Supreme Court Takes Pass on NLRB Undocumented Workers Case

4united_states_supreme_court_112904 The United States Supreme Court decided yesterday to deny certiorari in an NLRB case concerning whether undocumented workers are considered employees under Section 2(3) of the NLRA. Both the NLRB and the D.C. Circuit found that they were in Agriprocessors v. NLRB. The issue about the status of the undocumented workers became important because the company refused to bargain with the union once it won the election because seventeen out of twenty-one employees were challenged as being in the United States illegally.

Agriprocessors, a company that specializes in the production of kosher meats, has also been in the news lately after the company was raided by the government based on the employment of a large number of undocumented workers and after its top officials were arrested for lying about its workers’ citizenship status.

This is an interesting case because it can be contrasted with the view that the Supreme Court took in the case of Hoffman Plastics, in which the Court held that undocumented workers who were illegally fired under the NLRA could not seek backpay.

Like everything else in this area of the overlap of immigration law and labor law, it is unlikely this is the last we have heard about this issue.

Cross posted at Workplace Prof Blog.

Continue ReadingSupreme Court Takes Pass on NLRB Undocumented Workers Case

More Commentary on the Grand Irony of ERISA

Erisa Thanks to Ian Millhiser (National Senior Citizens Law Center) who wrote this piece about the inequities of employee benefits law under ERISA with his colleague Simon Lazarus for the U.K. Guardian.

Here’s a taste:

Erisa sets strict standards to ensure that employers and insurers administering group benefit plans act “solely in the interests of beneficiaries for the exclusive purpose of providing benefits,” not their own bottom-line. But the court has rendered these protections meaningless. In a Catch-22 decision written by Justice Scalia, a 5-4 majority held that, when plan administrators violate their obligations under the law, victims may not recover any monetary compensation for resulting losses they suffer. Adding insult to injury, the court has read Erisa as a warrant for “pre-empting” – ie abolishing – pre-existing state law protections, leaving victims with literally no recourse. Thus, in the words of, the late Justice Byron White, the supreme court has achieved the “perverse anomaly of leaving those Congress set out to protect with less protection than they enjoyed before Erisa was enacted.”

Continue ReadingMore Commentary on the Grand Irony of ERISA

New Report Finds Lack of Diversity in College Football Coaches

Football_player The Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sports (TIDES) of the University of Central Florida has put up this press release entitled: The Buck Stops Here: Assessing Diversity among Campus and Conference Leaders for Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS) Schools in the 2008-09 Academic Year.

Here’s a taste:

With the firing of Ty Willingham at the University of Washington and the resignation of Ron Prince at Kansas State, the 2008 regular season of college football will conclude with the controversy over the poor record of hiring African-American Division IA (Football Bowl Subdivision – FBS) head football coaches still continuing to make headlines. Their departure will leave only four African-American and two other head coaches of color. College football is still far behind other college and professional sports.

Continue ReadingNew Report Finds Lack of Diversity in College Football Coaches