Nov 2, 2016 Mila SohoniAdministrative Law
Christopher J. Walker,
Legislating in the Shadows, 165
U. Pa. L. Rev. (forthcoming 2016), available at
SSRN.
It generally starts with a phone call. A Congressional staffer might ring up a federal agency and request the agency’s assistance in thrashing out the details of a new law. Usually, there’s already a working draft of the law; more rarely, the staffer just has parameters or specifications in mind for how the final law ultimately ought to look and what it ought to accomplish. Depending on the situation, the agency might send back a redlined mark-up of the draft bill, or else write a draft of the law from scratch. As the bill wends its way through Congress, the agency hovers on the sidelines, red pen in hand, ready and willing to offer additional technical drafting assistance as needed. The entirety of the exchange between staffer and agency—the request, the response, and any follow-ups—remains informal, off-the-record, undocumented, and confidential, hidden from view from the White House, from OMB, and (needless to say) from the public.
This is the zone of “Legislating in the Shadows” that Christopher J. Walker brings into the light in his thought-provoking forthcoming article. This article builds upon Professor Walker’s recent empirical study for the Administrative Conference of the United States (ACUS), which generated a list of recommendations that ACUS adopted in December 2015. In “Legislating in the Shadows,” Professor Walker moves from description to assessment and critique, deftly distilling from his findings their most pointed—and sometimes disquieting—implications for the doctrines of administrative law and statutory interpretation. Continue reading "The Devil is in the Details"
Nov 1, 2016 Catherine FiskWork Law
Massive nationwide mobilization of low-wage workers and their advocates (mainly since 2012, though preceded by the nationwide “Day Without an Immigrant” one-day strikes in 2006 and 2007) has spurred recent changes in state and local labor standards: increases in the minimum wage to fifteen dollars an hour, paid sick leave, and measures to address wage theft, abusive scheduling practices, and misclassification of employees as independent contractors. As Michael Oswalt explains in Improvisational Unionism, the fast food, Fight for 15, and Walmart strikes did not produce bargaining leverage, but instead something possibly more difficult to conjure: public awareness and a sense among workers that something could be and should be done.
The article explains how these one-day strikes were different from many of the labor strikes since the Depression. Some were initiated by a single employee who was angry at poor working conditions and lack of respect, some were inspired by news and social media coverage of protests elsewhere, and some were the result of organizing by community groups; unions only later began to lend support. Workers acted collectively and with the support of unions, yet the workers and the unions both knew that the unions hadn’t a prayer of representing them for purposes of collective bargaining. It is unclear whether this activism – what Oswalt, with his penchant for catchy phrases, calls organizing by unions, but not union organizing – will result in any lasting change beyond the state and local minimum wage increases. But what is clear is that labor unrest is once again a part of the contemporary debate even as its form and goals have altered quite significantly since the strikes of the post-WWII period through the death of the strike in the early 1990s. Continue reading "Improvising the Future of Worker Mobilization"
