Employment/Labor Law

Professor Diana Reddy weighs in on whether or not the N.L.R.B. and its underlying statute is doomed.

Professor Catherine Fisk weighs in on Governor Gavin Newsom’s return to the office directive for public employees. 

UC Berkeley School of Law professor Catherine Fisk said that an employer’s intention when reviewing an employee’s email is key to determining whether a violation has occurred. If an employer reviewed a staffer’s email while they were on vacation to offload work to someone else, Fisk said, that type of search may be justified. But searching an employee’s email simply to surveil them probably would not be, she said.

Catherine Fisk, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law, said public support for unions is at its highest levels since the 1960s. Coupled with recent actions by the NLRB that boost union organizing, those positive attitudes about unions embolden workers to form them, whether on their own as thousands of Starbucks workers have since 2021 or by teaming up with established unions like Volkswagen employees in Tennessee who recently voted to join the United Auto Workers, she said.

A published study co-authored by Professor Catherine Albiston on counteracting workplace bias against mothers and caregivers is cited. 

“If the Ninth Circuit panel’s ruling in favor of Uber is allowed to stand despite AB 5’s reasonable distinctions, it would open the door to countless challenges to laws regulating the workplace and endanger the ability of legislatures to pass laws protecting workers,” write Christina Chung, executive director of the Center for Law and Work at Berkeley Law and Erwin Chemerinksy, dean of Berkeley Law.

“Once billionaires are scared of the power of the NLRB, they bring in the big guns,” said Diana Reddy, a labor law professor at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law.

“This is an effort by a group of lawyers who are foes of the administrative state and the New Deal-era legislation that created the NLRB and the SEC to essentially end enforcement of those statutes,” says Catherine Fisk, an employment and labor law authority at UC Berkeley law school.

Host Elizabeth Binczik speaks with Professor Catherine Fisk about the combination of labor wins this year and what 2023 could mean for labor moving forward.

Discrimination cases are generally difficult to argue in court. “You need a smoking gun,” said Khiara M. Bridges, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and a former professional dancer. The array of aesthetic judgments involved in dance casting and hiring scenarios can make them especially difficult to parse.