- More on presidential candidate Bernie Sanders’ big plans to regulate employment [Cato Daily Podcast with Ryan Bourne and Caleb Brown, related earlier]
- It’s not just the joint employer rules, NLRB is rolling back Obama-era decisions in many other areas too: union elections, including “quickie” procedures [Laura I. Bernstein, Felhaber Larson]; confidentiality in workplace investigations and use of company email systems [Jon Hyman]
- California Agricultural Labor Relations Board adopts a regulation entitling union organizers to enter farms whether owners approve or no. When such a mass incursion, with bullhorns, disrupts farm operations, has a taking of property occurred? Ninth Circuit says no [Pacific Legal Foundation; Metropolitan News-Enterprise; Federalist Society podcast with Wen Fa and Bethany Berger]
- Study based on tax data finds typical member of top-earning 1% “derives most of his or her income from human capital, not financial capital” [David Henderson] Or on the other hand: “The [analytic] attempt to divide all income between labor and capital is a fool’s errand.” [Arnold Kling]
- “Both the financial market crash and the aging of America’s industrial workforce are real phenomena. They did not, however, cause the multiemployer pension crisis.” [Charles Blahous, Economics21; more by Blahous here, here, and here; earlier]
- Supervisor’s remarks critical of exercising FMLA leave options keep nurse’s lawsuit alive despite clients’ complaints about her behavior while visiting their homes [Ronald Tang, SHRM]
Search Results for ‘multiemployer’
Labor and employment roundup
- “Three Bad Arguments for Government Paid Leave” [Vanessa Brown Calder, Cato]
- So much wrong with Bernie Sanders scheme of a guaranteed government job for everyone [Ryan Bourne, Cato] “This old socialist standby deserves to stay exactly where we left it — on the ash heap of history.” [Megan McArdle]
- NYC legislates “dues checkoff” payable to activist groups [Ruth McCambridge, Nonprofit Quarterly]
- “Ralph Lauren interns get next to nothing after winning lawsuit” [Julia Marsh, New York Post]
- Uh-oh: Ford Foundation funding Harvard Law School project to redesign U.S. labor law from ground up [Benjamin Sachs, On Labor]
- The federal law that forbids employers from ceasing to participate in union (multiemployer) pension plans unless they pay massive “withdrawal liability” including obligations of other employers is unjust and destructive. Now it’s playing havoc with the makers of Peeps confections [Damien Paletta, Washington Post/Lehigh Valley Live, related earlier]
Hostess’s pension liabilities
Some of the company’s $2 billion in unfunded liabilities could get dumped on the federally sponsored Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC), raising premiums for the many solvent companies that are obliged to participate. Worse yet, a lot of Hostess’s liability is to union “multiemployer” plans, which under a peculiarly onerous federal law follow a “last-man-standing” rule of liability under which companies still operating are made to pick up the obligations of those no longer in business. David Kaplan at Fortune quotes a Credit Suisse report to the effect that multiemployer plans “are now underfunded by $369 billion.” [Ivan Osorio, CEI]
And for wider background on the company’s decline: Scott Shackford, Reason, on who killed Hostess. Plus: “It’s a poorly evolved parasite that kills its Hostess.” [@mr_archenemy]