Benjamin Sachs

...Indeed, while changes in both the nature of work and anti-union government policies abetted organized labor’s decline, Rolf is right to observe that the union business model may be an even bigger problem. ...In addition, as Harvard Law School’s Benjamin Sachs has proposed, unions should be allowed to “unbundle” their services so that they can advocate political causes without bargaining collectively. This could help give workers a stronger political voice without the necessity of getting involved in every workplace issue. Unions and employers should also be free to reach contracts that involve only some aspects of work — say, benefits and work rules but not wages and job tenure — and unions should be free to sell a range of services to anybody who wants to buy them, employers included.

Stop & Shop’s stores were ghost towns during the recent strike. With workers standing outside in picket lines, customers stayed away , leading to one of the most effective strikes in recent memory. The grocery clerks and bakers and meat cutters holding signs were protesting proposed cuts to their benefits, but their plight also resonated with the public because they represented something bigger: working Americans across the country whose wages are barely budging while the cost of living skyrockets in such places as Boston and corporations rake in record profits. ...“What we’re seeing is an increasing resistance to the fundamental unfairness of a system that’s so skewed both economically and politically to the wealthy,” said Benjamin Sachs, a Harvard Law School labor professor, noting that when Uber goes public, former CEO Travis Kalanick’s stock is expected to be worth upward of $6 billion — an amount that would take a full-time Uber driver 150,000 years to make.

...Several worker advocacy groups have seized the moment to propose major overhauls to labor law, including the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law School, which is exploring policy proposals to reimagine collective bargaining by sector instead of by employer, and to give workers seats on corporate boards, among other recommendations. It’s not just a reaction to Trump, said Sharon Block, who runs the center with labor professor Benjamin Sachs, though she added he’s certainly making matters worse. “The little power that workers have, this administration seems to be bound and determined to diminish even more,” said Block, who served on the NLRB board and was a labor adviser to President Obama. “The time for tinkering around the edges has past. What we really need is fundamental change.”

Medicaid home care aides — hourly workers who help the elderly and disabled with daily tasks like eating, getting dressed and bathing — are emerging as the latest target in the ongoing power struggle between conservatives and organized labor...A proposed rule from the federal Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services would prohibit home health aides paid directly by Medicaid from having their union dues automatically deducted from their paychecks, though it doesn’t name the fees explicitly...“When a state pays a worker, and the worker pays the union, it’s the worker’s money going into the union,” said Benjamin Sachs, a professor at Harvard Law School who studies labor law. “CMS doesn’t have the authority to decide.”

...“This last term was horrendous for workers. If you are to have imagined a nightmare scenario for workers and workers rights, this would be it,” said Benjamin Sachs, a labor law expert at Harvard University. “But in those cases, the ruling justices also planted seeds that could lead to further damage against workers.”

Amazon.com is asking small-business owners to help deliver its goods, seeking to reduce its reliance on the U.S. Postal Service and other major delivery services as the number of packages it ships continues to climb. The online retailer, which last year shipped more than 5 billion packages through its Prime program, on Thursday said it is looking for hundreds of entrepreneurs “with little to no logistics experience” to set up their own delivery businesses — complete with Amazon-branded vehicles and uniforms...By using independent contractors instead of Amazon employees to deliver goods, the company can avoid paying benefits such as overtime, workers’ compensation and unemployment insurance, according to Benjamin I. Sachs, a professor of labor and industry at Harvard Law School. “This is a risk shift we’ve seen across the gig economy as companies convert people who should be employees into independent contractors,” he said. “There could be a whole host of issues here.”

An op-ed by Benjamin Sachs and Sharon Block. With its 5-4 decision in Janus v. AFSCME, the Supreme Court has just imposed a right-to-work regime on public workers everywhere in the country — a profound blow to the union movement. As a result of the decision, public sector unions are now legally obligated to provide representation to workers and yet legally prohibited from requiring anyone to pay for that representation. Before Janus, public sector employees who didn’t want to be union members still had to pay their share of what it cost the union to represent them. This “fair share fee” was calculated to include the worker’s share of the union’s collective bargaining expenses and also the costs the union incurred providing individual representation to the worker in grievance and arbitration proceedings. The fee could not include any costs of the union’s political program.

Conservatives on the Supreme Court have been signaling for years that they would like to destroy public-sector unions. On Wednesday, they handed down a ruling that aims to do just that. But the justices and right-wing groups that pushed for this outcome could soon find that it will not be so easy to suppress teachers, social workers and other government employees who in recent months have taken to the streets to demand raises and better working conditions...Benjamin Sachs, a labor expert at Harvard Law School, also suggests that states change how unions are compensated for collective bargaining expenses. He argues that even though workers pay union fees, that money ultimately comes from governments because the fees are deducted from the paychecks of public employees. State and local governments could solve the problem created by the Supreme Court’s Janus decision by paying unions directly for their expenses and reducing worker pay by an equivalent amount.

