Category: News

“The CUNY School Of Labor And Urban Studies Appoints Labor Lawyer Ellen Dichner As Distinguished Lecturer In Labor Studies”

CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies press release, November 1, 2019

A New York state court has dismissed Uber’s lawsuit challenging the city’s cap on the number of for-hire vehicles allowed on city streets. The decision marks the latest defeat for Uber in its legal battles with the city over regulations that target e-hailing services.

James Reif, a partner at Gladstein, Reif & Meginniss LLP and a key member of the city’s litigation team, played a central role in defending the cap. Reif emphasized that Uber’s business model has significantly contributed to congestion in New York City, noting that its vehicles spend 42% of their time on the road without passengers.

The ruling was welcomed by the New York Taxi Workers Alliance, which represents thousands of drivers, including those working with Uber and other e-hailing platforms.

City officials, including the Taxi and Limousine Commission (TLC), also celebrated the ruling, with Acting TLC Commissioner Bill Heinzen noting that the decision reinforces the city’s authority to manage traffic and improve working conditions for drivers who would be bringing home an additional $750 a month on average as a result of the victory.

Read the decision and order.

Coverage by Bloomberg Law can be found.

 

In a significant win for union advocates, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit upheld a National Labor Relations Board ruling that a New Jersey-based rehabilitation and skilled nursing facility violated federal labor law by withholding improved healthcare benefits from 200 employees during a union election. The Union was represented in the litigation by Gladstein, Reif & Meginniss, LLP.

The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) had previously ruled against Woodcrest, and the appeals court upheld that ruling.

Read the opinion.

Coverage by Bloomberg Law can be found.

Former National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) member Kent Hirozawa has rejoined Gladstein, Reif & Meginniss LLP as a partner, the firm announced Tuesday.

A longtime labor lawyer, Hirozawa returns to the firm after his term at the NLRB expired in 2016. He originally spent over two decades at Gladstein Reif prior to his appointment to the board by President Barack Obama in 2013. He also previously served as chief counsel to former NLRB Chair Mark Gaston Pearce.

In his time on the NLRB, Hirozawa played a key role in several landmark pro-labor decisions, including:

• The 2015 Browning-Ferris decision, which expanded the NLRB’s definition of joint employers.
• The 2016 Columbia University ruling, which allowed graduate teaching and research assistants to unionize.
• A 2014 rule change streamlining union elections, dubbed by critics as the “ambush election” rule.

Since leaving the board, Hirozawa has been active in academia, serving as a visiting scholar at NYU School of Law and teaching labor law at CUNY School of Law.

Coverage by Law360 can be found.

 

Two senior students at Fordham University publicly warned classmates about longstanding harassment allegations against associate philosophy professor William Jaworski, resulting in a university investigation and disciplinary charges against the students.

Jaworski had been the subject of numerous formal and informal complaints over more than a decade, with substantiated cases involving sexual harassment and unprofessional conduct. In January, before classes began, seniors Samantha Norman and Eliza Putnam informed students in two of Jaworski’s Philosophical Ethics classes about his history and urged caution. Following this, the university accused the students of dishonesty, disorderly conduct, and verbal harassment, ultimately upholding the dishonesty charge.

Fordham placed Jaworski on paid suspension through the end of the fall semester, citing violations of the university’s code of conduct and the impact on female students’ sense of safety. Jaworski denied the allegations, with his legal counsel attributing the accusations to opposition against his traditional views on sexuality and morality.

Kent Y. Hirozawa of Gladstein, Reif & Meginniss, LLP, the attorney representing the students, criticized the university’s response as an effort to suppress the students’ attempts to break a culture of silence around sexual abuse. He characterized the students’ actions as courageous and necessary to protect future victims.

The students expressed frustration over being disciplined for raising awareness but remained committed to their decision.

Read the New York Times’ coverage

Woodcrest Health Care Center in New Milford, New Jersey, has been ordered by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) to retroactively provide health benefit improvements and back pay to a group of workers it excluded just days before a union vote. The NLRB found that the nursing home violated federal labor laws by denying the enhancements solely to employees eligible to vote on union representation.

The dispute began when Woodcrest announced better health benefits, including lower premiums and copayments, but excluded workers involved in the upcoming union election. The company claimed it acted to maintain neutrality during the “critical period” of the union campaign. However, the board determined that Woodcrest failed to justify its actions with credible evidence or testimony.

