People
Benjamin Sachs
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Zooming in on faculty at home
April 29, 2020
With a little help from their at-home photographers, HLS professors share what teaching classes via Zoom looks like.
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When Did Labor Law Stop Working?
March 30, 2020
A podcast by Sharon Block and Benjamin Sachs: Why would it take an Amazon worker, employed full time, more than a million years to earn what its CEO, Jeff Bezos now possesses? Why do the richest 400 Americans own more wealth than all African-American households combined? And how are these examples of extreme income inequality linked to the political disenfranchisement of the lower- and middle-income classes? The established “solutions” for restoring balance to economic and political power in the United States have been tax increases on the rich, on the one hand, and campaign-finance reform on the other. But in this episode, we’ll explore the idea that retooling labor laws for the modern economy may be the most effective way to address both these issues. Harvard Law School’s Kestnbaum professor of labor and industry Benjamin Sachs, together with Sharon Block, executive director of the school’s Labor and Worklife Program, explain.
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Uber Changes Its Rules, and Drivers Adjust Their Strategies
February 18, 2020
On a recent morning in Santa Monica, California, Sergio Avedian pulled into the parking lot of a Vons supermarket, signed into the Uber driver app, and waited. At 7:07 am, a ride request came in for a trip to LAX that the app promised would earn Avedian between $9 and $12. He declined it...Thirty minutes later, he got it: A 15-mile ride toward Glendale, near where he lives. Just over an hour later, he dropped his passenger off. She paid $93.51; he pocketed $76.68. Avedian has been driving part time for Uber and Lyft for four years, but just two months ago, or anywhere outside California, this sort of strategy wouldn’t have worked. But in January, in response to a new state law, Uber changed the workings of its driver app in the Golden State, affecting some 395,000 drivers. Drivers can now see where a rider wants to go and an estimated payout before they accept. They are, theoretically, not punished by the Uber algorithm for rejecting too many rides. (Though starting last week, Uber began sending fewer requests to those who reject or cancel the vast majority of their ride requests.) Driver bonuses are structured differently. And around three California airports, Uber is experimenting with allowing drivers to choose their own fares... “Employers often respond to changes in the law by tweaking their business practices to avoid responsibility, and that’s clearly what we’re seeing here,” says Benjamin Sachs, a professor of labor and employment law at Harvard Law School.
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House Democrats Poised To Pass Major Labor Reforms Boosting Unions
February 6, 2020
The House is set to vote Thursday on a sweeping plan to overhaul U.S. workplace law in a way that could grow union membership and rejuvenate an ailing labor movement With Democrats holding the chamber’s majority, the legislation ― called the Protecting the Right to Organize Act, or PRO Act ― will likely pass but then face certain death in the GOP-controlled Senate. ...The legislation shares a lot in common with a new labor reform plan being passed around progressive circles called Clean Slate for Worker Power, spearheaded by Harvard University law professors Sharon Block and Benjamin Sachs. While their plan goes much further than the PRO Act ― for instance, Clean Slate calls for worker representation on corporate boards ― Block and Sachs told HuffPost they see the Democratic legislation as an important first step in fixing a collective bargaining system that dates to the Great Depression and that unions say is broken. “Folks are thinking in a bigger, bolder, more progressive way,” said Block, a former member of the National Labor Relations Board, the federal agency that referees labor disputes. “It enables workers to see that their lives could really be different… rather than the smaller-bore fixes like we’ve tried in the past that didn’t work.”
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Technology Has Made Labor Laws Obsolete, Experts Say
January 27, 2020
In the 1930s, at the time of the writing of the Wagner Act—the law which grants workers the right to form unions and collectively bargain— union organizing took place during shift changes on factory floors and over beers in union halls. The law protected workers from retaliation for this type of in-real-life organizing, and it still does...In a new report “Clean Slate for Worker Power,” released last Thursday by Harvard Law School’s Labor and Worklife Program, experts argue that U.S. labor law is obsolete and in need of a massive overhaul to meet the needs of workers organizing in modern times... “When [legislators] looked out at the economy in 1935, they saw factories where people worked similar shifts at similar jobs,” Benjamin Sachs, an author of the report and a professor of labor at Harvard Law School, told Motherboard. “But the modern workplace is fissured. Now we have gig workers and temp workers and franchised workers and freelancers. Empowering workers in the modern economy is different.” “There is no actual water cooler anymore,” Sharon Block, another author of the report, and director of Harvard’s Law School’s Labor and Workplace program, told Motherboard. “We recommend that employers should have to create digital meeting spaces, virtual water coolers, where there’s a safe space for workers to talk with each other about their collective interests.”
