Leaders of American-based labor organizations in Puerto Rico aggressively supported a collective bargaining rights bill for public sector workers in 1998 because, so they argued, the new law would help organize the public sector. However, almost ten years after the approval of that bill, it has...

In October of 2008, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) failed to obtain majority support to represent a 40,000-member bargaining unit of public school teachers in Puerto Rico even though it had most of the odds stacked in its favor: a huge war chest, a decertified and bankrupt...

Scholars have noted that judicial conservatism has eroded labor and employment law (hereinafter referred to as “work law”) in the U.S. and elsewhere. The Roberts Court has kept in line with such conservatism, perhaps with sharpened audacity, deciding a number of key work law cases in the...

This article details how minimum wage policies in Puerto Rico facilitated labor market centralization to establish a system of labor relations where labor, capital, and the government trusted each other. That trust, in turn, helped Puerto Rican policy makers to curb wage demands from labor...

Workplace law activists and reformers find it increasingly more difficult to obtain redress for violation of workers' rights. Some of them are calling for stricter enforcement and tougher penalties to bring employers into compliance. However, after seven and half months of participant...

Latin American countries deregulated much less than the United States and Europe during the Great Recession. Perhaps the country with the most the most deregulation was Mexico, where some categories of employment contracts now no longer require cause for termination and where back pay awards...

Globalization has led to union decline almost universally across the world's capitalist democracies. But despite globalization, global labor unions have been able to sign International Framework Agreements (“IFAs”) with more than 110 multinational corporations that cover about 9 million...

In the United States, union density continues to decline, while income inequality increases. But while union density falls we have experienced the counterintuitive rise in international framework agreements (IFAs), or agreements signed by global union federations (“global unions”) and...

Working class disorganization has been a fact in most of the OECD region for the past five decades. Outcomes of disorganization include increasing economic inequality and the precarization of work. But increasing precarization has also led to a surge in low-wage, oftentimes immigrant worker...