United States labor law

(States Twitter)-United States labor law is a heterogeneous collection of state and federal laws. Federal law not only sets the standards that govern workers' rights to organize in the private sector, but overrides most state and local laws that attempt to regulate this area. Federal law also provides more limited rights for employees of the federal government. These federal laws do not, on the other hand, apply to employees of state and local governments, agricultural workers or domestic employees; any statutory protections those workers have derived from state law.

The pattern is even more mixed in the area of wages and working conditions. Federal law establishes minimum wages and overtime rights for most workers in the private and public sectors; state and local laws may provide more expansive rights, Similarly, federal law provides minimum workplace safety standards, but allows the states to take over those responsibilities and to provide more stringent standards.

Finally, both federal and state laws protect workers from employment discrimination. In most areas these two bodies of law overlap; as an example, federal law permits state to enact their own statutes barring discrimination on the basis of race, gender, religion, national origin and age, so long as the state law does not provide less protections than federal law would. Federal law, on the other hand, preempts most state statutes that would bar employers from discriminating against employees to prevent them from obtaining pensions or other benefits or retaliating against them for asserting those rights.

The United States Congress has not ratified the International Labour Organization Convention on the Freedom of Association and Protection of the Right to Organise Convention, 1948 or the Right to Organise and Collective Bargaining Convention, 1949.

Regulation of unions and organizing

Contrary to popular intent, the Sherman Antitrust Act (1890) led to prosecution of unions as illegal combinations, but Section 6 of the Clayton Antitrust Act (1914) ended this practice by stipulating that unions shall not be "construed to be illegal combinations or conspiracies in restraint of trade, under the antitrust laws."

The National Labor Relations Act (the "Wagner Act") gives private sector workers the right to choose whether they wish to be represented by a union and establishes the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) to hold elections for that purpose. As originally enacted in 1935, the NLRA, then also known as "the Wagner Act", makes it illegal for employers to discriminate against workers because of their union membership or retaliate against them for engaging in organizing campaigns or other "concerted activities", to form "company unions", or to refuse to engage in collective bargaining with the union that represented their employees.

The Taft-Hartley Act (also the "Labor-Management Relations Act"), passed in 1947, loosened some of the restrictions on employers, changed NLRB election procedures, and added a number of new limitations on unions. The Act, among other things, prohibits jurisdictional strikes and secondary boycotts by unions, and authorizes individual states to pass "right-to-work laws", regulates pension and other benefit plans established by unions and provides that federal courts have jurisdiction to enforce collective bargaining agreements.

The United States Congress subsequently tightened those restrictions on unions in the Labor Management Reporting and Disclosure Act of 1959, which also regulates the internal affairs of all private sector unions, providing for minimum standards for unions' internal disciplinary proceedings, federal oversight for unions' elections of their own officers, and fiduciary standards for union officers' use of union funds. Congress has since expanded the NLRB's jurisdiction to health care institutions, with unique rules governing organizing and strikes against those employers.

Regulation of wages, benefits and working conditions

The Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 (FLSA) establishes minimum wage and overtime rights for most private sector workers, with a number of exemptions and exceptions. Congress amended the Act in 1974 to cover governmental employees, leading to a series of United States Supreme Court decisions in which the Court first held that the law was unconstitutional, then reversed itself to permit the FLSA to cover governmental employees.

The FLSA does not preempt state and local governments from providing greater protections under their own laws. A number of states have enacted higher minimum wages and extended their laws to cover workers who are excluded under the FLSA or to provide rights that federal law ignores. Local governments have also adopted a number of "living wage" laws that require those employers that contract with them to pay higher minimum wages and benefits to their employees. The federal government, along with many state governments, likewise require employers to pay the prevailing wage, which typically reflects the standards established by unions' collective bargaining agreements in the area, to workers on public works projects.

The Employee Retirement Income Security Act establishes standards for the funding and operation of pension and health care plans provided by employers to their employees. The ERISA preempts most state legislation that attempts to regulate how such plans are administered and, to a great extent, what types of health care coverage they provide. ERISA also preempts state law claims that an employer discriminated against employees in order to prevent them from obtaining the benefits they would have earned otherwise or to retaliate against them for asserting their rights.

Employment discrimination and whistleblowers

While Congress passed laws barring racial discrimination by private employers in 1866 with the Civil Rights Act of 1866, the Supreme Court's decision in the Civil Rights Cases made that Act a dead letter for nearly a century. Congress adopted limited prohibitions against racial discrimination by defense contractors during World War II, but no general prohibition against employment discrimination until it passed Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which bars employment discrimination on the basis of race, gender, national origin and religion. Congress amended that Act in 1972 to cover governmental employers, in 1981 to outlaw employment discrimination on the basis of pregnancy, and again in the Civil Rights Act of 1991 to overturn a number of decisions by the Supreme Court limiting employees' rights.

Job security

While most state and federal laws start from the presumption that workers who are not covered by a collective bargaining agreement or an individual employment agreement are "at will" employees who can be fired without notice and for no stated reason, state and federal laws prohibiting discrimination or protecting the right to organize or engage in whistleblowing activities modify that rule by providing that discharge or other forms of discrimination are illegal if undertaken on grounds specifically prohibited by law. In addition, a number of states have modified the general rule that employment is at will by holding that employees may, under that state's common law, have implied contract rights to fair treatment by their employers. US private-sector employees thus do not have the indefinite contracts (similar to US academic tenure) traditionally common in many European countries.

Public employees in both federal and state government are also typically covered by civil service systems that protect them from unjust discharge. Public employees who have enough rights against unjustified discharge by their employers may also acquire a property right in their jobs, which entitles them in turn to additional protections under the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution.

The Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act, better known by its acronym as the WARN Act, requires private sector employers to give sixty days' notice of large-scale layoffs and plant closures; it allows a number of exceptions for unforeseen emergencies and other cases. Several states have adopted more stringent requirements of their own.

California

In 1959, California added the Division of Fair Employment Practices to the California Department of Industrial Relations. The Fair Employment and Housing Act of 1980 gave the division its own Department of Fair Employment and Housing, with the stated purpose of protecting citizens against harassment and employment discrimination on the basis of:: age, ancestry, color, creed, denial of family and medical care leave, disability (including HIV/AIDS), marital status, medical condition, national origin, race, religion, sex, transgender and orientation. Sexual orientation was not specifically included in the original law but has been established based on case law. In any case, protections outlined in the Fair Employment and Housing Act do not extend beyond the state of California.

The state also has its own labor law covering agricultural workers, the California Agricultural Labor Relations Act.