Railroads Back on Track. After months of negotiating—and a very tense last few days—the national freight railroads have reached tentative agreements with the labor unions representing their employees. The agreements avert a national rail strike that threatened to cripple an already-tenuous supply chain system and cost the U.S. economy $2 billion a day. The tentative agreements include wage increases and new language relating to time off. The deal also includes an extended “cooling-off period”—during which strikes and work stoppages are prohibited—in order to give union membership time to vote on the agreements. While ratification is, of course, not guaranteed, and the situation can still go off the rails, there is now at least some light at the end of the tunnel.
Labor Nominees on the Move. On September 13, 2022, the U.S. Senate Committee on Health Education, Labor and Pensions held a hearing on the nominations of Karla Gilbride to be general counsel of the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) and Jessica Looman to be administrator of the U.S. Department of Labor’s (DOL) Wage and Hour Division (WHD). Both of these positions have been without a Senate-confirmed appointee for the entirety of the Biden administration (though former EEOC general counsel Sharon Fast Gustafson survived for a few weeks until her removal from her position by the president in early March 2021). The administration is obviously hoping to have these nominees confirmed during the...
Congress leaders Harshwardhan Sapkal and Nana Patole, Nationalist Congress Party (SP) legislator Rohit Pawar, and Shiv Sena (Uddhav Balasaheb Thackeray) leader Priyanka Chaturvedi said PM Modi's sp...