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A SOS Call for America’s Workers
January 24, 2020
On one level, the new report, Clean Slate for Worker Power: Building a Just Economy and Democracy—released Thursday and written by more than 70 professors, labor leaders and activists—is an ambitious menu of recommendations for how to remake America’s labor laws. ...Professor Sachs said, “The dire assessment by political scientists is that today in America the majority does not rule.” He added, “As economic wealth gets more and more concentrated, the wealthy build greater and greater political power that they, in turn, convert into government policy that enables them to build even more wealth, and on, and on.”The report is a wake-up call that something bold, even radical, needs to be done. Its authors see radical inequality and recommend radical solutions that seek to make the capitalist system fairer to workers, by giving them more power and say on the job, in politics and in policymaking. As Sharon Block, executive director of the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law School and also one of the report’s main authors, put it, “The problem of inequality is on a different scale than in other countries, and the solutions have to be on a different scale.”
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A Gut Renovation for U.S. Labor Law
January 24, 2020
American Labor Law is broken, argues a report released today by Clean Slate for Worker Power, a project of Harvard Law School’s Labor and Worklife Program. So, the report urges, the nation’s labor laws need to be fundamentally rewritten to make it easier for workers to organize, to have a voice in corporate decisions that affect them, and to participate in democracy—all essential to address larger concerns about economic and political equity in a divided, polarized society. At bottom, the project aims “to shift power from corporations to workers,” said Sharon Block, executive director of the Labor and Worklife Program, at the project’s launch Thursday morning. The ambitious, 100-plus page report lays out an agenda for a revitalized, robust labor law for the twenty-first century. ... “The richest 20 people in this country have more wealth than half the nation put together,” said Kestnbaum professor of labor and industry Benjamin Sachs, the co-leader with Block of Clean Slate. “It would take an Amazon worker about 4 million years working full-time to earn what Jeff Bezos now has. This vast disparity in material wealth means that millions of American families struggle just to barely get by.
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Harvard Law’s Labor and Worklife Program releases major report aimed at reforming American labor law
January 23, 2020
The Harvard Gazette sat down with Sharon Block and Benjamin Sachs of Harvard's Labor and Worklife Program to talk about their report "Clean Slate for Worker Power: Building a Just Democracy and Economy," and about what they envision for the future of labor law in the United States.
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Overhaul US labor laws to boost workers’ power, new report urges
January 23, 2020
More than 70 scholars, union leaders, economists and activists called on Thursday for a far-reaching overhaul of American labor laws to vastly increase workers’ power on the job and in politics, recommending new laws to make unionizing easier and to elect worker representatives to corporate boards. ... The Clean Slate report, nearly two years in the making, aims to rethink American labor law from scratch. “We firmly believe that we’re past the point of tinkering around the edges, that to really fix the problems in our economy and political system we need a fundamental rethinking of labor law,” said Sharon Block, one of the report’s main authors and executive director of the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law School. ... “This is an attempt to lay out a comprehensive vision of what labor law reform ought to look like,” said Ben Sachs, a professor at Harvard Law School and one of the report’s main authors. “We need this as a kind of North Star to know where we’re going when we have a chance to do reform of any kind.”
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Rewriting labor law, circa 2020
January 23, 2020
American workers have had the right to unionize since 1935, when Franklin Delano Roosevelt was in his first term as president and the Great Depression was ravaging the economy. But the parameters haven’t changed much in 85 years. Not as the treatment of women and people of color became more equitable. Not as businesses employed more independent contractors who weren’t protected by labor laws. And not as the gulf between the haves and have-nots expanded. On Thursday, two Harvard Law School faculty members unveiled a sweeping proposal to rewrite US labor law, aimed not at updating what’s on the books but at starting over. ... “ ‘Clean Slate’ is our vision for what labor law would look like if it were actually designed to enable workers to build an equitable economy,” said Benjamin Sachs, Harvard Law School professor and coauthor of the report. “It’s not a project designed to garner bipartisan support. It’s not a project designed to get the maximum amount of business endorsement.” ... The project is not just about unions, said coauthor Sharon Block, executive director of the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law School, who served in the US Labor Department under President Obama. It’s also intended to reform democracy, including proposals to promote workers’ civic engagement by mandating same-day voter registration and granting paid time off to vote and attend meetings.
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Why U.S. labor laws need to be revamped
January 23, 2020
Sharon Block, executive director of the Labor and Worklife Program, and Benjamin Sachs, the Kestnbaum Professor of Labor and Industry at Harvard Law School (HLS) are calling for an overhaul of American labor law. The Gazette sat down with Block and Sachs to talk about their report “Clean Slate for Worker Power: Building a Just Democracy and Economy,” which was released today.
