Management Memo

On April 24, 2023, just ten days after Rutgers University faculty ended their week-long strike, Governor Murphy signed bill A4772/S3215 providing workers with increased access to unemployment insurance benefits during labor disputes. The provisions of the bill include:

The General Counsel (“GC”) of the National Labor Relations Board (“NLRB” or “Board”) is urging the Board to upend nearly 60 years of precedent and adopt a new legal standard that significantly limits employers’ ability to hire permanent replacements for striking employees. Under current law, employers have a general right to permanently replace workers who go on strike to obtain economic concessions from their employer, so long as an employer does not hire the replacements for an “independent unlawful purpose.” In an Advice Memorandum released on December 30, 2022, the GC confirmed her intention to push for the Board to impose a more restrictive standard that would require employers to show specific business reasons justifying the decision to replace strikers.

On February 16, 2017, tens of thousands of individuals across the country stayed home from work as part of the “Day Without Immigrants,” a social activism campaign organized in response to President Donald Trump’s recent executive orders concerning immigration and increased enforcement, deportation actions, and raids by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The “Day Without Immigrants” action was apparently not coordinated by any centralized organization, but was promoted on social media and by word-of-mouth just days before.

Now, the same groups that organized ...

The National Labor Relations Board, in a 2-1 decision by Chairman Mark Pearce and Member Kent Hirozawa, in American Baptist Homes of the West, 364 NLRB No. 13, has adopted a new standard for considering the legality of an employer’s hiring of permanent replacements in response to economic strikes. The decision, in the words of Member Philip Miscimarra’s dissent, is not only a “deformation of Board precedent,” but “a substantial rearrangement of the competing interests balanced by Congress when it chose to protect various economic weapons, including the hiring of ...