Federal Labor Law Research Articles

Psychometric Quality of the Work Content Questionnaire Applied to Nursing Staff to Identify Job Stress

Objective: To demonstrate the reliability and construct validity of Karasek's Job Content Questionnaire (JCQ), which measures psychological demands, job control and social support, in nursing personnel. Theoretical Framework: In Mexico, the Federal Labor Law specifies that psychosocial risks must be kept at low or zero levels to prevent work-related stress in nursing staff. Method: The Job Content Questionnaire was applied to a sample of 181 nursing professionals from a population of 200 people. The internal consistency of the questionnaire was examined using the Cronbach's Alpha reliability coefficient, the construct validity of the questionnaire was identified through the fit indices of the confirmatory factor analysis, using the maximum likelihood method. Results and Discussion: The results obtained revealed [synthesize the main results of the research]. In the discussion section, these results are contextualized in light of the theoretical framework, highlighting the implications and relationships identified. Possible discrepancies and limitations of the study are also considered in this section. Research Implications: The Job Content Questionnaire presented adequate internal consistency (Cronbach's Alpha=.80) and construct validity in the sample; the structural equation model presented an adequate fit: GFI=.73, RMSEA=.066, NNFI= .93, CFI=.94, PNFI=.78. These findings affirm that the Job Content Questionnaire is valid and reliable to evaluate psychosocial factors among workers who perform nursing activities in Mexico. Originality/Value: This study contributes to the literature by demonstrating the reliability and validity of the Job Content Questionnaire in nursing in Mexico. Its effectiveness is confirmed to evaluate psychological demands, work control and social support, critical aspects to mitigate stress and improve the quality of work life. The results can influence labor policies and institutional practices, promoting healthier work environments, reducing stress and improving the quality of care in the health sector, which benefits both workers and patients.

Regulating Workplace Conduct Continues to Challenge Employers

A recent finding by a National Labor Relations Administrative Law Judge has highlighted the inherent thorniness of establishing workplace standards. The case was General Motors Components Holdings, LLC, Case No. 07‐CA‐293340, JD‐09‐24 (February 8, 2024), in which the company was alleged to have violated the federal labor law by maintaining certain workplace rules. Notably, the challenge was directed at the rules themselves and not to any unlawful application of them. The challenged rules included prohibition of the “making or publishing of malicious statements concerning any employee, the Company, or its products.” A prior rule, prohibiting “the making or publishing of false, vicious, or malicious statements concerning any employe [sic], supervisor, the Company or its products,” had been in effect since the early 1970s.

NLRB's decision about Dartmouth could impact other student‐athletes

The National Labor Relations Board recently concluded that the members of the Dartmouth University men's basketball team are considered to be employees of the university for the purposes of federal labor law. That conclusion was based on the members of the team performing “work,” that the university “controlled the work,” and that the work was done in exchange for “compensation.” As a result of that decision, the NLRB determined that the team members are eligible to vote in an election to decide if they want a union to represent them. If the majority of the team votes in favor of union representation, the union could then negotiate with the university on all terms and conditions of employment, including compensation and benefits.

Don’t Forget to Like, Follow, and Regulate: An Argument for the Expansion of Protections for Child Social Media Influencers

Child social media influencers, colloquially known as “kidfluencers,” have skyrocketed to fame alongside the growth of social media. However, traditional child labor laws do not consider online influencing “work” or these kids to be “child performers.” Thus, these children do not receive any form of legal protection for their presence online, leaving them open to exploitation and severe harms. This Note explores the lack of protection provided to kidfluencers, ultimately proposing a new federal labor law to expand child actor protections to kidfluencers. Part I of this Note provides a brief history of the landscape by reviewing landmark Supreme Court cases on the rights of the child, detailing the introduction of child labor laws and child actor protections, and surveying the meteoric rise of social media and “family vlogging” in the field of child labor. Part II explores the potential harms that kidfluencers could face due to the lack of regulation in the “family vlogging” field. Part III proposes a reform for the current legal schema to protect child influencers, ultimately culminating in a new federal labor law expanding current protections to protect child actors and introducing a privacy aspect to preserve children’s right to consent.

Teaching strategies to socialize NOM 035 in students of administrative economic sciences of a higher education institution

The International Labor Organization (ILO) and the World Health Organization (WHO) have developed initiatives and actions to promote an environment that favors the maxims for the respect of Human Rights and reverses the precariousness of work.In this situation, progress has been made, in the case of Mexico, in addition to the Federal Labor Law (LFT), NOM-035- STPS-2018, Psychosocial Risk Factors at Work- Identification, analysis aims to establish the elements to identify, analyze and prevent psychosocial risk factors, as well as to promote a favorable organizational environment in the workplace. The objective of the research focuses on using elements of standard 035 in the thematic content of the subject Interpersonal Conflict Resolution taught to undergraduate students in the Industrial Relations career. The methodology used was a Likert scale instrument where knowledge about the topics of the UDA and NOM-035 was evidenced. The contribution focuses on generating in a transversal way the thematic content of the subject to generate analysis and reflection among students and generate the appropriation of the content seeking a practical application of the NOM.

