Sharon Block

The outcome of the major U.S. Supreme Court case over whether companies can ban class actions in employment agreements holds new importance as women join together to speak out against sexual misconduct in the workplace, former National Labor Relations Board general counsel Richard Griffin said Wednesday...Griffin and fellow experts on labor and employment, former NLRB member Sharon Block, Epstein, Becker & Green member Paul DeCamp and Seyfarth Shaw partner Alexander Passantino, spoke on Wednesday’s panel...Block, executive director of Harvard Law School’s Labor and Worklife Program, said forcing workers to bring claims as individuals could have the effect of taking away the rights outlined in Section 7 of the National Labor Relations Act, which protects concerted speech. “It can eliminate protections for workers who need that protection the most,” Block said.

Business advocates who have been pressing the federal government for years to increase its regulation of worker centers like Fight for $15 are more hopeful than ever that they'll get their way after a string of reversals of Obama-era National Labor Relations Board precedent..."There's been a continuity to this issue across different administrations,” said Harvard Law School Labor and Worklife Program Executive Director Sharon Block, who was a DOL policy official in the Obama administration. "[Acosta] injected this uncertainty into what I think had no uncertainty."

A Trump administration appointee to the National Labor Relations Board benefited the interests and clients of his former law firm when he cast the deciding vote to undo rules protecting workers’ rights in two cases last month...William Emanuel, who joined the NLRB in September, has recused himself from involvement in more than four dozen cases involving the firm he left to join the labor board...“Deciding a case in a way the parties didn’t ask you to decide it seems to me inevitably to raise the question: Why are you doing this?” said [Sharon] Block, who now heads the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law School. “Emanuel having clients that actually had made that request — at the very least that creates a huge appearance problem.”

The Department of Labor has proposed a new regulation that would allow businesses to collect tips earned by their employees and either redistribute them to non-tipped workers or keep them as part of their own profits. The proposal — a win for the powerful National Restaurant Association — has outraged critics, and a new report from the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute found it would transfer $5.8 billion per year from workers to employers, with nearly 80% of these tips taken from female workers...Women and people of color are both more likely to be tipped employees and to earn lower wages than white men, so critics say the law would have a disproportionate adverse impact on both, and particularly women. "What is at stake is the ability of women to support themselves and their families," Sharon Block, executive director of the Labor and Worklife program at Harvard Law School and a former DOL official under the Obama administration, told Business Insider. "People often overlook that minimum wage workers are disproportionately women."

The American labor movement, over the past four decades, has had two golden opportunities to shift the balance of power between workers and bosses — first in 1978, with unified Democratic control of Washington, and again in 2009...Unions started discussions around EFCA in 2003, when Republicans controlled Congress and the White House...But the politics ended up being far more treacherous than labor anticipated — or perhaps more than the movement allowed itself to see. “We never had 60 votes for EFCA, we just didn’t,” said Sharon Block, who worked as senior labor counsel for Kennedy on the Senate committee on Health, Education Labor, and Pensions in 2008.

...Take one step back from the day-to-day work of organizing, and it is impossible to miss the specter of the Trump administration hanging over everything that CTUL does. There is the aforementioned threat of reclassification of worker centers by the Labor Department, which would burden them with legal restrictions and regulatory scrutiny, and would be a victory that Chamber of Commerce types have been craving for many years...Sharon Block, who served as a Labor Department official in the Obama administration and is now the director Harvard Law School’s Labor and Worklife Program, says that during her time in government the White House made a point to reach out to worker centers across the country as allies, a marked difference in posture from what is happening now.

Starting last month, after a 3-2 majority of Republican appointees were confirmed, the National Labor Relations Board reversed four Obama-era decisions and one from the Bush years that bolstered protections for workers. Trump's influence at the NLRB is also being wielded by the general counsel he appointed, Peter Robb, who was confirmed by the Senate in November..."I think that's a bellwether issue as to whether this leadership cares about these statutes making sense and applying today," said Sharon Block, executive director of the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law School, who served as head of policy at the Department of Labor until President Trump took office. "Or is this just a way of letting everybody fend for themselves, without the protections that they were supposed to have?"

