Unit VIII Employment Law ***FOR MATHGUY18 ONLY***

BHR 3565, Employment Law 1

Course Learning Outcomes for Unit VIII Upon completion of this unit, students should be able to:

4. Explain government regulations of the workplace with regards to unions, collective bargaining, health and safety, hours, wages, workman’s compensation, pensions, and health benefits. 4.1 Discuss how union elections are to be conducted. 4.2 Analyze the application of wage and hour laws to specific situations. 4.3 Examine how OSHA regulations apply in employment situations. 4.4 Explain the circumstances under which workers’ compensation laws apply.

Reading Assignment Chapter 18: Unions and Collective Bargaining Agreements Chapter 19: Wage and Hour Regulation Chapter 20: Occupational Safety and Health Chapter 21: Workers’ Compensation

Unit Lesson Studying the history of labor laws in the United States is a bit like looking at a pendulum in a clock – it swings one way until it reaches the extreme of its movement, and then it moves back the other way. By the beginning of the twentieth century, employers had become powerful as the result of the industrial revolution, and employees were often at the mercy of the policies that employers instituted and the wages that employers were willing to pay. As you can imagine, that power in the hands of employers sometimes led to employers taking advantage of and even abusing employees. In 1932, Congress passed the Norris-LaGuardia Act and in 1935, the Wagner Act (also called the National Labor Relations Act). These acts declared certain actions by employers to be illegal and empowered unions to form to represent workers in dealing with employers, thus limiting and, in some cases eroding, the power that employers had exercised over employees. Although the increased power of unions was, in theory, good for employees, in too many cases, unions used their new power to improperly convince employees to allow the unions to represent them and to improperly force employers to make concessions to employees. This overreaching by unions resulted in more federal legislation – the Taft-Hartley Act (also called the Labor Management Relations Act) in 1947 and the Landrum-Griffin Act in 1959 which established specific actions by unions to be illegal, gave union members certain rights that unions could not violate, and established processes to address corruption by union officials (Moran, 2014). There are still cases where either management (employers) or labor (unions) allege that the other has violated some federal law that establishes what management and labor cannot do in dealing with employees and each other. However, the federal law framework for labor relations is now in place, and there are other federal laws that influence the relationship between employers and employees. For instance, there are several federal laws that address compensation. The Fair Labor Standards Act, enacted in 1938, provides for the establishment of the minimum wage. Although the actual amount of the minimum wage has increased over the years (and there is now consideration of additional increases), this law

UNIT VIII STUDY GUIDE

Government Regulation of the Employment Relationship

BHR 3565, Employment Law 2

UNIT x STUDY GUIDE

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establishes the concept that most employees are entitled to receive a minimum amount for their labors, whatever those labors are. As is often the case with such laws, there are exceptions to the minimum wage law, and those exceptions are the subject of most of the disputes involving minimum wage. For example, the minimum wage law does not apply to managerial employees who receive a salary. For employees who are paid on an hourly basis, the minimum wage law establishes the amount that they must be paid for each hour that they work and also provides that after a certain number of hours are worked in a specified time period, the employees are entitled to an additional amount of compensation per hour for such “overtime” work. However, if an employee is classified as an “exempt” employee (meaning exempt for the minimum wage law), then that employee is not entitled to overtime pay because he or she is paid a salary rather than an hourly rate, so he or she is not compensated by the hour (Moran, 2014). There is another category of federal laws that deal with the employment relationship, that is, the laws that deal with the obligation of employers to insure the health and safety of their employees while those employees are on the job. The Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970 established the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) to establish and enforce regulations designed to make workplaces safer for employees. In carrying out that responsibility, OSHA has established regulations relating to employee safety, ranging from when safety helmets must be worn to how workers working on roofs must be secured to keep them from falling to how laboratories using hazardous materials must be vented. OSHA has the legal authority to not only establish these rules but to inspect workplaces to ensure that the rules are being followed, investigating accidents that do occur in work places, and fining employers who are found to have violated the rules (Moran, 2014). With respect to situations when employees are injured while working, one of the problems that employees encounter when seeking to sue their employer to recover for such injuries was first having to make a claim against the employer and potentially suffer retaliation from the employer, but also having to prove that he or she (the injured employee) had not done something to contribute to the injury. To resolve these difficulties, most states now have workers’ compensation laws. Although these laws differ from state to state, the general framework of these laws provides that employers either have workers’ compensation insurance or contribute to a state workers’ compensation fund, so that an employee injured on the job files a claim against the worker’s compensation insurance or with the state worker’s compensation agency and is paid for his or her injuries. That approach takes the burden of proving who was responsible for the injury from the injured employee, but at the same time, the injured employee gives up the right to seek damages from the employer (Moran, 2014).

Reference Moran, J. J. (2014). Employment law: New challenges in the business environment (6th ed.). Upper Saddle

River, NJ: Prentice Hall.

Key Terms 1. Child labor 2. Collective bargaining 3. Collective bargaining agreement 4. Emergency standards 5. Employer defenses 6. Greater hazard defense 7. National consensus standards 8. Occupational Safety and Health Administration 9. Permanent disability

10. Wage and hour regulation 11. Workers’ compensation 12. Yellow-dog contracts