9th Annual Employment Law Issues

This important theme was the focus of New York University's 54th Annual Conference on Labor and Employment Law. This highly significant book reprints the papers presented at the 54th Conference, with several additional papers. In its pages more than 40 noted labor and employment experts from a diverse range of countries and disciplines offer penetrating analyses of developments and trends in such areas as the following: - Regulation of immigrant labor; - legal issues facing undocumented workers; - labor markets in border regions; - guest worker programs; - extraterritorial applications of U.S.

Barack Obama’s famous “Blueprint for Change,” part and parcel of the campaign that culminated in his historic election as U.S. president in November 2008, openly announced his support for the Employee Free Choice Act (H.R. 1409) suggesting that major change was imminent in U.S. labor and employment law. Although promised legislative change has yet to materialize, there appears to be a growing consensus that the current system for addressing employment disputes in union-represented and non-union workplaces deserves renewed attention and needs significant restructuring. Thus, the issues taken up by this prominent U.S. conference remain relevant to policy debates which will likely continue to rage in the United States for years to come. Based on papers delivered at the 2009 conference of the New York University School of Law’s Center on Labor and Employment Law – the 62nd in this venerable and highly influential series – the book presents articles updated by the authors to reflect more recent developments, as well as new papers to ensure a comprehensive and current analysis of both what has actually changed and which trends seem to be gaining momentum. Twenty-two outstanding scholars and practitioners in U.S. labor law and practice pay special attention to such issues as the following: mandatory arbitration of employment disputes in non-union sector; call for improved administration of the National Labor Relations Act in expediting elections and reinstating discriminatees; more privatized forms of dispute resolution such as arbitration and mediation; card-check and neutrality agreements bypassing government processes; proposed reform of the Age Discrimination in Employment Act; evaluating market-based defenses to pay equity claims; EEOC initiatives in public enforcement of equality law; and challenges to labor relations in state and local governments.

Employers everywhere today must delicately balance the need to maintain a safe and proper workplace with employees rights and the risk of liability. The fact that new technologies make it easier for employers to monitor their employees whereabouts, communications, and activities only serves to make the issue more acute. Now, in this collection of essays by outstanding scholars and practitioners in U.S. labour law and practice, employers and their legal counsel will find a broad array of important contributions to the law and study of workplace privacy. Based on papers delivered at the 58th annual labour conference of the New York University Center on Labor and Employment Law, this book reflects and analyzes recent developments, providing the best comprehensive work on U.S. workplace privacy. How far should employers be allowed to go in monitoring employers? Where do employers rights to run their businesses end and employees privacy rights begin? Is the existing law sufficient to resolve recurring conflicts? These are among the big questions tackled in these articles. Among the many specific issues covered are the following: use of global positioning systems (GPS) in tracking employees; background checking for job applicants; email monitoring; physical monitoring of employees; scope and lawfulness of so-called lawful activity laws; employer involvement in employees nonworkplace behaviour (e.g., drug testing); employees rights of association; regulation of fraternizing and dating among employees; employee privacy issues in employer-union bargaining; privacy issues in public sector employment; privacy issues and threats of terrorism; and efforts by employers to verify employees nationality and immigration status. Authors pay special attention to fast-break developments such as in the extraterritorial reach of the European Union s data protection directive and the current status of the U.S. National Labor Relations Board s Register-Guard decision. A special feature is a very early draft of a chapter of the forthcoming Restatement (Third) of Labor and Employment Law made available through the graces of the American Law Institute on the U.S. common law of employee privacy rights. As always, this important annual publication offers definitive current scholarship in its theme area of labour and employment law. As such, it will be of inestimable value to practitioners, government officials, academics, and others interested in developments in employment and labour relations law and practice.

Each year, the New York University Annual Conference on Labor calls on outstanding scholars and practitioners in the field to come together to survey and analyse new developments and trends in U.S. labor law and practice. Reproduced here are papers delivered at the 2004 conference, the 57th in this venerable and highly influential series, with other articles either reprinted from earlier publications or written for this volume. The theme of the 2004 Conference was “Compensation, Work Hours, and Benefits.” The broad range of contexts in which compensation, work hours, and benefits issues and disputes arise is clearly on display in the many relevant aspects with which the authors engage. These issues are gathered into nine categories as follows: problems in ensuring acceptable compensation and work conditions in a global economy; attempts by states and municipalities to implement living wage measures and the potential conflict between such attempts and the doctrine of private labor law preemption; the possible demise of traditional pension benefits; recent workplace developments arising in response to the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA); the legality of policies surrounding attempts to keep workers’ pay secret; special compensation claims typically found in securities industry arbitration; state protections for non-salary forms of compensation; regulation of multiemployer benefit plans by the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA); and compensation, work hours and benefits issues with regard to multinational organizations. As always, this important annual publication offers definitive current scholarship in its theme area of labor and employment law. As such, it will be of inestimable value to practitioners, government officials, academics, and others interested in developments in U.S. employment and labor relations law and practice.