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A Surprising Solution to Save American Democracy
January 23, 2020
An article by Sharon Block and Benjamin Sachs: Running throughout the Democratic presidential debates has been a consistent theme: We are living in an era of deep economic and political inequality, and these dual crises now threaten to undermine our democracy. What does economic inequality look like today? Well, it would take an average Amazon worker 3.8 million years, working full time, to earn what CEO Jeff Bezos now possesses. And the country's wealthiest 20 people own more wealth than half of the nation combined—20 people with more wealth than 152 million others. On the political front, the facts are just as stark. Political scientists increasingly believe that our government no longer responds to the views of anyone but the wealthy. Of course, these forms of inequality are mutually reinforcing: As economic wealth gets more concentrated, the wealthy build greater and greater political power that they, in turn, translate into favorable policies that lead to even more profound concentrations of wealth. And on and on.
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Warren Supports ‘Sectoral Bargaining.’ Here’s What That Means
October 22, 2019
Presidential candidate Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., is getting some attention for her recently released labor platform, which focuses on unions and “sectoral bargaining,” a concept new to most Americans. Sectoral bargaining is when an entire field or industry agrees on basics, such as safety standards or minimum wages, rather than each company bargaining with its own workers. Benjamin Sachs, professor of labor and industry at Harvard Law School, said it’s worth noting because union membership has decreased in the United States. He said he thinks that’s partly because of the way businesses or enterprises handle their bargaining now. “The problem with enterprise bargaining,” he said, “is that as soon as you have a union in one enterprise, that puts that enterprise at a competitive disadvantage with all the other enterprises in the same market.”...While fewer Americans are union members than in the past, Sachs argued that doesn’t mean unions are less popular. According to Gallup polling, Americans increasingly have approved of labor unions since 2009, soon after the recession.
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Candidates Grow Bolder on Labor, and Not Just Bernie Sanders
October 15, 2019
When Bernie Sanders ran for president in 2016, his campaign was strikingly pro-labor...Several candidates have pledged to ban noncompete agreements, which hold down wages for workers, and mandatory-arbitration clauses, which prohibit lawsuits against employers...Larry Cohen, a former president of the Communications Workers of America and a top volunteer adviser to Mr. Sanders in 2016 and now, said that he has been touting the importance of sectoral bargaining to Mr. Sanders in recent years...Mr. Cohen has also been involved in an effort by two faculty members at Harvard Law School, known as the Clean Slate for Worker Power project, to convene dozens of labor experts, activists and organizers to reimagine labor law from the ground up. The group won’t publish its recommendations until January, but in the meantime it has worked to disseminate ideas like sectoral bargaining across the campaigns. Sharon Block and Benjamin Sachs, the Harvard faculty members involved, have weighed in with several campaigns that have embraced this approach, according to aides to Ms. Warren, Mr. Buttigieg, Mr. O’Rourke and Mr. Booker. Ms. Block, a former Obama administration official and congressional staff member who is a veteran of legislative efforts to make unionizing and collective bargaining easier, said experience had taught her that advancing labor interests through provisions like card check doesn’t work: Such measures tend to be too small to matter substantively, and they fail to generate political excitement among those who would benefit. “The folks who don’t want this to happen will fight just as hard whether it’s small or big,” Ms. Block said. “But doing something bigger makes moving legislation easier because you have the potential to have a much bigger constituency behind it.”
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Warren Supports ‘Sectoral Bargaining.’ Here’s What That Means
October 11, 2019
Presidential candidate Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., is getting some attention for her recently released labor platform, which focuses on unions and "sectoral bargaining," a concept new to most Americans. Sectoral bargaining is when an entire field or industry agrees on basics, such as safety standards or minimum wages, rather than each company bargaining with its own workers. Benjamin Sachs, professor of labor and industry at Harvard Law School, said it's worth noting because union membership has decreased in the United States. He said he thinks that's partly because of the way businesses or enterprises handle their bargaining now. "The problem with enterprise bargaining," he said, "is that as soon as you have a union in one enterprise, that puts that enterprise at a competitive disadvantage with all the other enterprises in the same market."
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TECHUBER Announcing Uber Works, the Ride-Hailing Giant Changes Lanes into Temporary Work
October 4, 2019
While Uber faces legal battles over whether its drivers should be classified as employees or contractors, the tech company unveiled an unexpected new service on Wednesday: Uber Works. ...Despite Uber's new take on temporary employment, Benjamin Sachs, Kestnbaum professor of labor and industry at Harvard Law School, says it's more of the same. "The connection between Uber Works and the ride-hailing side that I see is this massive company with intense tech resources fueling the degradation of work, rather than to make work meaningful," Sachs told Fortune. Sachs added that once again Uber is defaulting to billing itself as an app that connects people to work opportunities, rather than carrying the burden of being an employer.
