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Abstract:
As a 20 year-old law student in Paris, Frederic Ozanam (1813-1853) and a few fellow law students founded the St. Vincent de Paul Society, which quickly grew throughout Europe and today is one of the largest charities in the world (with more than a million members on all continents). Later, as a lawyer and professor of commercial law and of literature at the University of Paris, Ozanam was the first to conceptualize and elucidate the natural wage, drawing from Catholic Social Teaching, principally via St. Thomas Aquinas, regarding the common good. His work became an important platform for the first labor encyclical on the rights of workers, issued by Pope Leo XIII in 1891. Ozanam was an exemplary Catholic scholar and eloquent public intellectual. He fearlessly championed workers' rights, and his concept of the natural wage took root in the great labor encyclicals and in secular wage legislation that continue to resonate today in living wage initiatives. He was, however, that rarest of intellectuals, serving, directly and personally, and throughout his entire adult life, the immediate needs of the poor. He remains an important role model for those striving to build the good society, coupling academic and intellectual insight with direct, personal action.

Abstract:
On May 8, 2007, New York Governor Eliot Spitzer issued Executive Order No. 12, opening the door for the unionization of 60,000 persons paid directly or indirectly, in whole or in part, by state funds, to provide home-based day-care for the children of working parents.

The Governor's action was dramatic, stark, and extraordinarily significant.

Child Day-care

Abstract:
A particularly pernicious constriction of the scope of protection available under Section 7 of the National Labor Relations Act has occurred with respect to injured employees. Employees who complain about workplace safety and health issues are within the ambit of Section 7, protected against employer retaliation for having complained. Meanwhile, however, employees injured by those same workplace safety and health hazards, and who consequently exercise their state workers compensation law statutory rights to claim workers compensation monetary and medical care benefits, are not protected by Section 7. If the employer retaliates against the injured employee for claiming state workers compensation benefits, the employee's protections against such retaliation are under state workers compensation law, but not under the federal National Labor Relations Act. This undue constriction of Section 7's umbrella has fractured the practical and jurisprudential coherence of Section 7. Furthermore, this bizarre bifurcation has spawned atomistic progeny wholly antithetical to the spirit and purpose of Section 7. Perhaps most egregiously, the National Labor Relations Board now considers employees filing individual sexual harassment complaints with the United States Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to have acted individually, and thus not within Section 7's concerted, protected activities. This essay will critically analyze the genesis and evolution (mutation) of this bizarre bifurcation of Section 7 in this context, and will propose avenues for rectification.

Abstract:
Why Not a General Strike? proposes a - no surprise! - general strike, with the exception of essential services, for the Labor Day Weekend of 2006. With the waves of bankruptcies in the airline industry now spreading to the auto industry, and with the fracture of the AFL-CIO, workers are placed into increasingly desperate positions. Perhaps it is time for a weekend of deliberation about the future of jobs and about the lack of job and retirement and insurance security. The earlier history of the United States, and contemporary experiences in many other countries, demonstrate the intriguing viability of the general strike.

Abstract:
Sexual abuse of children by Roman Catholic clergy is perhaps the greatest scandal in the history of the Catholic Church in the United States. On September 7, 2007, the Roman Catholic Diocese of San Diego, California, announced a $198 million settlement with 144 claimants. In mid July, the Archdiocese of Los Angeles announced a $660 million settlement with 508 claimants, following a November, 2006 settlement with 86 claimants for an additional $114 million. Five prominent Catholic dioceses in the United States have filed for bankruptcy since 2004, facing (and, perhaps, seeking to avoid) enormous liability for tort damages caused by clergy sexual abuse. There is a burgeoning law review literature examining many different dimensions of the situation. However, no article, thus far, has focused on the labor and employment ramifications of the crisis. In this article, I study the five diocesan bankruptcy cases. I also discuss the status of labor and employment relations with the Church as employer, in light of secular case law, canon law, and Church teaching. I then present an overview of labor and employment relations consequences of diocesan bankruptcy, including, paradoxically, the possible resurgence of unionization and collective bargaining by, inter alia, school teachers in primary and secondary Catholic schools.

Abstract:
After the English coalminers' strike, circa 1984, the world changed. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher crushed the miners and Scargill, as fully-indeed, perhaps more so-as her fellow conservative President Ronald Reagan crushed the striking air traffic controllers in the United States at the beginning of his first term in 1981.

