Labor Law

Recall the 2015 ruling by the National Labor Relations Board that said, via Browning-Ferris Industries v NLRB, that a joint employer was not an employer that shared direct control over a temp agency’s employees with that temp agency, as the long-established 1984 standard held, but that such a joint employer is one that exercises merely tenuous control.

The case is before the DC Circuit on appeal from the ruling.  The Wall Street Journal is properly skeptical of the permanence of a favorable court outcome, as it is with the possibility of a reversing ruling by an NLRB populated with President Donald Trump appointees.

The WSJ is hopeful regarding another path, the Protecting Local Business Opportunity Act, which would codify that earlier standard.

That certainly would be a step in the right direction, but there’s no reason to believe a later NLRB wouldn’t simply ignore that or find a way to work around the standard—by creatively reinterpreting it to match it to then supposed social imperatives, as judges do too often with their own rulings.

No, the longer term and more effective solution is for Congress simply to abolish the NLRB altogether and not replace it.

Labor Under the Radar

Rather, a labor reform bill making its way (too slowly, IMHO) in the House.  The bill has some interesting items in it:

  • require unions to obtain permission from workers to spend their dues on purposes other than collective bargaining
  • mandate a recertification election upon the expiration of a collective-bargaining agreement if a workforce has turned over by more than 50%
  • take card-check off the menu of options for holding a union election
  • allow employees to withhold their personal contact information from unions

What’s not to like?

What’s holding up the bill?

Minimum Wage and Automation

Is technology—automation—really going to kill jobs?  No.  As many, including me, have written before, automation is only going to shift the nature of jobs.  Minimum wage laws are killing jobs, and will continue to and at increasing rates, by making robots cost effective despite their high up-front costs.

Wal-Mart, for instance, used to employ humans to track individual stores’ cash and manage their books.  Now at roughly 4,700 Wal-Marts, roughly 4,700 of those employees have been replaced by a machine that can track the books and while counting bills and coins at rates of 480 and 3,000 per minute, respectively.  Because it’s Wal-Mart, those folks, where they’ve wanted to, have taken jobs elsewhere in their store at the same pay, but those jobs are at risk, too.  Cashiers are being replaced by automated check-out stands, for instance.

Machines are made cheaper by current and rising minimum wage mandates from Government.

It’s not just Wal-Mart, either; it’s retail in general.  This graph, also from The Wall Street Journal, shows how widespread the risk is.

That’s good for us consumers, as those machines enable us to avoid much of the damage to our pocketbooks minimum-wage laws would do through labor-driven price increases.  Notice that the industries in the graph are especially labor-driven.  So far.

There’s another, this time insidious, impact of this increasing minimum wage driven increasing automation.  Lots of those jobs being lost are moderate-skill ones—counting the money and tracking the books, for instance—and those folks, as the Wal-Mart example illustrates, can find other work.  But what about the low skill work, where the employee truly is being paid minimum wage, because that’s all the work itself is worth (Wal-Mart’s money counter got $13/hr, above the current minimum wage, albeit threatened by $15/hr mandates)?

Those folks—the teenagers looking for summer work for the experience and to build money for college and a resume for later employment, the low/no skill worker trying to work at anything, the single mom or married spouse trying to work a second job to add income to the family—are going to be SOL.  Because Government won’t let them work for less than what Government deigns permit them to work.

The mandated minimum wage does a wannabe worker no good at all, if the job paying that mandated wage no longer exists.

That doesn’t make automation bad; as I wrote above, it’s good for us consumers.  What’s bad is minimum wage mandates—they drive automation, but the bad thing about them is they deprive the unskilled of jobs, with the knock-on failure of preventing them from becoming consumers, too.

EPA Jobs?

The Environmental Protection Agency has sent out more than 1,000 buy-out notices to its employees….

The positions are being eliminated, and the incumbents aren’t being offered positions elsewhere on the government’s teat payroll.  The horror.  The union-demanded, if not God-given, sinecures are not sinecures, after all.  American Federation of Government Employees Local 704 President Michael Mikulka is quite vocal with his dismay.

EPA wants over 1,200 of us to leave, purportedly to save money going forward and claiming that they no longer need the positions occupied by staff that in some cases worked at EPA for over 30 years[.]

Because the existence of a union-protected job means the employer needs that job, and the longer its existence, the deeper into perpetuity that need must be.  Sure.

Mikulka also insisted that the EPA would be less active without those jobs, speaking like that would be a bad thing.  He said this, too:

We’re going to have to do less with less.

Recall that, during the Obama government shutdown in 2011, the EPA rated over 90% of its workforce as unessential and furloughed them for the duration of the shutdown.  Certainly, that per centage was true only for the short-term, but a huge fraction of those 90% really are unessential, and they could be released were the EPA to be returned to its original mission of science-based protection of the environment and moved away from supporting its politically motivated pseudo-science climate funding industry.

The agency certainly can do less with less.  And it should.

A Union

doesn’t like Amazon buying Whole Foods.

[United Food and Commercial Workers International Union President, Marc] Perrone plans to file a complaint to the Federal Trade Commission, arguing that letting Amazon buy Whole Foods would trigger a wave of store closures and eventually quash customer choice.

With a straight face, he argued in his complaint (which somehow fell into The Washington Post‘s hands before the filing) that

Regardless of whether Amazon has an actual Whole Foods grocery store near a competitor, their online model and size allows them to unfairly compete with every single grocery store in the nation.

So, doing a better job of competing in an industry, doing a better job of selling products customers want, is in some way unfair.  Hmm….

And

I’ve got concerns, and our organization has concerns, about what technology does and at what cost to society[.]

Sure he does.  So long as society is defined as union society.  Because technology improvements benefit the broader society of ordinary American citizens.  Just compare tech-developed and built cars with buggies and wagons.  Compare today’s house with yesterday’s.  Compare today’s communications media with yesterday’s.  Compare today’s cars with yesterday’s, come to that.

The union, Perrone said, is worried that America’s shifting shopping preferences will spark a crisis in its industry the same way automation and trade with China and Mexico has wiped out factory work.

Our factory work hasn’t been wiped out; it’s just changed its character because competition made those manufacturing industries get better and do better.

The union just wants a protection from competition.

Imagine that.