By Andrew Cohen
Berkeley Law recently turbo-charged its status as a haven for top work law scholarship and research with three consecutive days of robust conferences that welcomed some of the field’s preeminent voices.
Coordinated by Professors Catherine Fisk ’86 and Diana Reddy Ph.D. ’23, co-faculty directors of the school’s Center for Law and Work (CLAW), the gatherings Sept. 17-19 confronted unionization and collective bargaining, wage and hour compliance, employee misclassification, paid leave, discrimination, accommodation, and plenty more.
“Work law is once again recognized as central to questions of inequality, democracy, and freedom,” says Reddy, who represented labor unions and workers before entering academia. “Good jobs are a driver of just about every other social good you can imagine. Given the challenges of income and wealth inequality, political polarization, social isolation, pandemic-driven labor market changes, and now AI upending the social contract, it’s hard to ignore the importance of how we work.”
Fisk and Reddy developed the idea for hosting these three conferences to bring the widest group of scholars, lawyers, and policymakers together — “and to encourage sharing of ideas among people who aren’t regularly in conversation with one another,” says Fisk, a prolific and award-winning work law scholar.
The annual Work Law Junior Scholars Colloquium welcomed 13 emerging scholars who presented their research, with senior scholars from Berkeley Law and elsewhere serving as commentators. The event, hosted by a different law school each year, features rising academics whose papers are chosen in a competitive process and receive intensive feedback.
In its third year, the colloquium aims to support and foster newer scholars entering the field and broaden the scope of what work law entails by organizing the conference around a different interdisciplinary theme each year. This year’s theme: All law is work law.
“We sought out and selected papers that connect work to other bodies of law, which also shape the experience of work but are understudied in that context,” Reddy says. “We had almost 100 applications and were only able to accept a small fraction. The great thing about hosting these conferences at Berkeley is that we’re able to connect students here with scholars nationwide and worldwide.”
Pioneering scholarship
3L and Berkeley Journal of Employment and Labor Law Co-Editor-in-Chief Ian Fredrickson, who helped lead a lunchtime panel on the article selection and publication process at student journals, calls Berkeley “special for its in-depth coursework and extracurricular offerings in work law.”
“I feel like I have a strong community of like-minded students and professors who want to create a pro-worker future,” he adds. “I can’t imagine being anywhere else.”
The school also welcomed about 90 work law scholars at all career stages for the 21st annual Colloquium on Scholarship in Employment and Labor Law (COSELL), which Fisk has been involved in since its founding. They presented papers, dissected each other’s research, and shared their thoughts on an array of scholarship in labor law, employment law, and related areas such as litigation and alternative dispute resolution.
“What began 21 years ago with a couple dozen American legal scholars has grown to attract an international group of scholars,” Fisk says. “We wanted to bring COSELL here both to showcase the strength of Berkeley Law in the field of work law and to support the vibrant intellectual community.”
That group included T.J. Mertikas, a Ph.D. student in Berkeley Law’s Jurisprudence and Social Policy (JSP) Program, who presented his paper “Labor Banks, Democratic Finance, and Whole-Life Unionism.” It focuses on the labor bank phenomenon of the 1920s and 1930s, when labor leaders recognized that growing personal wealth in the United States could further develop the labor movement. By 1926, some 26 of these banks held over $125 million in assets, over $2 billion in today’s dollars.
“For our time, marked by the long decline of union density and influence, these experiments represent the contingency of our current labor regime and offer alternative ways of thinking about what a union can do,” Mertikas says. “I feel very lucky to be able to develop these ideas at Berkeley Law. Being in the JSP Program, I’m able to take advantage of both doctrinal specialists in the law school and experts from across disciplines when working through research problems.”
Other presentations highlighted AI’s far-reaching impact on the workplace, the continually widening wealth gap, and nefarious forms of employee exploitation that have elevated awareness of work law concerns — and efforts to address them.
California setting the pace
The final conference, hosted by CLAW and the Berkeley Labor Center, examined the past, present, and future of California’s Public Employment Relations Board (PERB) amid its 50th anniversary. A dozen leading practitioners, policy advocates, state officials, and scholars gave presentations on the role state agencies play in protecting workers’ labor rights.
Fisk notes that California is a national leader in work law, having pioneered strategies to reduce the incentives for businesses to compete with each other by driving labor costs down to unlivable levels. The state has also been out front in protecting immigrant workers from the endemic low pay and dangerous working conditions that characterize industries where they work.
“California is at the forefront of innovations in workers’ rights, including by empowering PERB to enforce the unionization and collective bargaining rights of employees who are excluded from federal labor law — such as home care workers, child care workers, and most recently drivers for app-based transportation network companies like Uber and Lyft,” Fisk says. “So far, only California, Massachusetts, and Illinois have created a legal framework to enable drivers to unionize.”
Mertikas and Fredrickson rave about the work-law education, mentorship, and hands-on opportunities available at Berkeley Law. Mertikas calls Fisk and Reddy, along with JSP Professors Christopher Tomlins and Catherine Albiston ’93, Ph.D. ’06 “intellectually generous and endlessly supportive” in developing future work law scholars.
“I don’t think that there is a better place to produce scholarship that evaluates the challenges that working people face — with an orientation toward making the workplace and the broader economy more democratic — than Berkeley,” he says.
Fisk, whose upcoming book No Neutrals: Lawyers for the 20th Century Labor Movement will be the latest addition to her robust work law canon, recalls people asking why she wanted to teach about labor law when she became a law professor in 1991.
“Many said it was a dying field — it wasn’t dying then and it’s vibrant now, even as the legal obstacles to unionizing are higher than ever,” she says. “It’s gratifying to help Berkeley Law bring together experts in the field and to train a new generation of scholars who will bring innovative ideas to the table.”