law in the United States. Below, I take a first step toward clarifying the extent to which immigration policy affects the rights of states to extend the full protection of their state labor and employment laws to undocumented workers. Specifically, I address the following unresolved question currently before many lower courts: When, if ever, does federal immigration law preempt certain state labor and employment law remedies? First, I briefly describe why this question has emerged and has become important in U.S. courts. Next, I describe recent U.S. Supreme Court Supremacy Clause jurisprudence indicating that some lower courts’ answers to the preemption question described above threaten to stretch the Supremacy Clause beyond its constitutionally-intended boundaries

The NLRA Defamation Defense: Doomed Dinosaur or Diamond in the Rough

[Excerpt] This Article explores an underappreciated and promising NLRA protection of collective activity. It elaborates the NLRA’s role as a defense in state defamation cases. Specifically, this Article explains how the “NLRA defamation defense” frees defendants from some forms of defamation liability when the allegedly defamatory statements are made during labor disputes. The defense has no effect on defamation liability in what this Article refers to as “more egregious” state defamation law cases. However, the defense forecloses liability in “less egregious” state defamation law cases. It makes it harder for defamation plaintiffs to win their cases because it requires them to satisfy a heightened standard of proof. In this way, the NLRA defamation defense limits the ability of defamation lawsuits to serve as “a powerful weapon for shutting up those with whom [one] disagree[s]” in the labor context. In other words, it reduces the likelihood that state defamation law will chill the free flow of speech and collective activity with the threat of monetary awards, sometimes in the millions of dollars. While all parties to labor disputes who face defamation claims can take advantage of the NLRA defamation defense, this Article focuses on the use of the defense by employees and both traditional and non-traditional worker organizations to highlight an important aspect of the NLRA’s protection of collective activity

The Vindication of a National Public Policy Under the Federal Employers’ Liability Act

Vi går mot en tid med fler och fler bonusfamiljer, där halvsyskon och bonusbarn är något vanligt och ibland förväntat. Att det ska vara svårt och kräver en del jobb är nog de flesta medvetna om, men hur blir det med kärleken mellan parterna som en gång blev förälskade? Uppbackningen från samhället är liten, samtalsforumen få och litteraturen begränsad (om än ökande). Syftet med denna studie är att genom en kvalitativ intervjustudie ta reda på hur den vuxna kärleksrelationen påverkas av att leva med bonusbarn. Undersökningspopulationen bestod av fem kvinnor som lever med en man och hans barn från en tidigare relation. Frågeställningarna är: Vad säger bonusmammorna i denna intervjustudie om relationen till mannen? Vad säger bonusmammorna i denna intervjustudie om sin relation till bonusbarnen? Analysmetoden är en narrativ analys där kvinnornas berättelser återges i form av citat och i en berättande form. Ur materialet växte fem teman fram som blev gemensamt för alla kvinnorna. Slutsatserna i denna studie visar att det finns ett flertal områden som är extra problematiska för ett kärlekspar med barn från en tidigare relation. Dessa är: 1) Detta skulle jag aldrig göra om. 2) Känslorna för bonusbarnet. 3) Hur kärleksrelationen påverkas. 4) Exet. 5) Uppfostran. Något nästan alla kvinnor är överens om är att detta med bonusbarn är svårare än vad de trodde, att de inte kan se några egentliga fördelar med att ha ett bonusbarn och att de inte skulle göra om detta igen. Då urvalet av tidigare forskning är relativt begränsat, har det mesta som finns skrivet i Sverige i modern tid kring detta ämne tagits del av inför denna studie och byggt upp empirin. Det har blivit synligt att just den vuxna kärleksrelationen kommit i skymundan i tidigare forskning

Discovering “Immployment” Law: The Constitutionality of Subfederal Immigration Regulation at Work