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Why the Gig Economy Matters — Even If It’s Small
September 18, 2019
When I started reporting on gig workers in 2014, I was surprised to find some of the people who represented labor organizations would respond to my inquiries with mild irritation. Why would you write about Lyft and Uber’s labor issues, they’d ask me, when there are so many sectors with bigger workforces? ... I ran this idea by Benjamin Sachs, a professor at Harvard Law who has written extensively about the gig economy. “It seems intuitively possible that the reason this is now possible is that the issue has been hitched to a politically salient group of workers,” he said. That analysis seems all the more accurate because it can be observed in reverse: While blue states like California and blue cities like New York and Seattle have been passing laws that grant gig economy workers more rights, red states have started passing legislation that, for instance, preemptively classifies gig economy workers as independent contractors. “Overall,” he said, the attention paid to the gig economy “could make it more likely to move things.”
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What California should do next to help Uber drivers
September 13, 2019
An op-ed by Sharon Block and Benjamin Sachs: The struggle for gig workers’ rights took a big step forward this week when the California legislature passed a law classifying many such workers—including Uber and Lyft drivers—as “employees.” Once it is signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom (D), the law will grant workers in California critical protections such as minimum wage, overtime pay, workers’ compensation and unemployment insurance — all of which they currently lack. Uber has vowed to fight application of the law to its drivers through litigation or repeal by referendum. It’s a significant victory for the gig workers, and California’s move could lead other states to act, but there’s a problem. It’s that the new law fails to offer gig workers one of the most important employment rights of all: the right to form a union. As important as minimum wage and overtime pay are, they are minimum protections that fall far short of ensuring that workers earn what they need; only a union and a collective bargaining agreement enable workers to demand and secure anything beyond these minimum standards. But even more important, a substantial body of economic research confirms that basic workplace protections are adequately enforced only when there’s a union on the scene.
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Why Uber Thinks It Can Still Call Its Drivers Contractors
September 12, 2019
Uber will not treat its California drivers as employees, the ride-hail company’s head lawyer said Wednesday, despite a new law designed to do just that. The law would create a more stringent test to separate independent contractors from full-time employees. The company’s argument rests on a premise that’s been a cornerstone since its early days: that Uber is a technology company, not a transportation one. ... Elsewhere, though, courts have had little patience for this argument. In California, one federal judge called it “fatally flawed,” arguing the company is “no more a ‘technology company’ than Yellow Cab is a ‘technology company’ because it uses CB radios to dispatch taxi cabs.” “It seems very clear that Uber is a transportation company, not a technology company, despite the fact that it uses an impressively powerful piece of technology to offer transportation services,” says Benjamin Sachs, a professor who teaches labor law at Harvard Law School.
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“Unions for all”: the new plan to save the American labor movement
September 3, 2019
Labor Day 2019 comes in the midst of a crisis for the American labor movement...So a growing number of labor law experts and even presidential candidates (including Sen. Bernie Sanders, former Rep. Beto O’Rourke, and South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg) have settled on a new approach to revive the US labor movement...This approach is called “sectoral bargaining,” and it could change the way work is done in the United States....“Sectoral bargaining is certainly getting more attention in legal academic and labor law policy debates,” Benjamin Sachs, a professor at Harvard Law School and former practicing labor lawyer, says. “The way I would think about it is that there’s an existential panic about what will happen to the labor movement. That’s not new, it’s just getting worse. … If we need unions for economic and political equality as I think we do, we have to do something to stop that downward spiral.”
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Barstool Sports Founder’s Tweetstorm Raises Labor Row
August 14, 2019
The founder of bombastic sports website Barstool Sports is the latest boss to potentially face an unfair labor practice complaint for an anti-union tweetstorm threatening workers who talk to union attorneys. ...Federal law allows managers and other agents of a company to criticize unions, but restricts them from threatening to punish employees who organize. “As an employer, you can hate unions, denigrate unions, oppose unions,” said University of Wyoming law professor Michael Duff, a former NLRB attorney. “But you may not, in reaction to real or imagined concerted employee activity, make statements containing threats of reprisal” like Portnoy’s. “Under any reading of the federal labor law, telling workers that they’re going to be fired if they seek advice or help about a unionization campaign is flatly illegal,” said Harvard law professor Ben Sachs. “In my estimation, even the Trump NLRB would consider that illegal.”