The Trump administration is proposing to let small firms act more like big corporations to buy cheaper health insurance, a measure that would get around some of Obamacare’s requirements. The rule would broaden the availability of less-regulated health insurance coverage to more small employers, and to self-employed people...“This rule seems to err on the side of making AHPs broadly available without making any effort to embed the protections that people get from ACA-covered plans,” said Sharon Block, a former senior Obama administration Labor Department official who now runs the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law School. “You’re moving people towards less-quality plans and potentially doing harm to the people who stay in the ACA-covered plans.”

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.

The National Labor Relations Board has overturned a 2015 law that made it easier for contractors and workers at franchised businesses to form unions and collectively bargain with big corporations. The 2015 NLRB ruling said contract workers at a recycling center were jointly employed by a third party staffing firm and the business they worked for. Sharon Block was a member of President Obama's NLRB. She's now executive director of the labor and worklife program at Harvard Law School. “What the Obama board did was try to apply the proper legal standard, but in a way that fit the way that our economy and our business relationships work today,” she said.

An op-ed by Sharon Block and Christine Owens. If the Trump administration has its way, the tip you leave your waiter or waitress could end up in the pocket of the restaurant owner instead of the person who served you. This week, Trump’s Labor Department proposed rescinding an Obama-era rule that made the logical point that tips are the property of the servers and cannot be taken by the restaurant owner.

Speculation has been simmering for months that the Trump administration might ask the Supreme Court to ban public sector unions from collecting mandatory fees. Calling for a decision that could significantly reduce labor movement finances and political influence would be a major shift in approach for the federal government. The question will be answered by midnight Dec. 6. That’s the deadline facing the Justice Department if the solicitor general wants to file a friend-of-the-court brief supporting the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation in its decades-long crusade against government unions...“If they were to take such a radical step to undermine workers’ rights, I have no doubt that it would be motivated not by a genuine concern about constitutional rights but by a desire to destroy the labor movement,” Sharon Block, who was both a National Labor Relations Board member and DOL policy official in the Obama administration, told Bloomberg Law.

The Labor Department wants to remove an Obama-era regulation that restricted the circumstances in which employers could force workers to share tips. The DOL’s Wage and Hour Division, in a proposed rule released Dec. 4, calls for rescinding the 2011 regulation that prohibited restaurants, bars, and other service industry employers from requiring front-of-house employees, such as servers, to share tips with back-of-house workers, such as cooks and dishwashers...The proposal would eliminate from the Fair Labor Standards Act language under the 2011 rule that said tips are the property of the employee regardless of whether the employer has applied a tip credit. The department’s analysis that unwinding this rule will improve workplace conditions for restaurant employees was immediately opposed by worker advocates and former DOL officials in the Obama administration. “There is nothing” in the proposed rule “that would preclude an employer from keeping the tips of workers as long as he’s paid them $7.25 an hour,” Sharon Block, who ran the DOL’s policy shop in the Obama White House, told Bloomberg Law.

An op-ed by Sharon Block and Terri Gerstein. We can all imagine the legion of politicians, media executives and entertainment moguls who are not getting a lot of sleep these days, wondering when their turn in the sexual harassment spotlight will come. That’s a good thing – hopefully, that fear is reforming behavior for them and their peers. An important question is, however, how do we instill the same fear in the hearts of men whose misdeeds won’t land them on the front pages or in the midst of a Twitter storm because they don’t have a public profile. What we’ve learned from the current flurry of revelations about sexual harassment is that public shaming may reform behavior but the law, as is, won’t. That means we need a broad agenda to change the law to protect the millions of women who don’t work for a famous boss.

