America's Union-Free Movement in Light of International Human Rights Standards

Abstract

union organizing by encouraging delays in the representation process.Employer arguments that some employees are supervisors result in legal disputes that increase the processing time in a case.Employers can, in fact, delay the process by weeks by making arguments about the supervisory status of workers even if the merit of the arguments is questionable.In addition, these cases have encouraged courts of appeals to remand cases to the board for further consideration.This increase in case processing time in representation cases generally decreases the probability that the employees will succeed in forming a union (Roomkin and Block 1981).The increased time associated with remands in court cases further discourages employees from exercising their rights.Thus, Abraham, Eaton, and Voos demonstrate that board and court decisions have an effect not only on the substance of the law, but on NLRB procedures as well.It appears that legal decisions, by creating ambiguity in the law, create openings for litigation that cause delay.Singh and Dannin provide a unique perspective on a current interpretation of the law of the bargaining process under the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA)-implementation at impasse.They asked a sample of business and law students to share their views of the relative bargaining power of the union and the employer under three regimes, including the current regime, which gives employers the right to implement their final pre-impasse proposal and to replace strikers.As these students knew nothing about the law and had no vested interest in any particular statutory structure, their situation was roughly akin to a Rawlsian "veil of ignorance" (Rawls 1971).The authors report that these disinterested, unknowing parties believed the current regime strongly favored employers, enhancing their bargaining power, and that a regime that permits no implementation at impasse and prohibits striker replacement would enhance worker power.A compulsory arbitration regime favors neither party.Their work suggests that the current law strongly favors employer interests over worker interests.Part 4 looks beyond U.S. labor law to international perspectives.Industrial relations in the United States often have been discussed in the context of "exceptionalism," the notion that, in some way, the United States is different from other countries and should not be subject to international scrutiny.It is difficult to understand the justification for this notion, especially in a world of globalized markets.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 10 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.