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Open Access Publications from the University of California

Scholarly Works (9 results)

  • Article
Working Papers (2008)

There is a serious problem with the labor and employment law system in the United States today. Unions have declined to the point where they represent less than 8 per cent of the private sector workforce, employee wages have stagnated for more than three decades, employers are cutting back on workers’ health insurance and pensions, and there is a dramatic growth in the numbers of the working poor. At the same time, there has been a rising chorus of complaints from labor scholars that the labor law has become “ossified, that the law is failing to offer meaningful worker protection, that the courts and Labor Board have abandoned the “core values of labor law,” and that Congress has defunded the labor protective agencies such as the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), and the Hour and Wage Division that administers the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA). Indeed, some have contended that over the past two decades, there has been a passive repeal of the employment statutes.

There is a reason that the field of labor and employment law – both as an academic subject and as an arena of social life – has declined. That is that the labor and employment laws do not address the concerns or vulnerabilities of the majority of the workforce today. Work itself is a prominent aspect of social life, but the regulatory framework governing the workplace is quickly becoming irrelevant.

The question that needs to addressed is, how did the system come to this state and where is it going? In order to consider the future, one must develop an analytic and dynamic understanding of the present and the past. A future-oriented interpretation of the present and the past can help identify trends, provide a basis for critique, and point in some constructive directions. Hence I begin my discussion of the future of labor and employment law with a brief overview of where U.S. labor and employment law came from and what it is has become today. Then I offer some predictions or hypotheses about where the field of labor and employment law is going.

    Cover page: The Future of Labor and Employment Law in the United States
    • Article
    Working Papers (2012)
    The most important question for social policy today is: can the United States participate in global trade while maintaining a robust middle class? Ordoes expanded global trade necessarily mean doom for the U.S. middle class and others in advanced industrial nations? This question might have sounded provocative, incendiary, or just plain silly a decade ago, but it can no longer be ignored. Several different approaches have been advocated to preserve the living standards of the middle class in advanced countries in the face of expanded global trade. This essay examines three clusters of policies that are the most promising, policies to (1) encourage a race to the top that cancounterbalance a race to the bottom; (2) promote the creation of local and regional agglomeration economies that will act as counterweights to a race tothe bottom, and (3) foster firm-level innovation and develop the skills andhuman capital of the local population. It concludes that we adopt policies thatbraid these three together in order to preserve the U.S. middle class.
      Cover page: Globalization and the Middle Class
      • Article
      Working Papers (2012)
      There has been a great deal written about change in the nature of employment in advanced industrialized countries over the past two decades, but the economic data to substantiate this claim have been contradictory and/or ambiguous. Some analysts contend thatthe existing data show little or no change in job longevity or incidence of temporary work, thereby casting doubt on the claim that the standard contract of employment has eroded. This article examines the best available data from ten advanced industrial countries -- Australia, Japan, United States, Spain, Italy, Germany, Netherlands, Denmark, United Kingdom and France. It looks at three of specific aspects of the standard employment contract: the growth ofnonstandard employment, the decline in job tenure, and the decline in union density and collective bargaining coverage. Overall, the data reveal changes in national labor marketsconsistent with the thesis that there has been a decline in standard employment practices. In particular, they show an increase in many forms of nonstandard employment in Europe, Japan, and Australia. In the United States, the trajectory concerning nonstandard employment is less clearly demonstrated due to definitional issues that are discussed. Nonetheless, the U.S. datareveal a significant increase in nonstandard employment amongst mid-career and older workers. The data also show a marked pattern of decline in union density and collective bargainingcoverage in all the countries studied.
        Cover page: The Decline in the Standard Employment Contract: Evidence from Ten Advanced Industrial Countries
        • Article
        Journal of Scholarly Perspectives, Volume 4, Issue 01 (2008)
        No Abstract
          Cover page: A Labor Law for the Digital Era
          • Article
          • Peer Reviewed
          UCLA Previously Published Works (2009)
            Cover page: A Labor Law for the Digital Era
            • Article
            Working Papers (2014)
            This essay describes the changes that have taken place in employment practices andregulation in advanced industrial countries. It first canvasses employment trends to show that job security and the other features of the standard contract of employment are fading. It then describes some measures undertaken in some countries and regions to try to protectworkers and to ameliorate the insecurity that present practices human resource practices generate. It concludes by considering what countries can learn from ameliorative policies and programs in other countries.
              Cover page: Green Shoots in the Labor Market: A Cornucopia of Social ExperimentsCreative Commons 'BY-NC-ND' version 4.0 license
              • Article
              Working Papers (2013)
              In this contribution to the Symposium honoring Stephen Yeazell, the author explores the interaction between group litigation and social context in the contemporary setting. She traces recent developments in the law of class action waivers coupled with mandatory individual arbitration clauses in consumer and employment contracts. She shows how the Supreme Court’s decisions in AT&T v. Concepcion and American Express v. Italian Colors enable large corporations that impose class action bans on consumers and employees to achieve de facto immunity from decades of hard-won protective legislation. She concludes that Yeazell’s insight—that the availability of group litigation is intricately linked with a society’s social arrangements—is as truetoday as it was when he first examined the issue in the 1970s.
                Cover page: Procedure, Substance, and Power: Collective Litigation and Arbitration of Employment RightsCreative Commons 'BY-NC-ND' version 4.0 license
                • Article
                UCLA Previously Published Works (2023)
                  Cover page: Arbitration -- From Sacred Cow to Golden Calf: Three Phases in the History of the Federal Arbitration Act
                  • Article
                  • Peer Reviewed
                  UC Santa Barbara Previously Published Works (2015)
                  The emerging Overhauser effect dynamic nuclear polarization (ODNP) technique measures the translational mobility of water within the vicinity (5-15 Å) of preselected sites. The work presented here expands the capabilities of the ODNP technique and illuminates an important, previously unseen, property of the translational diffusion dynamics of water at the surface of DNA duplexes. We attach nitroxide radicals (i.e., spin labels) to multiple phosphate backbone positions of DNA duplexes, allowing ODNP to measure the hydration dynamics at select positions along the DNA surface. With a novel approach to ODNP analysis, we isolate the contributions of water molecules at these sites that undergo free translational diffusion from water molecules that either loosely bind to or exchange protons with the DNA. The results reveal that a significant population of water in a localized volume adjacent to the DNA surface exhibits fast, bulk-like characteristics and moves unusually rapidly compared to water found in similar probe volumes near protein and membrane surfaces. Control studies show that the observation of these characteristics are upheld even when the DNA duplex is tethered to streptavidin or the mobility of the nitroxides is altered. This implies that, as compared to protein or lipid surfaces, it is an intrinsic feature of the DNA duplex surface that it interacts only weakly with a significant fraction of the surface hydration water network. The displacement of this translationally mobile water is energetically less costly than that of more strongly bound water by up to several kBT and thus can lower the activation barrier for interactions involving the DNA surface.
                    Cover page: Anomalously Rapid Hydration Water Diffusion Dynamics Near DNA Surfaces
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