A Reexamination of the Role of Employer Motive Under Sections 8(a)(1) and 8(a)(3) of the National Labor Relations Act

The question of the role of employer motive in analysis of the unfair labor practices defined by Sections 8(a)(1) and (3) of the National Labor Relations Act has troubled the National Labor Relations Board and the courts from time of the enactment of that legislation. Despite repeated efforts by the Supreme Court to authoritatively define that role and repeated efforts by academics to advise the Court in the task, motive\u27s function remains confused—the subject of diverse viewpoints compromised in the cases by an analysis which submerges fundamental isssues in the language of procedural burdens of proof. The Board, which had long adhered to the view that an employer motivated even in part by an anti-union animus in discharging an employee violated the Act, recently succumbed to repeated First Circuit criticism of that position and adopted, in Wright Line, a but for causation test of employer motive tied explicitly to an allocation of the burden of proof and derived from the Supreme Court\u27s similar test in the constitutional arena. Wright Line presents anew old dilemmas concerning the meaning and efficacy of motive as a touchstone for analysis of an employer\u27s conduct in the context of Sections 8(a)(1) and (3) unfair labor practices. This Article will attempt a reexamination of these questions, using Wright Line\u27s adoption of the sine qua non causation test as both the occasion and vehicle for that reexamination

The Nikolaevskiy equation with dispersion

The Nikolaevskiy equation was originally proposed as a model for seismic waves and is also a model for a wide variety of systems incorporating a neutral, Goldstone mode, including electroconvection and reaction-diffusion systems. It is known to exhibit chaotic dynamics at the onset of pattern formation, at least when the dispersive terms in the equation are suppressed, as is commonly the practice in previous analyses. In this paper, the effects of reinstating the dispersive terms are examined. It is shown that such terms can stabilise some of the spatially periodic traveling waves; this allows us to study the loss of stability and transition to chaos of the waves. The secondary stability diagram (Busse balloon) for the traveling waves can be remarkably complicated.Comment: 24 pages; accepted for publication in Phys. Rev.

Very weak electron-phonon coupling and strong strain coupling in manganites

The coupling of the manganite stripe phase to the lattice and to strain has been investigated via transmission electron microscopy studies of polycrystalline and thin film manganites. In polycrystalline \PCMOfiftwo a lockin to $q/a^*=0.5$ in a sample with $x>0.5$ has been observed for the first time. Such a lockin has been predicted as a key part of the Landau CDW theory of the stripe phase. Thus it is possible to constrain the size of the electron-phonon coupling in the CDW Landau theory to between 0.04% and 0.05% of the electron-electron coupling term. In the thin film samples, films of the same thickness grown on two different substrates exhibited different wavevectors. The different strains present in the films on the two substrates can be related to the wavevector observed via Landau theory. It is demonstrated that the the elastic term which favours an incommensurate modulation has a similar size to the coupling between the strain and the wavevector, meaning that the coupling of strain to the superlattice is unexpectedly strong.Comment: 6 pages, 7 figure