Sharon Block

“What’s the real value of my work?” It’s a question many of us wonder privately when negotiating salaries. Now, that information is becoming more public. Workers across a number of industries are creating their own widely shared salary databases, with employees anonymously entering their earnings for all to see. In 2019, there were organized efforts to capture industry-wide salary information for arts and museum workers, media workers, baristas in different cities, workers at Jewish nonprofits, academics, design interns, workers in publishing, staff at creative agencies, and paralegals, just to name a few. ...“People who are employees, treated as employees, have been able to assert their right as employees. In circulating this spreadsheet, they are acting concertedly, they are joining with their co-workers to say we think pay transparency is important,” said Sharon Block, executive director of the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law School. “They cannot be fired for that. The law says they have a right to act concertedly.”

A new law in California seeks to rewrite the rules of work and what it means to be an employee. Known informally as the gig-economy bill, or AB5, the legislation went into effect on Jan. 1, seeking to compel all companies ― but notably those like Lyft and Uber ― to treat more of their workforce like employees. The law represents a cataclysmic shift for workers who depend on apps to get gigs, and it has inspired similar efforts in New York, New Jersey and Illinois. Heavyweight presidential candidates like Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders have championed the measure...A coalition of tech companies have pledged a reported $110 million for a new measure on the November ballot to exempt app-based drivers. Lyft and Uber, which together have more than 500,000 drivers in California, say they believe the law does not apply to their drivers, while simultaneously pursuing other avenues to exempt themselves from its provisions... “We are in this place because we have these really big companies that will put tens of millions up for the right to deny basic protections for workers,” said Sharon Block, executive director of the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law School.

Some of the country’s largest foundations and billionaire philanthropists want to upend the very system that allowed them to build massive endowments and personal fortunes. Among wealthy donors and foundation heads there is a growing belief that capitalism, the financial engine that put Ford cars in driveways and Hewlett-Packard printers on office desktops nationwide needs to be rewired. The relentless pressure on companies to serve up quarterly profits to shareholders has widened the gap between the superrich and the rest of the country, they say, and made one of philanthropy’s main jobs — fixing social problems — even harder. ... Omidyar has also supported policy change. The grant maker is also pushing for rules to allow employees to unionize industrywide, rather than employer by employer and has expressed an interest in the work of Clean Slate for Worker Power, a program at Harvard University that will present a proposed revamp of national labor policy in January.

A religious discrimination lawsuit filed last month in federal court against a local union and Boston College is being hailed by anti-union groups for upholding individual workers' rights — and railed against by union advocates who say it's an attempt to weaken organized labor. The plaintiff, a Muslim electrician and member of Service Employees International Union 32BJ District 615, informed the school and the union last fall that his religious beliefs conflicted with being part of the union...The National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation was involved in the 2018 Janus Supreme Court decision, which made it illegal for public-sector unions to charge fees to workers who choose not to be union members, which is expected to drive down revenues. Labor advocates fear that if a similar case involving private-sector unions makes it to the Supreme Court, it could be devastating for the labor movement. The National Right to Work movement and its supporters are “trying to get cases before the Supreme Court to push the impact and the consequence of Janus as far as possible," said Sharon Block, executive director of the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law School.

Former WeWork chief executive and co-founder Adam Neumann walked away with a $1.7 billion payout when he was forced out of the company. Now, ahead of the planned layoffs of thousands of workers, WeWork employees are organizing to make demands of management. ... According to Sharon Block, executive director of the labor and worklife program at Harvard Law School, informal actions like WeWork’s have the potential to address issues more quickly than formal union bargaining. “It’s understandable that workers want a process that’s more agile and can be more responsive to their needs in the moment,” she said. Forming a union to bargain with an employer may be a years-long process but, Block added, union bargaining does have the advantage of making it legally binding for the employer to come to the negotiating table.

