Labor

Last week, an appeal was made to the Supreme Court in Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association (CTA), a case that could severely weaken the power of public sector unions. The case invovles a California elementary school teacher who does not want to pay $650 in annual “fair share fees” to the CTA for costs associated with collective bargaining and administration.

U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) Michael Froman appeared before Congress Tuesday to make the corporate argument for fast track trade promotion authority. The USTR and President Obama are pushing fast-track pre-approval for the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and other big trade agreements they are working on.

New numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics show that the percentage of the workforce represented by a union fell to 11.1%, down from 11.3% the previous year. Overall, 14.6 million Americans belonged to a union in 2014.

A federal judge in California has approved a settlement between Lowe’s Home Centers and a class of its home improvement contractors who claimed they were misclassified as independent contractors. The maximum settlement amount in Shepard v. Lowe’s HIW is $6,500,000, depending on the number of contractors who file claims.

With counties across Kentucky rapidly passing unprecedented “Right-to-Work” ordinances, activists and lobbies on both sides of the issue are scrambling to establish their position on what they once thought would only be a state-level type legislation. This is not limited to “Right-to-Work” opponents. The National Right to Work Committee has actually come out against these local-level laws.

The U.S. Department of Transportation is expected to announce that it will be lifting restrictions on Mexican trucking firms who want to operate throughout the United States. Despite the passage of NAFTA in 1994, which theoretically should have allowed Mexican trucking companies to engage long haul operations in the U.S., restrictions have remained. In 2011, a pilot program (FMSCA) began to phase out the existing restrictions.

Following Wisconsin’s passage of Act 10, union-friendly Dane County prolonged public sector union contracts as long as it could to avoid the legislation’s anti-worker effects. The city of Madison did the same.