Although a federal appeals court initially sided with Woodcrest and remanded the case for reconsideration, the NLRB reaffirmed that the facility’s conduct was unlawful under the correct legal standards. The board concluded that the company did not provide a legitimate business reason for its decision and did not consult the union or later offer the same benefits post-election.

The ruling marks another step in a years-long legal battle between the facility and union members of 1199SEIU United Healthcare Workers, represented by Katherine Hansen of Gladstein, Reif & Meginniss, LLP. The decision reinforces employee rights to organize and prohibits employers from discriminatory practices during union activities.

Read’s Bloomberg Law’s coverage

A New York State appellate court has revived a legal challenge by two tenured professors at New York University’s School of Medicine who are contesting involuntary salary reductions linked to external funding requirements. The professors, Marie Monaco and Herbert Samuels, represented by Katherine Hansen and Beth Margolis of Gladstein, Reif & Meginniss, LLP, argue that these cuts violated a de facto contract embodied in NYU’s faculty handbook, which they say guarantees academic freedom and economic security.

Previously, a lower court dismissed the case, ruling there was no evidence that the faculty handbook created a binding contract or guaranteed a specific level of salary support. However, the appellate court recently ruled that the professors had sufficiently alleged that the faculty handbook’s policies form an essential part of the employment agreement and carry contractual force preventing involuntary salary reductions.

Monaco emphasized the significance of the ruling for tenured faculty members who rely on the handbook to define their rights, warning that without this recognition, many could be treated as at-will employees. The case highlights broader concerns over tenure protections amid increasing challenges to academic job security.

The lawsuit is supported by the American Association of University Professors. Legal experts note that New York courts often resist viewing employment handbooks as binding contracts, making this decision notable.

Read coverage by Inside Higher Ed

By Jana Kasperkevic

As it appeared in the Guardian – https://www.theguardian.com/money/2014/sep/30/maria-fernandes-dunkin-donuts-part-time-work-hours-schedule-crisis\

All Maria Fernandes wanted was a nap.

Juggling three jobs, her only opportunity to do so was to sleep in her car after she drove from one job to another. All three of her jobs were with Dunkin’ Donuts. Each was at a different location. She spent so much time in her car that she found it easier to just sleep there between shifts.

On 25 August, after working her regular overnight shift in Linden, New Jersey, Fernandes drove to a parking lot where, after briefly speaking with her boyfriend, she curled up for a quick nap. She never woke up. Poisoned by the carbon monoxide and fumes from an overturned gas can, she was found dead eight hours later.

“This sounds like someone who tried desperately to work and make ends meet, and met with a tragic accident,” Elizabeth, New Jersey police Lt Daniel Saulnier said at the time.

Fernandes’ death highlights the difficulties of part-time workers: their struggle for hours, which can get so intense that they must lie about their other jobs or pretend they don’t have children; how uninformed they are about the laws that govern their schedules; how their schedules can be used by managers to punish them.

These problems affect millions of people. In August, there were over 7.2 million part-time workers who wanted a full-time job, but couldn’t find one. That same month about 3.4 million workers held two jobs in order to make ends meet; for one-third of those workers, both of those jobs were part time.

The part-time worker is becoming a new normal – and it is an adult problem. Much of the fast-food industry, in particular, has been built on the outdated perception that minimum-wage jobs are only for high-school or college students. In 2013, 4.7 million of involuntary part-time US workers were over 25-years-old; a million of them were over 55-years-old.

“The long-term picture is this is much more part of the American economy than it was a generation ago,” says Arun Ivatury, campaign strategist at the National Employment Law Project.

“The image that these fast-food empires create of ‘Well, most of our people are just high school students and they are just trying to make a couple of extra dollars after they get out of school every day’ is a total bullshit,” says James Reif, partner at Gladstein, Reif & Meginniss, LLP. His firm is suing McDonald’s in a wage-theft case.

“Most part-time workers don’t want to work part-time. They want to work full-time,” says Reif. “If you look at McDonald’s workforce, the vast majority of people are not only not of high school age, they could be in their 30s or 40s or whatever. They could’ve been working there for years and they are always looking to work more time.”

While the increase in part-time work was mainly due to recession, employers have now come to realize the benefits of employing mostly part-time workers instead of full-time ones. By relying on part-time workforce, employers can avoid paying overtime and benefits like health care.

The power is in the hands of employers, says Ivatury.

“What little regulations there are for hourly workers – with part-time workers you can avoid even those,” explains Ivatury.

He attributes the scheduling crisis in part-time work to “the efforts of employers to keep as much flexibility for themselves as possible to avoid as many obligations as they can towards their workforce”.

