By Dave Jamieson
Huffpost

His dissents involving undocumented meatpacking workers and a death at SeaWorld tell us a lot about the worldview of Trump’s Supreme Court pick.

The Agri Processor case provides a window into Kavanaugh’s thinking when it comes to workers’ rights. Like the conservative justices he would join at the Supreme Court, Kavanaugh has tended to side with employers in workplace disputes. If confirmed, he would almost certainly continue the Supreme Court’s run of business-friendly rulings in contentious, precedent-setting cases that have weakened labor unions and class-action lawsuits in recent years.

In his dissent, Kavanaugh argued that undocumented workers were no longer employees under the law due to the 1986 law passed by Congress. In Block’s view, Kavanaugh’s opinion sidestepped Supreme Court precedent and denied workers safeguards they deserved regardless of their legal status.

“It shows a willingness to go out of his way to write a whole group of people out of the protection of the [law],” said Block. “And I find that to be troubling.”... Read more about Brett Kavanaugh Ruled Against Workers When No One Else Did

By Sabri Ben-Achour and Daniel Shin
Marketplace

Tuesday's U.S. Supreme Court decision to rule in favor of Mark Janus in the Janus v. AFSCME case effectively changed the entire way public unions raise funds for their collective bargaining services. The ruling now bars unions from collecting fees from non-union members with the court citing this now defunct fee requirement as a violation of free speech.

The conclusion of the Janus v. AFSCME case brings a major disruptive change to how public sector unions would potentially operate, so what will these unions do next?

Sabri Ben-Achour spoke with Benjamin Sachs, professor of labor and industry at Harvard Law School for some insight.... Read more about What does the Supreme Court's Janus ruling mean for unions? It would be like the government no longer enforcing taxes

The Labour Rights Indicators are based on coding the findings of selected nine sources and compiling this information in a readily accessible and concise manner. It is designed to be used both by practitioners and researchers. It builds on five basic elements: the premises of definitional validity, reproducibility and transparency; the 108 violation type used to code violations in law and practice; the textual sources selected for coding; the general and source-specific coding rules; and the rules to convert the coded information into normalized indicators. The...

By Josh Eidelson
in Bloomberg

Thanks to a web of loopholes and limits, the federal government has been green-lighting hourly pay of just $7.25 for some construction workers laboring on taxpayer-funded projects, despite decades-old laws that promise them the “prevailing wage.”

The failure of government to keep up with what’s going on in the labor market, [Erlich] said “is a large piece” of why construction has faded as “a pathway to the middle class.”