I first covered the budding Worker Center movement here. The takeaway from that blog post was: But worker centers are not “labor organizations” – they are 501(c)(3) charities – so they are not regulated as heavily as unions nor do they pay taxes. Worker centers cannot engage in unfair labor practices and do not have…

Thankfully, the National Federation of Independent Business (“NFIB”) has challenged a rule that has been around for only a short period of time called the Union Walk Around Rule. For background, when OSHA inspects a workplace, an OSHA Compliance Officer does a “walk around” where he literally walks around the workplace looking for violations of…

If you’re former President Obama the answer is yes, and he said so during his farewell address. For those unfamiliar with the definition of a Social Compact (like I was), here’s the definition that Google gave me: an implicit agreement among the members of a society to cooperate for social benefits, for example by sacrificing…

Since 1980 real wages in retail have fallen by 11% while on-call scheduling, involuntary part-time work, and “clopening” (where workers lock up the store at night and reopen the next morning) have, according to unions, wreaked havoc with workers’ lives. But the retail sector has one of the lowest rates of unionization in the economy…

Workplace organizing typically requires large amounts of time and money. Yet for more than five years now, labor unions increasingly have been relying on a low-cost alternative: micro-unions (or as some say, partial workplace organizing). President Obama used his power of appointment to achieve a highly partisan pro-union majority on the five-member National Labor Relations…

A small hospital, with 15 in-patient beds, operates 24 hours a day, 7 days a week with a nursing staff that includes 6 PCC (who are registered nurses) and their subordinates: 8-9 registered nurses, 3 licensed practical nurses, and 1 certified nurse assistant. The PCC position was created specifically to have someone accountable for the…