“As a result, you are seeing more cases like that of Maria Fernandes where people end up struggling, and end up in a situation that might be dangerous to themselves and be difficult for their families, because they are just trying to make ends meet,” says Ivatury.

In Fernandes’s case, her managers described her as a model employee over her four years with the company in Linden, New Jersey. Yet, they wouldn’t give her enough hours to round out a full-time job: each manager, intent on keeping her as only a part-time employee, wouldn’t provide her with more hours when she asked them. About year and a half ago, she obtained two other jobs, both at Dunkin’ Donuts locations, to cobble together the equivalent of one full-time job.

Fernandes is not rare.

Part-time workers often have to find ways to get around the rules. In other cases, fear has many part-time workers dissembling about their lives, forced to pretend they don’t have children or other responsibilities so that they look more employable.

Most places who depend on part-time workers won’t even hire an employee if they know he or she has another job.

“Even just to get hired, you have to have open availability,” explains Sasha Hammad, director of the Retail Action Project, an initiative of Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union.

I have spoken to many parents who have said that in job interviews, they actually don’t reveal that they have children, because they are afraid that employers will think: ‘Oh, they are going to want to pick up their child from child care’ or ‘Oh, they’ll need to be home at night to make them dinner or help them with their homework. We don’t want that kind of restriction. We want maximum flexibility.’

As a result, workers hide the fact they have children and try not mention them at work.

These low-wage workers also have to juggle their obligations to their family with this job that barely enables them to make ends meet.

Another source of fear: retribution for being anything less than perfectly available.

Few protections are extended to part-time workers, so schedules can be used as a weapon to carry out punishment.

If a worker is asked to work an extra shift or stay few extra hours and refuses, it’s likely that his or her hours will be cut. “That’s a common practice across the board. Workers are really afraid to say no to employers’ last minute requests because they know that,” says Hammad.

“There is a lot of fear in stores. Scheduling is often used as a tool of punishment,” she adds.

The result is predictable: most workers refuse to say “no” to even the worst hours. They also can’t afford to reject hours, because working more hours means more money.

Many stores also use technology that dehumanizes the process. Ng Ju San, a former McDonald’s worker told the Guardian earlier this year:

The manager would always look at point of sales, POS, system, a restaurant software, to make sure that no one got too many hours so as to not pay them too much. Sometimes we would have a lot of customers, but the POS would flag the manager, ‘Hey, you are paying too much in salary.’

He would say: ‘Oh, you must go home’ even though everyone was already working at their max because of the orders that were coming in. He would still send you home, because the algorithms would tell him that he has too high of an overhead and he must cut that down until he can improve profit. So you end up with even more orders but fewer people to work on them.

The future of scheduling will be in Congress and in the courts. Senator Elizabeth Warren has introduced legislation on the issue, and the lawsuit that Reif’s firm has leveled against McDonald’s is currently pending in a New York court.

Reif says the problem comes down to accountability, which is hard to find in the franchise system that rules most fast-food places who depend on minimum-wage workers.

“The franchisors – the big boss, the McDonald’s, the Dunkin’ Donuts, the Burger Kings, the Starbucks, the whatever of the world – engage these middle men, who are the franchisees to cook and sell their product and whenever a worker in one of these places sues the franchisee, they can have the same line as the garment manufacturers have: ‘Oh, I am terribly shocked to learn that you are being mistreated at your work, but I have no responsibility for it, because I am not your employer.’”

By Julia Marsh

As it appeared in the New York Post – https://nypost.com/2014/07/18/profs-sue-nyu-over-pay-cuts-allegedly-tied-to-lack-of-grant-money/

Two longtime NYU medical professors are suing the school, claiming their salaries were slashed because they didn’t bring in enough grant money — even though their research data were destroyed during Hurricane Sandy.

Physiologist Dr. Marie Monaco — who has been a vocal opponent of the university’s loans for employee vacation homes — and biochemist Dr. Herbert Samuels, who has been at the university since 1970, say their labs were flooded in the storm because of NYU’s failure to protect the facilities.

The data “is the backbone of their research and critical to their ability to secure extramural funding,” the Manhattan civil suit says.

Still, the tenured professors were notified last spring of impending pay cuts. Monaco’s $167,646 salary will drop over the course of five years to $94,646 and Samuels’ $287,652 will go to $189,652 in that same period.

They want the court to overturn the cuts that start this fall.

Monaco, who was hired in 1980, says administrators are applying the policy in an “arbitrary and unequal fashion,” giving leeway to some colleagues who were affected by the storm while cracking down on others.