The Trump administration is sure to be hell for working people, but so far the actual Labor Secretary has been relatively quiet on the specifics...As explained at length here by former Labor Department official Sharon Block, the only real purpose for reclassifying worker centers is to make their lives harder by requiring them to do a ton of paperwork and follow a ton of new rules. There is no threat being addressed here, except the threat that day laborers might be paid a semi-living wage.

An op-ed by Sharon Block. As executives in Hollywood and other industries hold their breath to see who will be the next subject of an exposé on sexual harassment in the workplace, the nation’s board members should be on high-alert: They are also culpable for harassment in the companies that they are supposed to steward. Corporate boards are the institution that the law imbues with ultimate responsibility for company performance. That the Weinstein Company board and others failed so completely to understand what was going on within their firms should give impetus to new thinking about how corporations are governed.

An op-ed by Patricia Smith and Sharon Block. The clock is ticking. Will the Labor Department appeal a judge’s recent decision that could deny overtime pay to millions of Americans? Labor Secretary Alexander Acosta has been clear that he doesn’t like the Obama administration’s overtime rule, insisting that he wants to reconsider it and possibly make one of his own. But he needs to appeal the judge’s decision regardless, otherwise he’s creating uncertainty that isn’t good for anyone. This summer, the Labor Department issued a formal “request for information” to get public feedback on which white collar employees should get overtime pay.

In what was hailed as a major victory for labor unions, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) in 2015 redefined what constitutes a “joint employer,” ruling that any company that has “indirect” control over a business can be held responsible if that business violates labor law. In practice this has meant that a corporation such as McDonald’s can be held liable if its franchises are illegally withholding pay to employees or otherwise breaking the law. Now, a new bill could reverse that decision and make it much harder to hold large corporations accountable...“It’s really disingenuous and not truthful to say that what this bill does is undo [the NLRB’s] decision,” Sharon Block, executive director of the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law School, tells In These Times.

...On Monday, the Supreme Court opened its fall term with National Labor Relations Board v. Murphy Oil USA, and two similar cases, that will determine whether companies can force workers like Hobson to sign away their right to file collective suits. The decision in the cases, which were heard jointly, has the potential to push millions more workers into individual arbitration hearings that lack many of the protections of the US legal system...Sharon Block, the director of Harvard’s Labor and Worklife Program and a former NLRB board member, is concerned that Murphy Oil could be used to stamp out other workplace rights. Block and Benjamin Sachs, a Harvard law professor, recently highlighted how the Trump administration’s brief casts doubt on the legal protections for collective actions outside of a traditional union context. That interpretation, Block says, could prevent workers from jointly asking for wage increases or joining worker centers that advocate for higher wages. Those rights are particularly important as union membership declines.

An op-ed by Sharon Block and Benjamin Sachs. The Trump Administration is waging a quiet war on workers. The effort involves anti-union appointments to federal agencies, repeal of Obama-era regulations that were designed to raise the wages of low and middle income workers, and support for anti-worker legislation in Congress. But the most recent salvo may actually prove to be the most devastating. In a case called Murphy Oil, slated for the first day of the Supreme Court’s new term, the Trump administration is inviting the court to eviscerate the rights of employees who don’t have a union.

Sheila Hobson never imagined the lawsuit she filed seven years ago about some unpaid overtime would one day become a Supreme Court case with far-reaching implications for American workers. But two days ago, on the eve of oral arguments, she came in for an even bigger shock — the U.S. government, her biggest champion, had suddenly switched sides...The answer is in an amicus brief filed by the U.S. Solicitor-General’s office in her case, National Labor Relations Board v. Murphy Oil. The Trump Justice Department had reconsidered the position taken under President Obama, the brief said, and “reached the opposite conclusion.”...The new position of Trump’s Justice Department threw that principle out the window, said Sharon Block, executive director of the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law School and a former Obama administration official. “It could essentially close the courthouse door on workers,” she said.