Walmart is getting out of the vaping business, but still sells cigarettes. It is working to reduce plastic packaging for the products on its shelves, but continues to use plastic grocery bags in its checkout lines. After a gunman killed 22 people at a Walmart in El Paso this summer, the retailer said it would no longer offer certain types of ammunition, but stopped short of banning customers from carrying their guns into stores. When navigating the nation’s culture wars, Walmart follows a strategy is has honed for years: alienate as few customers as possible and do no harm to its core business...The same year Walmart raised its starting wage, the company also eliminated health care coverage for tens of thousands of part-time employees. The company says it provides health insurance to 1.1 million workers and their family members. “Their strategy is to give a little here and there, but not provide the thing that is most valuable to workers, which is collective bargaining,” said Sharon Block, who ran the policy office at the Labor Department during the Obama administration and now teaches at Harvard Law School. “That is the only way Walmart workers are going to make any real gains.”

One year ago on November 1, tens of thousands of Google workers spilled out of their offices around the world, protesting sexual harassment, misconduct and a lack of transparency at one of the most powerful tech companies in the world. In New York City, hundreds of workers gathered in a park near Google HQ, holding signs like "Women's rights are human rights" and chanting "time is up." Organizers took turns using a megaphone to address the crowd, reading anonymous stories from colleagues who said they'd been treated unfairly by the company. ... While the National Labor Relations Act of 1935 protects some organizing by employees outside of a union, the law has many weaknesses, said Sharon Block, an executive director of Harvard Law School's Labor and Worklife Program. "The law is pretty narrow," said Block, a former policy office head at the Department of Labor under President Barack Obama. She added that there's some understanding that workers are protected if they organize related to something that has an "immediate nexus to their working conditions."

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.”

Democratic presidential contenders are coming under increased pressure from their base to take a page from Donald Trump’s 2016 playbook and release a shortlist of potential Supreme Court nominees — one part of a larger strategy from party activists to make the courts a central issue in the 2020 race. Demand Justice, a group founded to counteract the conservative wing’s decades-long advantage over liberals in judicial fights, will release a list of 32 suggested Supreme Court nominees for any future Democratic president as they ramp up their push for the 2020 contenders to do the same. The slate of potential high court picks includes current and former members of Congress, top litigators battling the Trump administration’s initiatives in court, professors at the nation’s top law schools and public defenders. Eight are sitting judges. They have established track records in liberal causes that Demand Justice hopes will energize the liberal base...The full list from Demand Justice includes...Sharon Block, the executive director of the labor and worklife program at Harvard Law School and former member of the National Labor Relations Board.

Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) has released a comprehensive plan to reform America’s labor laws. While the Democratic presidential hopeful’s campaign says her proposal will empower American workers and raise wages, it has economists from across the political spectrum sounding off. “What really struck me the most is the framing of it around the issue of power—the fact that workers collective power is at a historic low,” said Sharon Block, executive director of the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law School.

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.

A California bill that is on the brink of becoming law threatens the business model of the gig economy. Called Assembly Bill 5 (AB 5), it would make workers for companies like Uber, Lyft, and DoorDash employees under state law, rather than independent contractors, as they are currently classified. That change would legally entitle them to a minimum wage, unemployment insurance, and other benefits. ... Drivers could still bring a lawsuit through California’s Private Attorneys General Act, a law that allows workers to sue even if they have signed a mandatory arbitration agreement. Or they could file arbitration demands. “They still can bring suits. They just have to be in arbitration,” says Sharon Block, executive director of the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law School. But, she says, “it does impede [drivers’] ability to be in control and bring a lawsuit in the most effective way that they want to or believe they can.”

Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont on Wednesday rolled out an ambitious plan to strengthen organized labor in the United States, setting a goal of doubling union membership in his first term as president...The plan “is an important recognition of the fact that tinkering around the edges isn’t going to be enough to return power to American workers in our economy,” said Sharon Block, a former National Labor Relations Board member appointed by President Barack Obama, who is executive director of the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law School.

In response to President Donald Trump’s historic transformation of the federal judiciary, several Democratic candidates for president have promised to prioritize the swift appointment of a new wave of federal judges if they enter the White House. ...Instead of someone like Katyal, Democrats ought to nominate judges whose day jobs involve working for ordinary Americans. That means, for example, choosing lawyers who represent workers, consumers, or civil-rights plaintiffs, or who have studied the law from that vantage point. Many outstanding lawyers have dedicated their career to advancing the interests of workers. For example, Deepak Gupta has represented the employees’ side in multiple arbitration cases before the Court, and Jenny Yang is a former plaintiffs’ lawyer and former chair of the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Sharon Block is a former National Labor Relations Board member who now runs an employment-law program at Harvard Law School, and Tim Wu is a Columbia Law School professor whose scholarship has questioned corporate power. Any of them could bring to the bench experiences and perspectives that are sorely lacking in our federal courts.

