Labor law

Labor law is the field of legal specialization devoted to issues that arise in the context of employment, generally focusing on the rights and duties of employers, employees, and unions toward one another. Labor laws have traditionally been categorized as either individual or collective; individual labor laws are those which govern the relationship between a single employee and the employer, while collective labor laws concern relations between employers and unions representing groups of employees. Labor law encompasses many different aspects of employment, from establishing basic standards for working conditions to clarifying how negotiations between employers and labor unions may be conducted.

Brief History

Labor law first emerged as a distinct discipline with the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. Prior to this time, employment relationships were individual affairs that did not permit broad, policy-based definitions of responsibilities and rights; they were more akin to unique, personal bonds. As industrialization began to gain momentum, this circumstance underwent a profound change, as classes of similarly situated workers began to form. For example, in the year 1450, a typical employee might have been an apprentice stonemason learning to work different types of stone by working for a master stonemason for many years. This master and apprentice relationship was entirely between the two individuals occupying those roles. If the apprentice felt he or she was being treated unfairly, there was no recourse.

By 1850, however, a typical employee might have been a factory worker, one of hundreds of people working shifts assembling products for distribution and sale. In settings like these, one worker was basically indistinguishable from another, and employers considered them to be like interchangeable parts of a machine. This type of attitude, further fueled by employers’ desire to compete in and capitalize on the industrial market by turning out large amounts of product in short amounts of time and at as little cost as possible, led employers to impose some decidedly inhumane policies, including child labor, long work shifts, inadequate breaks and rest periods, and an overall lack of benefits such as vacation time and health care. Gradually, workers began to realize that even if they were powerless as individuals, since they could be easily replaced, if they banded together they could wield greater authority, force employers to negotiate with them, and pressure legislators to enact legal protections and reforms. This represented the beginning of both the organized labor movement and the unfolding of labor law.

One of the first labor laws was passed in England in 1802 to address some of the above issues: the Health and Morals of Apprentices Act. This law sought to place a limit on the number of hours children could work each day. Part of the reason the law was passed was in response to an epidemic that had broken out, partially due to overcrowding and unhealthy conditions in factories. The law forbade forcing children to work at night and limited their workday to twelve hours, among other terms. In the United States, the National Labor Relations Act was passed in 1935 to give workers the right to organize and engage in collective bargaining. Three years later, the Fair Labor Standards Act codified the minimum wage and forty-hour workweek while prohibiting most child labor.

Overview

One set of labor laws governs who may legally work. At one point in history, there were no restrictions about how old one had to be in order to hold a job. This led to companies choosing to hire large numbers of women and children for a variety of reasons. In some jobs, intricate machines with many moving parts and small pieces were used, and employers preferred having children work on these because the children had smaller hands, better eyesight, and greater dexterity than their adult counterparts. Many of the same considerations encouraged the employment of women, as well as the perception that women would be more likely to comply with the directives of managers, given that women had been relegated to a subservient role in society for much of history.

Related to the issue of who may legally work is the topic of discrimination as it relates to labor, and this is another major area of concern in the law. Generally speaking, there are two types of labor discrimination that the law is concerned with: discrimination in hiring and discrimination in the workplace itself. Discrimination in hiring occurs when an employer exhibits a preference for certain types of workers and against other types of workers. For example, if a company declared that it did not want to hire women for any of its sales positions because it felt that they were not aggressive enough, this would be a preference for male employees against female employees. This type of discrimination in hiring is prohibited in the United States under the principle that all persons are equal and thus deserve to be treated equally, including having equal access to the job market rather than being excluded from applying for some positions based on the arbitrary preferences of some employers. Discrimination in hiring can be based on many different factors, including sex (sexual harassment also falls into this category according to federal labor laws), sexual orientation, religious affiliation, age, and ethnicity.

Discrimination in the workplace occurs after an employee has been hired and can also manifest in a number of different ways. Frequently, workplace discrimination takes the form of only certain employees being selected for raises or promotions, or for receiving other types of benefits such as training or the ability to attend professional conferences. For example, it has often happened that employers that would prefer to hire only men, but that wish to avoid the legal liability that would result from doing so, hire women for lower-level positions and then refuse to promote them beyond a certain rank. Such employers felt that this type of workplace discrimination was safer to practice than simply refusing to hire women, because it is more difficult to detect that an organization has an unwritten policy against promoting a particular group beyond a certain rank. This is because employers can simply claim, as many of them have, that the individuals who are alleging improper discrimination in promotion were not promoted because of their own shortcomings rather than the employer’s bias.

