Benjamin Sachs

US corporations have mounted a fierce counterattack against the union drives at Starbucks, Amazon and other companies, and in response, federal officials are working overtime…

What do we do when we have the public on our side, when we have workers in motion, when we see people playing by the…

In December 2021, Winifer Pena Ruiz got a new job at a Chipotle in the Bronx. She was an aspiring student, and she hoped the…

The Workers United campaign to unionize Starbucks grabbed the public’s attention when it won its first representation election at a store in Buffalo, New York,…

Organizers at Apple’s Towson Town Center store in Maryland claim that the company isn’t telling the whole truth when it comes to withholding benefits from…

Apple Inc. is withholding its latest employee benefits from staff who work at its sole unionized retail store, a move that could potentially inflame labor…

Apple Inc. is withholding its latest employee benefits from staff who work at its sole unionized retail store, a move that could potentially inflame labor…

Today, workers at Amazon’s LDJ5 warehouse facility will vote on whether to organize with the Amazon Labor Union (ALU), the same union that pulled off a historic win at another Staten Island, New York, facility earlier this month. With ballots scheduled to be counted on May 2nd, the election will last just one week. After months of slow buildup, workers are just a week away from learning whether their site will unionize — assuming there aren’t any tiebreaker court fights of the kind that held up Bessemer’s second vote. ... “It seems to me that Amazon has to worry about its public persona, and to be viewed as viciously anti-union and anti-worker at this moment in history is probably a bad look for them,” said Benjamin Sachs, a professor of labor and industry at Harvard Law School, in an interview with The Verge. According to Sachs, support from the public and policymakers is a factor in the ALU’s favor. “I think the support from President Biden matters. I think the visible support from the National Labor Relations Board to enforce the law matters,” Sachs said. “Broad public support definitely matters in a lot of ways. It helps to embolden workers who are making this decision about whether to support the union, knowing that the country is essentially behind them.”

Amazon workers have voted to unionize for the first time in the company's history in the United States, securing a sweeping and unexpected victory in a National Labor Relations Board election for a group of around 8,000 workers at a warehouse in Staten Island, New York. Amazon Labor Union secured 2,654 "yes" votes to Amazon's 2,131 "no" votes. The union won the election with 55% of the vote, a lead of 523 votes. The union and Bloomberg both declared victory for unionization Friday morning. ... "Amazon is a corporation with massive essentially unlimited resources which it has deployed to stop workers from exercising their right to organize, and that nonetheless the workers have been able to do it. And they deserve enormous credit for that," Benjamin Sachs, a labor and industry professor at Harvard Law School, told Protocol immediately after the Staten Island victory was announced.

Annie Hollister had designs on a public interest career when she entered law school in fall 2017 as the campaign to organize Harvard University's graduate student workers and teaching assistants geared up for a second election. Hollister had inherited a "vaguely positive attitude" toward unions from her father, a member of International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees Local 52. So she was an easy sell when a classmate approached her about signing a union card in the lead-up to a rerun election, but not quite a true believer. ... Benjamin Sachs, a professor at Harvard Law School and a co-director of the Labor and Worklife Program, said he's observed an uptick in interest in the labor program over the last several years amid broader public attention to unions. Now, labor law courses are overenrolled and students face long waitists to join seminars in advanced labor topics. "My sense is that participation in the graduate student union has been an incredibly important and formative experience for a lot of those students," alongside other initiatives, like the Clean Slate for Worker Power project that reimagines labor law, Sachs said.

The state of Washington could be on its way to adopting a law with big implications for the gig economy. State lawmakers have passed a bill that offers ride-hailing drivers some new benefits. The bill bars them from being classified as employees. Washington is the latest state to grapple with providing rideshare driver benefits – like sick leave and minimum pay — while still giving drivers flexibility over their schedules. Lawmakers there sought some input from organized labor. ... Benjamin Sachs at Harvard Law School said under that law, employees can still have control over their hours. “There is nothing inconsistent between being an employee and having a flexible work arrangement,” he said, adding that remote workers often set their own schedules and are still considered employees.

Organizers of an effort to unionize an Amazon warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama, filed a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board this week, challenging the company’s right to require employees to attend anti-union presentations at work, a common tactic that is currently considered legal. These so-called “captive audience” meetings are usually held at workplaces during work hours, where employers make their case. ... Labor advocates have long argued unions should be offered equal time in workplaces to present their own information said Benjamin Sachs, co-director of the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law School. “It would also be a big deal symbolically, because it would symbolize that the union was not so much an outsider,” he said.

Before I became a journalist, one of the best jobs I had was waiting tables at a barbecue restaurant atop a little bump on Snowmass Mountain called Sam’s Knob. My daily commute involved riding a high-speed chairlift, and I was guaranteed an hour and 15 minutes of snowboarding every morning before my shift. Tips were good, so I could afford to work four days a week, thus netting myself another three days to snowboard. Sam’s was where I learned that fresh snow made a sound when you were surfing through it: shhhh, softer than a whisper. ... There’s just one obvious catch: historically, work-life balance has largely been out of our hands. “Most people don’t have much of a choice about whether, or how much, to work, given the state of wage and benefit levels in the nation and the lack of government-provided social safety nets,” notes Benjamin Sachs, a Harvard law professor and a faculty codirector of Harvard’s Labor and Worklife Program. “The power generally resides with the employer.”

Last week, Kellogg’s workers rejected a contract offer from management that could have ended a two-month strike at four cereal plants. Their decision to stay on the picket lines for a better deal elicited an ugly threat from Kellogg’s: to permanently replace the strikers with other workers. ... It’s routine for companies to bring in replacement workers — “scabs,” in union parlance — to try to maintain production during a strike. But can the company just get rid of the striking workers for good? ... “The bite of the permanent replacement doctrine is the employer has no obligation to discharge the replacement workers when the strike is over to make room for returning strikers,” said Benjamin Sachs, a labor law professor at Harvard Law School. “That means if the replacement never leaves, you can never get your job back.”

Something could be brewing at Starbucks. Starbucks workers from three Buffalo, New York, stores are set to begin voting on unionization, and if successful, it could mark a major shift for the broader food industry, labor professors told Retail Brew. ... Benjamin Sachs, a professor of labor and industry at Harvard Law School, told Retail Brew that splitting the vote does increase the odds in favor of the union supporters. “That seems like a small detail, but that’s probably going to be the difference between victory and loss [for the pro-union workers],” he said.

IATSE isn’t working alone when it comes to pressing for better labor conditions. As Hollywood waits to see whether the union that represents thousands of technicians and craftspeople will go on strike as part of an effort to improve on-set working conditions, the rest of the country has already seen similar maneuvers from workers in a broad range of industries. ... “We are seeing what may be the biggest part of a new strike wave, in which workers are expressing their unwillingness to put up with intolerable conditions. That’s happening in health care. It’s happening in coal mines. It’s happening at Kellogg. It’s happening at Nabisco,” says Benjamin Sachs, a professor at Harvard Law School who studies labor law and labor relations. “It’s really cutting across sectors.”