Child Care Is an Organizing Tool

At La Colmena, a small community worker center in Staten Island with light yellow walls plastered with posters about labor rights, children play while their mothers organize. “I started seeing the need to organize women and to look at the worker holistically, to see that they also have a life, they also have children,” said Yesenia Mata, executive director of La Colmena, which has supported low-wage immigrant workers, especially day laborers, since 2014. And at La Colmena, holistic support means child care. For decades, worker centers have served as a vital source of advocacy for low-wage workers excluded from unions and traditional forms of labor organizing, often because they work in informal sectors not covered by federal labor law. But for working mothers, finding the time for organizing isn’t easy. That’s why in recent years, spurred by the pandemic, worker centers across the country have enacted family-friendly organizing strategies and programming. They are meeting their communities where they need it most.

Why You Should Care About the NCAA

Fans of college sports readily recognize the four letters “NCAA” as the National Collegiate Athletic Association, an organization of colleges and universities across the United States that sets the rules for college athletics. These fans are soon to become familiar with a slightly different set of four letters: NLRB. The NLRB recently announced its decision to move forward against the NCAA, the PAC‐12 college athletic conference, and the University for Southern California (USC) to assert that they have violated federal labor law for failing to recognize USC student‐athletes as employees. The move is the next step in an initiative, announced by NLRB General Counsel Jennifer Abruzzo in September 2021, advocating for a finding that such students be considered as employees.

Starbucks Accuses NLRB of Collusion with Union

Starbucks Accuses NLRB of Collusion with Union

The Supreme Court as an Agent of Policy Drift: The Case of the NLRA

Scholars have made important advances in explaining policy drift, uncovering the prevalence of drift in veto-riddled systems, the importance of bureaucratic discretion and statutory ambiguity in combatting drift, and its feedback effects. Despite research demonstrating the potential for judicial action to alleviate drift, we know little about the potential for the Supreme Court to facilitate policy drift. I argue that the Supreme Court may operate as a powerful agent of drift by stripping statutes of ambiguity, foreclosing policy innovation in institutions outside of Congress, and curtailing bureaucratic discretion and authority. To demonstrate these mechanisms, I show how in the case of federal labor law, the Court’s jurisprudence addressing the right to strike, federal preemption, and National Labor Relations Board authority played a central role in gradually undoing the efficacy of The National Labor Relations Act. This inquiry has important implications for understanding public policy, judicial power, the development of American labor law, and American democracy.

Divided Unions: The Wagner Act, Federalism, and Organized Labor

Divided Unions: The Wagner Act, Federalism, and Organized Labor

Avoiding Unlawful Interrogation

It is unlawful for management to interrogate employees about their union views. Under federal labor law, even a single question—based on curiosity, not an intent to hinder union organizing—is interrogation. It is unlawful. Nevertheless, the most frequent mistake made by supervisors during an organizing drive is questioning employees about their involvement with the union. It is a natural reaction to learning that employees have concerns that are leading them to consider unionization. Well‐meaning supervisors may want to ask “Why?” They must be trained not to. The NLRB holds that inquiry into the employees' union views or how employees feel towards union representation, in and of itself, unlawfully coerces employees and interferes with their rights. Intent does not matter.

NLRB Enforcement to Sharpen

As previously reported in Management Report, agencies of the federal government are preparing to coordinate their efforts in enforcement of federal labor and employment laws. To that end, the U.S. Department of Labor and National Labor Relations Board recently made public the details of their Memorandum of Understanding to coordinate enforcement efforts.

Special Provisions for the Rights of Working Women in the UAE Federal Labor Law - A comparative Study

Special Provisions for the Rights of Working Women in the UAE Federal Labor Law - A comparative Study

Time Theft in the Los Angeles Retail Sector: The Need for New Labor Standards and a Fair Workweek

We argue that employers subject workers to time theft by controlling workers’ time—both on and off the clock. Time theft considers employer control of workers’ time without the promise of pay through unstable scheduling practices as well as beyond their scheduled work hours. We develop a typology of time theft through a discussion of survey and workshop data with retail workers in Los Angeles. We underscore how federal labor law is inadequate to address unstable scheduling and we discuss retail worker organizing and the implications of time theft for labor policy and worker movements.

