Organizing unions on college campuses is en vogue. As followers of Roetzel Recap know, the adjunct professor unionization movement is sweeping the country. Graduate students and some athletes, though to a lesser degree, have joined the movement. Now, resident advisors (RAs) and student peer mentors can be added to the mix of groups of people…

One limit of the National Labor Relations Act is that it applies only to employees. Independent contractors are not covered by the Act. A Seattle city council member recently introduced legislation that would bring collective bargaining to cab drivers that work as independent contractors who are not covered by the Act. This is another creative…

Senator Marco Rubio (R-Fla) and Representative Todd Rokita (R-Ind.) introduced legislation in February that would let employers give merit pay increases or bonuses to workers covered by collective bargaining agreements. The Rewarding Achievement and Incentivizing Successful Employees (RAISE) Act would amend the National Labor Relations Act to provide that employers are not barred under collective…

Collective bargaining agreements generally run in 3-year cycles; every three years they expire, at which time companies and unions re-negotiate a contract to govern labor relations for the next three years. That means contracts that are negotiated in 2015 must take into account the Affordable Care Act’s “Cadillac” tax for most union health care plans,…

Seven different unions were negotiating a collective bargaining agreement with a single employer. While bargaining for the 2011 agreement, everyone agreed to exclude newly hired workers from an established pension plan, but did not discuss the “Copper Price Bonus” or workers’ eligibility for it. The bonus was kept in place in the 2011 version of…

Nurses were eligible for two types of wage increments: an across-the-board annual raise and a periodic longevity-based wage increase as individual nurses progressed from one experience level to the next. Both raises were paid in January each year. In January 2014, nine months after the contract expired but while negotiations for a successor agreement were…