Overlawyered: Chronicling The High Cost Of Our Legal System

Labor and employment roundup

  • Now watch out for the next phase of the “ban the box” effort, which will demand that private employers not be allowed to ask about applicants’ criminal records [Open Society via @georgesoros]
  • “We have one restaurant in Seattle, and we probably won’t be expanding there. That’s true of San Francisco and Los Angeles, too.” [Buffalo Wild Wings CEO Sally Smith via David Boaz]
  • New York Times reporting vs. nail salons: the video [Reason, earlier] The other Greenhouse effect, in this case Steven: Times “sees the labor beat as having essentially an advocacy mission.” [Adam Ozimek]
  • The lawsuits of September: “the EEOC has once again rushed to file a blitz of federal court complaints just under the fiscal year wire” [Matthew Gagnon, Christopher DeGroff, and Gerald Maatman, Jr., Seyfarth Shaw]
  • I was a guest on Ray Dunaway’s morning drive time show on WTIC (Hartford) talking about cop fitness tests and the blind barber suit, you can listen here:
  • NYC Commission on Human Rights — with an assist from Demos and New Economy Project — runs public ads saying “There’s no evidence that shows a link between credit reports and job performance. That’s why NYC made it illegal to use credit reports in employment decisions.” The “Suburbanist” responds: “We will punish those who depart from our null hypotheses regarding their business. Human rights indeed.”
  • What are the biggest legal questions facing employers? “What is work?” and “Who is an employee?” are a start [Jon Hyman]

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2 Comments

  • BWW might have only one store in San Francisco but they’ve got two stores right next door in San Jose, two down in Fremont, and three across the bay in Pleasanton. While it’s true that these stores aren’t right there in the middle of the city, it’s not like there’s only a single BWW in all of Northern California.

    And it doesn’t change the basic point, but it does somewhat lessen the rhetorical impact.

    • No, it doesn’t lessen the rhetorical impact one bit. The statement isn’t about CA state law, San Fransisco enacted a municipal minimum wage in 2014 that is higher than bot the federal and CA state minimum wages. the two other cities mentioned Seattle WA and Los Angeles CA also have municipal minimum wages these municipal minimums $15, are more than 50% higher than the relevant state minimums and double the federal minimum.

      It’s the municipal minimums that drive the decision to not expand in those cities

      • By MattS