WRI's Senior Fellow, Gabrielle Rejouis's essay in Feminist Cyberlaw (eds. Meg Leta Jones and Amanda Levendowski, May 2024)

The current content moderation crisis must be addressed through antitrust policies
that use a Black feminist framework. While online violence impacts many groups
of people, social media platforms’ failure to moderate abusive and hateful content
puts Black women in disproportionately dangerous positions.

WRI's Affiliate Fellow, Marta Rozmysłowicz discusses the algorithmic employee evaluation system at Amazon’s warehouses in Poland.

A weekly performance review, the evaluation is a measure of productivity and quality, gathered in real time as warehouse associates scan barcodes throughout the working day. Evaluation results instruct on the employment status of individual workers, without any input from supervisors. The article probes the significance of the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) for bolstering job security at workplaces like Amazon, where HR decisions are automated and based on the processing of work performance data. Article 22 of the GDPR lays down a prohibition for decision-making based solely on the automated processing of personal data. In turn, it establishes the right to human intervention, which might allow employees to avoid the adverse effects of an employee evaluation, if it did not ensure significant human input. Departing from a shop-floor level view of Amazon’s employee evaluation system that is reinforced by insight gained through litigation in Polish labour courts, this article argues that the process of evaluating workers is not a purely technical operation that can be consigned to algorithmic management. Employee evaluation must abide by certain legal criteria, which ultimately requires human discretion

WRI Research Assistant Mell Chhoy published an article in the Georgetown Journal of Poverty Law and Policy with WRI Director Mark Gaston Pearce.

The article seeks to discuss the history and development of case law on protected concerted activity, consider how to reconcile the National Labor Relations Act with employer obligations to curtail discrimination, and introduce workplace rules as a mode favored by employers. Furthermore, this Article deliberates on how recent decisions signal the National Labor Relations Board’s impending treatment of worker speech against racism, namely worker invocation of Black Lives Matter in the workplace

WRI Research Assistant, Shiva Sethi, and WRI director, Mark Gaston Pearce, published online with the Georgetown Journal of Poverty Law and Policy.

They discuss Chipotle's closure of a location in Augusta, Maine following worker organizing. The authors discuss the application of the Darlington line of cases on "partial closures" of business locations intended to chill section 7 activity elsewhere in the business to Chipotle. They propose that the analysis should center terminated workers to offer better protections and that a legislative fix be introduced to clarify how the Board and courts deal with such cases going forward.

WRI research assistant, Percy Metcalfe, explains how the NLRB, in a recent decision, cracks down on employers who seek to silence terminated workers through coercive severance agreements.

WRI Director Mark Gaston Pearce, and WRI Research assistant, Daphne Assimakopoulos, pen this report on the shifting terrain for student organizers and athletes. Summarizing history and recent legal developments, Pearce and Assimakopoulos argue that the current arrangement presents an unsustainable "plantation dynamic" under which universities and coaches profit off the labor of predominantly black student-athletes.

In an attempt to address misclassification, the Department of Labor is proposing a new set of rules to determine which workers are workers and which are independent contractors for the purposes of the Fair Labor Standards Act.

WRI's Senior Fellow, Gabrielle Rejouis's op-ed "A Sieve for Black Workers" in The Forge Organizing

Excluded from minimum wage and union rights, gig workers, disproportionately Black, grapple with a two-tiered system rooted in historical labor laws that must be reformed for racial and worker justice.