In this essay, we reflect on the past quarter century of ADR in labor management relations in the United States and in the United Kingdom, critically assessing the trajectory and the evolution of ADR in labor management matters, with particular reference to the ADR of discharge and discipline grievances of unionized workers. With this platform context for the past two decades, we ruminate on the similarities and contrasts, such as they may be, in the daily working realities of labor-union-represented workers in the U.S. and in the U.K., paying particular attention to the resolution of grievances in labor management relations. We also offer some preliminary thoughts on the likely future of ADR in labor management relations in the U.S. and the U.K.

The two centerpieces anchoring this essay are the Advisory Conciliation and Arbitration Service, established via the Employment Protection Act of 1975, and the heightened due process and progressive discipline protections and standards in the Employment Act of 2002.

Abstract:
The National Labor Relations Act was a product of the FDR initiatives combating the economic and social misery of the Great Depression. This year marks the 70th anniversary of the Act. For the past two decades, labor activists have been the most severe critics of the Act, regarding it as, at best, obsolete, and, more likely, counterproductive to union organizing campaigns. The ABA, New York State Bar, and the Association of the Bar of the City of New York co-sponsored a major conference on May 25, 2005, to examine the current state of the NLRA. My opening remarks, encapsulated in this essay, suggest that global economics radically eclipse the capability of the NLRA, and, for that matter, of unions and of employers to provide for economic equity.

Abstract:
By its 5-4 sharply divided decision in 14 Penn Plaza v. Pyett, 556 U.S. (April 1, 2009), the United States Supreme Court dramatically endorsed mandatory labor arbitration, rather than external litigation, to resolve labor union-represented employees’ statutory claims of unlawful age-based employment discrimination. The Court summarily isolated and trivialized as jurisprudentially obsolete, but did not deem it necessary to formally overrule, 35 years of well-established precedent that had protected the employee’s right to litigate de novo statutory claims of unlawful employment discrimination, without suffering any res judicata or collateral estoppel effects from a prior adverse arbitration decision. The Court substantially clarified, and perhaps simplified, what had become an increasingly complex and potentially inconsistent panorama of decisions as to whether labor union-represented employees can be mandated to arbitrate, and thus be foreclosed from litigating de novo, statutory claims, most frequently and most classically, those alleging unlawful employment discrimination by the employer. By its controversial activist methodology, the political, ideological Court ran roughshod over stare decisis principles. A host of questions, ramifications, and unintended consequences could well transform the dynamics of arbitration well beyond the present contours of labor-union represented employment environments. This article will critically assess the salient foreseeable consequences and likely ramifications of the Pyett decision. On the eve of a half-century of Supreme Court enthusiasm for labor arbitration, grounded in the landmark Steelworkers Trilogy in 1960, the Pyett decision perhaps reached the correct result, favoring a single, globalized, omnibus arbitration, rather than second bites at the apple in serial litigation. But, the Court engaged in deeply problematic, severely truncated reasoning to reach this result. Unfortunately, Pyett is not the rare exception. The phenomenon of the Court reaching the correct result, but through badly fractured and spasmodic reasoning, while not the norm, occurs with some frequency. Pragmatically, a sound functional result from a problematic and jagged opinion undeniably is markedly superior to an elegant theory yielding an obsolete, wrong result. The great practical utility of these quintessentially Lincolnian principles is palpable in labor and employment law. Pyett is certainly not the first, and will not be the last, decision of the Court that, while not elegantly grounded in sophisticated jurisprudential metaphysics, may nevertheless work well and yield just and fair results for employees, employers, and unions who favor a single, integrated arbitration forum for the resolution of all contractual and statutory claims. Meanwhile, those employees, employers, and unions wishing to retain independent judicial recourse for litigating statutory claims are not precluded from doing so, and are left unaffected by, the Pyett decision.

Abstract:
I contend that the U.S. Catholic Bishops Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship letter, issued at the end of November, 2007, misses the mark. It is caught up in excessive pragmatism, caution, and prudence, having failed to squarely come to grips with the 2004 reception of the Eucharist by pro-abortion Catholic politicians, most prominently, Presidential Candidate John Kerry. And, as a matter of social justice, the 2007 letter lacks the fervor and the authenticity of the Bishops' 1986 letter, Economic Justice for All.