This type of situation, in which there is an invisible but very real barrier to advancement for members of certain groups in an organization, is often referred to as a "glass ceiling." Traditionally, the glass ceiling referred to women who found that they bumped into an invisible partition rather than being promoted along with their male colleagues. When the group being discriminated against in this way is not women but some other demographic, then variations on the glass ceiling are sometimes used to describe it. As an example, the bamboo ceiling describes a situation in which persons of Asian ancestry are discriminated against. However, in the United States, federal laws were instituted over the years to combat such discrimination in all aspects of employment, such as Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which made employment discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin illegal; the Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967; and the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, which prohibits discrimination against people with disabilities who are qualified for employment.

A major area of labor law in the United States deals with defining how rights and responsibilities are allocated between different types of workers. The main categories into which individuals may be placed are employers, employees, and independent contractors. Employers are those who hire employees to perform designated tasks. Employees and independent contractors are both hired by employers to perform designated tasks, but the difference between the two groups is that independent contractors have a more temporary and distant relationship to the employer than employees do. The distinction in the type of relationship becomes important in situations where a worker’s conduct causes difficulty or violates the law, because there is the possibility that responsibility for the conduct of an employee may be imputed to the employer. This could mean that an employer might be held financially liable for damage caused by the conduct of an employee. Conflicting interpretations of the employment relationship can arise in these cases, because an employer may try to argue that it should not be required to pay for the damage for any of a variety of reasons, such as that the conduct of the employee that caused the damage was "outside the scope" of the employee’s work.

A considerable amount of labor law concentrates on the duties owed to employees by employers. One reason for this is that historically there has been a power imbalance between employers and employees. This power imbalance arises in part because the employer often is in a position to pick and choose which people it will employ and which it will not, because there tend to be more available employees than there are available positions. Another factor tending to give employers greater latitude is that workers need the wages they can earn by working in order to sustain themselves and their families, so they are usually reluctant to contradict the wishes, expressed or implicit, of their employers. Regardless of the reason, the power imbalance between employers and employees can cause difficulty for employees. For example, if an employee suffered an injury causing a permanent disability, an employer might attempt to fire that worker and hire someone else as a replacement to avoid the expense of having to employ someone with a disability.

Labor law has developed over time to help make situations such as this more equitable, so that they have an outcome that is fairer to the employee. If this were not the case, then there would be no recourse for employees who had given the best years of their lives to their employers, only to be cast aside after being injured. Some categories of employees are now protected from being arbitrarily fired by their employers, including employees who work for state or local governments. Other employees are classified under labor law as "at will." At will employees are those who may be fired at any time, with or without good cause (good cause means a clear reason for the termination, such as the employee breaking the law or failing to perform the duties required by the position). Many state laws have attempted to define most types of employees as at will, in an effort to give employers more freedom in deciding which employees they will retain. However, the fact that a particular position is at will does not permit employers to terminate the person in that position for reasons that are improperly discriminatory. This point can be difficult to determine, because when a person is fired that person may claim that he or she was let go due to discrimination, while the employer may state that this was simply not the case and that because the position is at will, no further explanation is necessary.

These situations, along with other issues pertaining to rights covered by labor laws, can often lead to litigation in court, with each side attempting to introduce evidence that supports its explanation of the termination. The person fired might bring in evidence that many other people similarly situated to him or her (same race, same sex, same age, etc.) were also let go, while the employer might try to show that there were other reasons for firing the person (such as that the company’s financial performance declined or the person refused to perform his or her duties). Ultimately, the court will be asked to decide which interpretation of events is more credible, and whether it comports with the law; this represents a considerable step forward from the way employment disputes were handled in the past.

Bibliography

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Estreicher, Samuel, and Matthew Bodie. Labor Law. St. Paul: Foundation, 2016. Print.

Finkin, Matthew W., and Gai Mundlaḳ, eds. Comparative Labor Law. Northampton: Elgar, 2015. Print.

Gold, Michael Evan. An Introduction to Labor Law. 3rd ed. Ithaca: ILR, 2014. Print.

Hermann, Richard L. Manufacturing Business and the Law: A Guide to the Laws, Regulations, and Careers of the U.S. Manufacturing Revival. Chicago: Amer. Bar Assn., 2015. Print.

Kahana, Jeffrey Steven. The Unfolding of American Labor Law: Judges, Workers, and Public Policy across Two Political Generations, 1790–1850. El Paso: LFB Scholarly, 2014. Print.

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Secunda, Paul M., Anne M. Lofaso, Joseph E. Slater, and Jeffrey M. Hirsch. Mastering Labor Law. Durham: Carolina Academic, 2014. Print.