About 100 musicians in the Cleveland Orchestra will receive annual 2% pay increases under a three-year contract that will take them through the 2020-2021 season. In addition to the pay increases, the agreement creates a new fifth tier of seniority pay for musicians who have been orchestra members for 25 years, increases retirement benefits, provides…

Pursuant to its first collective bargaining agreement, The Intercept, a New York based on-line news site, must interview at least two minority job candidates for each open position. Women, people of color, or members of LGBTQ community must be considered for positions.  Both Facebook and Amazon announced in May that they have adopted similar policies. Quotas are…

Cafeteria workers (who are not Facebook employees) at Facebook’s Menlo Park, California headquarters just ratified their first collective bargaining agreement. In a strange U-turn from current trends, the workers replaced their 401(k) plan with the union’s defined benefit pension plan. Defined benefit pension plans, once the crux of generous union benefit packages, have been decreasing…

Unions have a knack at wanting to gloss over the details of contract language in collective bargaining agreements. This gives unions the ability to later allege a company violated the contract while the company is left without recourse to defend itself. Because of this, I insist on detailed collective bargaining agreements that leave very few…

Common fodder for labor relations seminars is whether employers must bargain with a union over the employer’s discontinuance of providing workers with a Christmas ham (or my personal favorite, whether bargaining is required before changing the chips in a vending machine). Here, the issue was whether the employer’s change in a Christmas gift policy violated…

A union representing employees of Rite Aid’s New York and New Jersey stores filed a complaint alleging that the company illegally insisted, as a condition of reaching a contract, that the union agree to remove newly hired interns and pharmacists working in New York stores from the bargaining unit. Rite Aid contended that is proposal…