[Excerpt] This Article develops two general preemption frameworks that feature federal employment law. It first devises and applies an implied-preemption analysis of subfederal employer-sanctions laws based on the preemptive force of FLSA and Title VII. In doing so, this Article reveals that the four subfederal employer-sanctions laws that have produced conflicting court decisions are unconstitutional because they stand as obstacles to fundamental policies underlying FLSA and Title VII. Specifically, these four subfederal laws, along with other subfederal laws that share their qualities, conflict with core federal employment policy goals of protecting employees from employment discrimination and encouraging valid employee-initiated complaints from marginalized workers for the benefit of employees more broadly. Second, this Article develops a hybrid preemption framework that simultaneously considers the policy goals of federal immigration law and federal employment law. This new hybrid framework highlights an additional theory for preemption of these subfederal employer-sanctions laws. This Article’s analytical focus on legal theories for preemption of subfederal employer-sanctions also indirectly exposes a number of policy tensions between workplace-based immigration regulation and federal workplace protections more generally

When Federal Immigration Exclusion Meets Subfederal Workplace Inclusion: A Forensic Approach to Legislative History

What happens when a person is simultaneously viewed as an unauthorized immigrant without rights according to a federal regime and as an employee with rights according to a subfederal regime? In the wake of widespread and inconsistent adjudication of this issue, this Article sheds new light on this pressing question. To date, pertinent court battles and scholarship have led to a virtual stalemate and often focus exclusively on normative policy arguments. By contrast, this Article employs an empirically-grounded review of fifteen years of legislative history to analyze this paradox. This review illustrates that the denial of workplace protections to unauthorized workers runs contrary to immigration law purposes. The Article, therefore, provides a fresh perspective on an otherwise intractable debate. In doing so, it also develops a more scientifically grounded forensic approach to legislative history which addresses some of the most salient and passionate critiques of legislative history and revives legislative history as a more reliable interpretive tool in law and policy analyses

Keeping up With the Joneses: Institutional Changes Following the Adoption of a Merit Aid Policy

The increasing use by private colleges and universities of financial aid based on “merit”, as opposed to based solely on financial need has caused many to raise concerns that this type of aid will go mainly to higher income students crowding out aid to lower income students. However, some analysts suggest that by attracting more “almost full-paying” students through the use of merit aid, institutions will have more financial resources that they can use to increase their financial aid to low-income students and thus their enrollment. Results using data from the College Board’s Annual Survey of Colleges and other secondary data sources suggest that the increased use of merit aid is associated with a decrease in enrollment of low-income and minority students, particularly at more selective institutions. Additionally, this paper examines how institutions may be diverting financial resources to fund merit aid awards, such as through the increased use of part-time faculty, increases in tuition or fees, or smaller increases in faculty salaries. For middle and bottom tier colleges a merit aid policy is accompanied by an increase in tuition. Top tier colleges experience decreases in faculty salaries after the introduction of a merit aid policy, and bottom tier colleges see increases in salaries

Laborers or Criminals? The Impact of Crimmigration on Labor Standards Enforcement

[Excerpt] As we examine the criminalization of immigration, commonly referred to as “crimmigration” (Stumpf, 2006), it is essential to consider its impact on other areas of law and policy that involve immigrants but are not traditionally thought of as formal elements of either criminal law or immigration law. Why? As Hortensia’s story illustrates, crimmigration may unexpectedly affect protections and rights that relate to immigrants’ experiences but come from other areas of law and policy. This chapter explores the impact of crimmigration on labor standards enforcement. By labor standards enforcement, the chapter refers mainly to the wage and hour, health and safety, anti-employment discrimination, and collective activity protections that emerge when an employee performs labor for an employer. At the federal level, the statutes that provide these rights include the National Labor Relations Act (1935), the Fair Labor Standards Act (1938), the Civil Rights Act (1964), the Occupation Safety and Health Act (1970) and the Migrant and Seasonal Agricultural Workers Protection Act (1983). Most of these federal protections have state counterparts that provide equal or greater protections. Thus, labor standards protections generally come from the labor and employment law regime and arise because of the existence of an employment relationship, regardless of immigration status. As this chapter will illustrate, the crimmigration dynamic threatens to negatively affect these longstanding and baseline workplace protections in a number of ways

ICT, corporate restructuring and productivity

Stronger productivity growth in the US than the EU over the late 1990s is widely attributed to faster, more widespread adoption of information and communication technology (ICT). The literature has emphasised complementarities in production between ICT and internal restructuring as an important mechanism. We investigate the idea that increased use of ICT has facilitated outsourcing of business services, and that these are complementary activities in production because they allow firms to focus on their core competencies. This is consistent with evidence from the business literature and aggregate trends, and we show evidence from microdata that is consistent with this idea