Redefining Workplace Speech After Janus

We have a First Amendment right to criticize the government. But this freedom does not translate into a right to criticize one’s boss even if, as for millions of Americans, one’s boss happens to be a government employer. Public employee speech doctrine has long established wide latitude for public employers to supervise their workers. Employees must show at the threshold that their speech was on a matter of public concern and not an internal workplace matter. The Supreme Court’s pronouncements over the last decade in a related doctrinal area, however, have unsettled the line demarcating workplace speech. In its agency fees cases, the Court has repeatedly stated that when a union speaks on matters of interest to the general public, even internal workplace matters, it triggers constitutional scrutiny. Taken at face value, the new definition of matters of public concern in a government workplace provides a basis for employees to claim expanded free speech protection. This Note is the first scholarly work to propose how public employees will claim expanded speech protection on the basis of the Court’s holding in Janus v. American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME). The expanded definition of matters of public concern is likely to destabilize public employee speech doctrine, causing uncertainty for employers as to how to supervise employees in compliance with the First Amendment

Redefining Workplace Speech After Janus

We have a First Amendment right to criticize the government. But this freedom does not translate into a right to criticize one’s boss even if, as for millions of Americans, one’s boss happens to be a government employer. Public employee speech doctrine has long established wide latitude for public employers to supervise their workers. Employees must show at the threshold that their speech was on a matter of public concern and not an internal workplace matter. The Supreme Court’s pronouncements over the last decade in a related doctrinal area, however, have unsettled the line demarcating workplace speech. In its agency fees cases, the Court has repeatedly stated that when a union speaks on matters of interest to the general public, even internal workplace matters, it triggers constitutional scrutiny. Taken at face value, the new definition of matters of public concern in a government workplace provides a basis for employees to claim expanded free speech protection. This Note is the first scholarly work to propose how public employees will claim expanded speech protection on the basis of the Court’s holding in Janus v. American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME). The expanded definition of matters of public concern is likely to destabilize public employee speech doctrine, causing uncertainty for employers as to how to supervise employees in compliance with the First Amendment

Can We Use the Relationship Between Within-Field Elevation and NDVI as an Indicator of Drought-Stress?

Large farmers’ datasets can help shed light on agroecological processes if used in the context of hypothesis testing. Here we used an anonymized set of data from the geoplatform Akkerweb to better understand the correlation between within-field elevation and normalized differential vegetation index (NDVI, a proxy for biomass). The dataset included 3249 Dutch potato fields, for each of which the cultivar, the field polygon, the year of cultivation and the soil type (clay or sandy) was known. We hypothesize that under dry conditions such correlation is negative, meaning that the lowest portions of the field have more biomass because of water redistribution. From the data, we observed that in dry periods, such as the summer of 2018, the correlation was negative in sandy soils. Furthermore, we observed that early cultivars show a weaker correlation between NDVI and elevation than late cultivars, possibly because early cultivar escape part of the long dry summer spells. We conclude that the correlation between NDVI and elevation may be a useful indicator of drought stress, and deviations from the norm may be useful to evaluate the resistance to drought of individual cultivars