Monaco’s attorney, Katherine Hansen, said she’s concerned NYU is punishing her client for her outspoken opposition to questionable spending.

Her lab at the Langone Medical Center’s Veterans Affairs Hospital lost all of the refrigerated cells used for experiments when the power went out and there were no generators to preserve the materials.

“The loss of data has negatively impacted [Monaco and Samuels’] ability to secure extramural funding and will continue to make it difficult for them to secure grants for many years,” the suit says.

School policy dictates that 60 percent of professors’ salaries related to research must be covered by outside funds, according to the suit.

NYU spokeswoman Lisa Greiner said the policy started in 2008 “to bring its job performance requirements in line with other nationally recognized academic medical centers.”

*The Professors are represented by Katherine Hansen and Beth Margolis of Gladstein, Reif & Meginniss, LLP

By Jon Swaine

As it appeared in the Guardian – https://www.theguardian.com/business/2014/mar/13/mcdonalds-lawsuits-allege-wage-theft-franchise-owners

McDonald’s is being sued in three states by workers who allege that the fast-food giant is systematically stealing the wages of tens of thousands of employees.

Seven lawsuits, some of them requesting class-action status, have been filed this week against the corporation and McDonald’s franchise-owners in California, Michigan and New York, lawyers announced on Thursday afternoon.

The lawsuits allege that thousands of McDonald’s workers have their pay pushed below the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour, through a variety of practices. Some are not paid for all the time they work, some have wages docked in order to pay for their uniforms and some are made to wait for hours until busy periods before they are allowed to clock in, the complaints allege.

“These suits have been filed to stop this widespread wage theft,” said Joseph Sellers, one of the attorneys for the workers, in a conference call. “They highlight a broad array of unlawful pay practices, which together reflect ways in which McDonald’s has withheld pay from its low-paid workers in order to enrich the corporation and its shareholders.”

Heidi Barker Sa Shekhem, a spokeswoman for McDonald’s, said in an emailed statement the company was “currently reviewing the allegations in the lawsuits”.

“McDonald’s and our independent owner-operators share a concern and commitment to the well-being and fair treatment of all people who work in McDonald’s restaurants,” she said. “McDonald’s and our independent franchisees are committed to undertaking a comprehensive investigation of the allegations and will take any necessary actions as they apply to our respective organisations.”

Representatives for the plaintiffs stressed on Thursday that McDonald’s made more than $5.5bn in profit a year on revenues of about $28bn, and that the total annual pay package for Don Thompson, its chief executive, amounts to about $13.75m.

They said that if granted class-action status, the lawsuits could apply to more than 25,000 workers. They declined to estimate a total for the compensation being sought in back-pay but said McDonald’s could also be forced to pay extra damages and legal penalties.

Across three lawsuits filed in California, workers allege that McDonald’s bosses there failed to pay workers for all the hours they worked, prevented them from taking breaks or time out for meals, and even altered records in order to remove hours worked from time-sheets.

“When I took a job at McDonald’s, I knew I wouldn’t be making a lot of money,” Jason Hughes, a plaintiff in one of the California suits, told reporters during the conference call. “But I thought a well known company like McDonald’s would treat me fairly – at the very least follow the law. We have brought this lawsuit because neither has happened.”

In Michigan, two lawsuits filed against McDonald’s and two Detroit-area franchise owners allege that bosses forced workers to buy their own uniforms and frequently made employees who arrived on time for their shifts wait without pay until a number of customers arrived at the restaurant.

“McDonald’s franchisees closely monitor the ratio of labour costs to revenues,” lawyers said in a news release about the lawsuits. “When it exceeds a corporate-set target, managers tell workers arriving for their shifts to wait for up to an hour to clock in, and sometimes direct workers who have already clocked in for scheduled shifts to clock out for extended breaks until the target ratio is again achieved.”

Meanwhile a lawsuit filed in New York alleges that low-paid workers were forced to spend their own time and money cleaning their uniforms, sometimes three times a week, in violation of New York state laws requiring firms to pay employees for uniform maintenance.

“Because McDonald’s restaurants pay so little, forcing workers to clean their Golden Arches uniforms on their own dime drives many workers’ wages below the legal minimum,” said Jim Reif, an attorney who filed the New York lawsuit.

The lawsuits are being assisted by a union-backed campaign that has been pushing since 2012 for a rise in the federal minimum wage to $15 and the right for fast-food workers to form trade unions without retaliation.