The emergence of coercive federal Australian labour law, 1901–2020

Over the past two decades, industrial relations scholarship has observed a trend towards an increasingly punitive industrial environment along with the ‘re-regulation’ of labour law. Absent from much of this literature, however, has been an empirical and historical measurement or comparison of the scale and quality of this systemic change. By surveying coercive and penal federal industrial legislation over the period 1901–2020, this study shows empirically that over the last 40 years, there has been a steep increase in the amount of coercive federal labour legislation in Australia. It further measures and compares the volume of coercive labour legislation enacted specifically against ‘labour’ and ‘capital’ or both throughout the same period (1901–2020). Analysis reveals a correlation between a high volume of coercive labour legislation with low levels of trade union power and organisation. Argued here is that coercive labour legislation has been crucial to transitioning from a liberal conciliation and arbitration model of Australian industrial relations towards a neoliberal framework of employment legislation. In the former, regulation was more collective, informal and egalitarian (embodied by the sociological concept of ‘associative democracy’). Under a neoliberal framework, regulation is now more individualised, technical, punitive and rarely enforced, resulting in less equal material outcomes.

A Call out of Seir: The Meaning and Future of US Labor Law

The Cambridge Handbook of US Labor Law for the Twenty-First Century decries federal labor law for forsaking American workers and undermining American unions. Its contributors seek a reformed labor law for the current century. In this review essay, I examine the handbook’s contention that federal labor law has failed. To assess the merits of the claim, we must test the foundations of its contributors’ assumptions—about the labor movement, about the place of the labor movement in the political economy of American capitalism envisaged by labor law, and, indeed, about law itself. To do so, I turn to earlier, critical research on the character of American labor laws, notably Joel Rogers’s seminal 1990 essay “Divide and Conquer,” and also to work of my own. To put it crudely, I ask how much labor law reform actually matters.

“They Steal Our Work”: Wage Theft and the Criminalization of Immigrant Day Laborers in Colorado, USA

Latino immigrant day laborers are among the most vulnerable populations in the USA, frequently subject to work-related abuses such as wage theft in violation of federal and state labor laws. Despite legal reforms to facilitate wage recovery for low-wage workers and to recognize wage theft as a crime, this article draws on over two years of community-based research to show how day laborers face challenges mobilizing their legal rights and holding employers accountable for the crimes they suffer owing to their own criminalization and devaluation in US society. Contributing to harms-based approaches in critical criminology, it explores how individual legal remedies or criminal justice responses can risk obscuring the ways that wage theft is embedded along a continuum of legal and illegal exploitative labor practices that are normalized and maintained by the broader degradation of work and the criminalization of immigration.

Enfermedad profesional de los trabajadores del sector salud por COVID-19

Faced with the pressing situation that developed the viral disease better known as COVID-19, it served to highlight the lack of labor regulation in Mexico as an occupational disease for providers of services in the Health Sector. Method: Qualitative Research, through the analysis of scientific publications, which address the issue worldwide, the issue of contagion by Covid-19 in health care personnel. Results: The investigations that deal with the issue of Covid-19 and the personnel of the health sector, focus on the mental situation of the worker, being counted the investigations that deal in depth with the legal and labor situation of the workers in the health service. Conclusion: The lack of regulation of Covid-19 disease, as an occupational disease in the table of occupational diseases indicated in article 513 of the Federal Labor Law, leaves workers in the Health Sector unprotected.

NLRB Further Insulates Union‐Free Companies From Joint Employer Obligations

For nearly half a decade, union‐free employers have suffered from material uncertainty when contracting with unionized companies. Prior to 2015, federal labor law found that two such companies had a joint employer relationship only when one entity exercised direct and immediate control over essential terms and conditions of employment for workers at another entity. In Browning‐Ferris, 362 NLRB 1599 (2015), the National Labor Relations Board reversed course and established a broader definition of the joint employer concept. It held that an entity that shared a common‐law employment relationship with the workers of another entity, and reserved unexercised control over the employment terms of those workers, would be found to be a joint employer.

Broader-based and Sectoral Bargaining Proposals in Collective Bargaining Law Reform: A Historical Review

Labour legislation regulating Canada’s private sector has incorporated forms of broaderbased or sectoral certification and bargaining (BBB) in varying degrees for decades, particularly in British Columbia and Quebec. However, BBB had not been the subject of significant post-war labour law reform discussion until the 1990s. This decade saw a wave of interest in introducing BBB arise across several jurisdictions. Originating in Ontario in the late 1980s, it spread to British Columbia as a key part of labour law reform discussions in the early and late 1990s and became a minor issue in the federal labour law reform review process later that decade. In none of these instances were BBB proposals or recommendations adopted. Since then, and until the Changing Workplaces Review (CWR) of Ontario’s Labour Relations Act (OLRA) and Employment Standards Act (ESA) commenced in 2015, private sector BBB had not been an important reform issue. BBB gained significant attention in the CWR process but was less prominent in the subsequent labour law reform processes undertaken in Alberta and British Columbia. None of these reviews have resulted in substantial BBB amendments to the labour legislation. This article traces the history of BBB as an issue in labour law reform exercises across jurisdictions in English Canada from the late 1980s to early 2019, examining the context in which these issues arose, identifying key BBB proposals, and challenges to these proposals. It concludes with an analysis of the failure of efforts to incorporate BBB proposals into labour legislation, and an assessment of the key challenges to adopting significant BBB reforms in the future.