The Trump administration’s disregard for the Environmental Protection Agency’s mission has riled many agency veterans, particularly when it comes to sustainability and climate change. But a new crackdown on working from home is pushing the already beleaguered workforce in Boston to the brink...The clampdown at the EPA is part of an “unmistakable pattern” of hostility toward public servants, said Sharon Block, a former labor adviser to former president Barack Obama who runs the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law School.

After Eugene Scalia was picked by President Trump last week to head the Labor Department, former Senator Barbara Boxer went on TV to suggest that there is another assignment for which someone with Scalia’s background as a business lawyer would be far better suited. “Let them go . . . be the secretary of commerce, for God’s sake,” the California Democrat said...Time and again in the current administration, “the impact of proposed rules on business is what shapes the agenda—not the benefit to workers,” says Sharon Block, who served as a senior aide in the Obama Labor Department and is now executive director of the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law School. She fears that having Scalia as labor secretary is likely to accelerate the trend. And that, in turn, would mark a sharp reversal of history.

An article by Sharon Block: The Trump era has not been an easy time for workers who want to stand up for themselves and have a voice in their workplaces and our economy. This administration has made anti-union appointments to federal agencies, repealed rules designed to protect workers' lives and livelihoods, and successfully asked the U.S. Supreme Court to deny basic workplace rights in cases such as Epic Systems v. Lewis and Janus v. AFSCME. Surprisingly to many, American workers have met the challenge of the Trump administration with a big wave of activism and collective action — teachers marching on state capitols, Uber drivers turning off the app, and tech workers refusing to develop software used to repress people in other countries or immigrants at our border.

One year after the Supreme Court dealt government employee unions a severe financial blow, the country’s biggest public employee unions remain surprisingly flush. In its June 2018 ruling in Janus v. American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, the high court shut off a crucial source of revenue for unions that represent government workers: mandatory fees collected from union nonmembers to cover their share of collective bargaining costs. ... “In talking to folks, my perception is that there has been good news, that membership has not been falling off dramatically,” said Sharon Block, a former Obama Labor Department official who now runs the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law School.

Uber’s IPO is about to hit the market. Ride-hail drivers head out on strike for better wages and working conditions. We look at the gig economy now. Guests: ... Sharon Block, executive director of the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law School, which is Harvard’s forum for research and teaching on the world of work and its implications for society.

The Labor Department weighed in Monday on a question whose answer could be worth billions of dollars to gig-economy companies as they begin selling shares to the public: Are their workers employees or contractors? ... Sharon Block, a former top official in the Obama Labor Department who is executive director of the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law School, said it was hard to tell from the facts the Labor Department chose to include in its letter whether the workers using the platform in question were truly independent contractors. But she said there seemed to be a stronger case to make for contractor status in that case than for Uber. Still, she speculated that the finding could be procedurally useful for the department if it later sought to deem Uber drivers to be independent contractors. “This as a strategy makes sense,” Ms. Block said. “They set the standard in a way that makes it really clear this company gets past it, and in a way that’s going to help them in the harder cases.”

... When the news broke that he’d been picked, Kennedy had just come from hours sitting in a classroom at Harvard Law. He was already at work on a speech he was writing on his big idea: moral capitalism. A few months earlier, in late 2017, Kennedy had emailed Sharon Block, the director of the school’s Labor and Worklife Program and a former Ted Kennedy aide, asking for help in developing his concept, which he was viewing as a kind of working political philosophy. ... In telling me about how it went, Block kept bringing up Ted Kennedy. She tends more toward policy discussions than daydreams, but there’s just something about the family, she insisted, and something that’s made its way down to Joe. “I don’t feel like I have to denigrate other people to say he’s unusual or impressive. This has been a more intense interaction, intellectual exercise,” she said, “than I am used to having with members directly.”