An interview with Benjamin Sachs. The Supreme Court dealt a major blow to labor unions today in the case of Janus vs. American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees -- commonly known as AFSCME. In a 5-4 decision, the conservatives on the bench won out and ruled that states can not force government workers to pay union fees -- even though nonunion workers have the same pay and benefits as their union colleagues.

An op-ed by Benjamin Sachs. NFL team owners this week decided that players will no longer be allowed to take a knee during the playing of the national anthem. And if they do, they will be subject to punishment and their team will be subject to fines. The owners did provide the players with an alternative, of sorts: If a player does not wish to stand and salute the flag, he can stay in the locker room and wait for the anthem to end. This new league policy is meant to enforce a particular vision of patriotism, one that involves compliance rather than freedom of expression. The policy is also illegal — for a host of reasons.

An op-ed by Benjamin Sachs. Today’s Philadelphia Inquirer reports on the death of Pablo Avendano, a 34-year old bike messenger who was killed while delivering food for Caviar, the app-based food delivery service. Because Avendano was classified as an independent contractor and not an employee, his family will not be entitled to workers compensation benefits that they could otherwise collect...If gig workers – Uber drivers, Lyft drivers, and Caviar delivery people – get reclassified as employees, that status will not require the firms to take away all the workers’ flexibility. In fact, the trope gets the relationship between control and employee status exactly backwards. The way the law works is this: if a firm exercises sufficient control over a worker, then the worker may be an employee.

The Center for American Progress (CAP), one of DC’s most influential liberal think tanks with deep ties to the Obama administration and Hillary Clinton campaign, has just proposed a big idea for raising Americans’ wages. A new paper by CAP’s David Madland calls for the creation of national wage boards, tasked with setting minimum wage and benefit standards for specific industries. Fast food companies, say, would send representatives to meet with union officials and other worker representatives, and hammer out a deal that ensures workers get a fair shake. Same goes for nurses, or retail workers, or home health aides, or accountants...“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.”

An op-ed by Sharon Block and Benjamin Sachs. For the past three years, the federal government has painstakingly built a case against the world’s second-largest private employer, McDonald’s, charging the company with illegally harassing and terminating employees who have gone on strike with the “Fight for $15″ campaign. There have been over 150 days of trial and hundreds of exhibits entered into the record. And though McDonald’s has aggressively fought to slow down the trial, attorneys at the National Labor Relations Board have continued to press the case. Until, that is, the Trump administration’s political appointees showed up for work.

Even in his hometown of Springfield, Mark Janus is a relatively unknown figure. Janus is a state employee who works in a nondescript office investigating child support claims. He’s also a divorced father of two adult children and he volunteers to help Boy Scouts. Until recently there was little in the 65-year-old man’s life that would indicate he would make history. But on Feb. 26 the United States Supreme Court will hear his case. At stake is whether government workers should, as a condition of employment, be compelled to pay money to a union. “I would say this case has the potential to be a landmark case,” Harvard University Law Professor Benjamin Sachs told Illinois Times. “Essentially, if the court rules in Mr. Janus’ favor, it would put every government worker in the United States under a right-to-work regime.”

An article by Sharon Block and Benjamin Sachs. In September, we shared our plan to hold a symposium at Harvard Law on the question of whether it is time to end labor preemption. The symposium brought together leading labor law scholars and practitioners to wrestle with this big question. To help give context to the symposium discussion, we had asked several thought leaders to help paint the picture of what is at stake in this debate by exploring ways that workers are already organizing outside of the confines of the National Labor Relations Act and models that they might pursue, if given the opportunity.

An op-ed by Benjamin Sachs. Juli Briskman was fired after telling her employer that she’s the one who gave President Trump’s motorcade, as The Post’s Petula Dvorak put it, the “middle-finger salute seen around the world.” However sympathetic Briskman’s story is and heavy-handed the consequence seems, the conventional legal treatment of this situation would be straightforward: Briskman’s employer, the government contractor Akima LLC, has the right to fire her at will. Under this conventional approach, if Akima management doesn’t like it when employees publicly express political views, then as a private-sector employer, it isn’t bound to respect the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech. But these aren’t conventional times, and the conventional legal approach doesn’t make sense today. Briskman’s firing is unconscionable, and it should be illegal.

An op-ed by Benjamin Sachs and Noah Zatz. As National Football League owners and players’ union representatives meet in New York today and tomorrow to discuss the players’ recent demonstrations — the kneeling, linking arms or raising fists during the national anthem — they should know how the law views these protests. This will not only tell them what the league lawfully can do; it also will reveal something about American values.

An op-ed by Benjamin Sachs. Last Sunday, Jerry Jones, the owner of the Dallas Cowboys, said he would bench players who did not stand during the national anthem. This threat was publicized nationally and applauded on Twitter by President Trump, who summarized the two men’s shared view: “Stand for Anthem or sit for game!” On Wednesday, the president elaborated on his views, telling Fox News that the NFL “should have suspended” Colin Kaepernick for kneeling during the anthem because “you cannot disrespect our country, our flag, our anthem — you cannot do that.” It is quite possible the players have First Amendment protection against retaliation of this kind.