University of Missouri School of Law Scholarship Repository
Abstract
A common reprise among labor activists and scholars has been that for the fortunes of labor to change, the law must change. Prompted perhaps by a seeming surge in labor movement activity over the past few years, including headline-grabbing strikes and recent union victories at several U.S. Starbucks locations, various labor law activists and scholars have called to seize the moment and proposed the enactment of comprehensive labor law reform. We argue in this Article that broad-scale labor law reform is unlikely to be enacted by the current U.S. Congress or even have all its provisions pass muster when potentially challenged in the current U.S. Supreme Court. Thus, after a brief review of labor history/legislation, and an examination of the “limits of the law” in the workers’ rights area, we advance a set of three modest reform proposals that we argue have the potential of being both achievable and impactful. They are: (1) increasing the use of mail balloting in NLRB representation elections, (2) implementing NLRB-sponsored “debates” to be held at neutral locations during labor representation campaigns, and (3) exploring the potential greater use of labor neutrality agreements
