Date:
Location:
First working group meeting of the Rebalancing Economic and Political Power: A Clean Slate for the Future of Labor Law Project
DATE & TIME Tuesday October 9, 2018, 8:30 a.m. – 3:30 p.m. (Closed session for Working Group II.B. Members - 3:30-5:00p.m)
LOCATION Harvard Law School, Wasserstein Hall, 2036 Milstein East A
1585 Mass Ave, Cambridge, MA 02138
Purpose: Increasing inequality can be attributed in part to the expansion of “right to work” and declining union density, such that we need new ways to form and sustain worker organizations. At this convening, we will debate how workers should decide whether to be represented and how workers can most effectively support the organizations that represent them.
Getting there:
For those in need of parking, the closest Harvard Parking garage is located at 10 Everett Street and parking passes can be purchased online here.
Recommended Readings:
- Feigenbaum, James, Alexander Hertel-Fernandez & Vanessa Williamson, From the Bargaining Table to the Ballot Box: Political Effects of Right to Work Laws, Working Paper 24259, National Bureau of Economic Research, January 2018
- Hertel-Fernandez, Alexander, What Progressives Can Learn from Conservative Cross-State Policy Feedback Successes: The Case of Labor Politics, Memo Prepared for the Clean Slate Project Convening on Available Forms of Worker Organizations, October 2018
- Fisk, Catherine & Martin Malin, After Janus, 107 California Law Review __ (forthcoming 2019) or read a summary of the article.
- Sachs, Benjamin, Enabling Employee Choice: A Structural Approach to the Rules of Union Organizing, 123 Harvard Law Review 655 (2010) or read a summary of the article.
- Strom, Shayna, Organizing’s Business Model Problem, The Century Foundation (Oct. 26, 2016) or read a summary of the article.
8:30am-9:00am |
Registration and Breakfast |
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9:00-9:15am |
Welcoming Remarks
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9:15-9:45am |
Keynote - Policy as Political Weapon: Conservative Advocacy and the Demobilization of the American Labor Movement
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9:45-11:00am |
Panel One: Facilitating Choice of Worker Organization Under current law, choosing representation (without an employer’s acquiescence) is extremely cumbersome – it requires the intervention of a government agency, guarantees employers a voice in the campaign, and sets significant numerical hurdles to starting the process and even higher hurdles to winning any representation. On this panel, we will debate how workers should decide whether to be represented by a worker organization. Among the ideas we will explore are: whether workplaces should be unionized by default, whether elections should be required in all workplaces, and how formal the choice of representation should be.
Moderator: Judy Scott, James and Hoffman, P.C.
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11:00am-11:15am |
Break |
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11:15am-12:30pm |
Panel Two: Revenue Generation to Sustain Powerful Worker Organizations As our panelist Shayna Strom has written, worker organizations that cannot simply rely on mandated membership dues or fees have a “business model problem”. Among the ideas we will explore for how workers can most effectively sustain organizations are: whether worker organizations should be permitted to charge fees for representation activities, whether they should be able to collect fees directly from employers, whether they should rely on revenue derived from providing non-representation services to workers, and whether they should charge for services provided to employers or government.
Moderator: Karla Walter, Director, Employment Policy, Center for American Progress
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12:30pm-1:00pm |
Lunch Break |
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1:00pm-1:15pm |
Looking at Global Modals of Sustainable Revenue Generation and Workers’ Choice
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1:15pm-3:15pm |
Working Groups on Revenue Generation Working Groups on Facilitating Choice |
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3:15-3:15pm |
Closing Remarks
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Agenda - Spanish
Twitter: @LWPHarvard, @OnLaborBlog #ReworkLaborRights
Opening remarks by Sharon Block and keynote by Alexander Hertel-Fernandez
Information on collective bargaining and union density in Canada - English Spanish
List of possible worker choice and revenue generation models discussed - English Spanish