NLRB Winks at Offensive Workplace Language … Again

A very important discovery has been made through the reviewed literature and theories showing existence of an intricate relationship between natural surroundings and the prevalence of offensive language, aiming to unravel the underlying dynamics that contribute to linguistic behavior in diverse environmental contexts. Through a multidisciplinary approach that integrates insights from psychology, sociology, and environmental science, the study established the impact of natural environments on the frequency, intensity, and contextual nuances of offensive language. Therefore, the purpose of this research paper was to explore the correlation between the natural surroundings and the prevalence of offensive language in society: a case study on three (3) selected communities in Lusaka district. The sample consisted of sixty (90) respondents. A representative sample of 60 adolescents and 30 parents: i.e., 20 adolescents from each named compound and 30 parents, that is, 10 from each compound were randomly selected from the three compounds in the district. Qualitative method was applied during data analysis. The results of the study indicated that environmental factors, including the natural surroundings do influence human behavior and emotions thereby adversely affecting language use in various contextual settings. It was equally revealed that exposure to nature or green spaces has a positive effect on the mental well-being, reducing stress and promoting positive mood amongst people living in low density residential compounds where the use of offensive language is less, as opposed to high density residential compounds where the use of offensive (profane) language is heavily influenced by numerous social, cultural, and personal factors among others.

Software Engineering (SE) communities such as Stack Overflow have become unwelcoming, particularly through members' use of offensive language. Research has shown that offensive language drives users away from active engagement within these platforms. This work aims to explore this issue more broadly by investigating the nature of offensive language in comments posted by users in four prominent SE platforms - GitHub, Gitter, Slack and Stack Overflow (SO). It proposes an approach to detect and classify offensive language in SE communities by adopting natural language processing and deep learning techniques. Further, a Conflict Reduction System (CRS), which identifies offence and then suggests what changes could be made to minimize offence has been proposed. Beyond showing the prevalence of offensive language in over 1 million comments from four different communities which ranges from 0.07% to 0.43%, our results show promise in successful detection and classification of such language. The CRS system has the potential to drastically reduce manual moderation efforts to detect and reduce offence in SE communities.

The growing use of social media has increased online harassment, cyberhate, and the use of offensive language. This poses significant challenges for effectively detecting and addressing such issues. Natural Language Processing (NLP) has seen considerable advancements; however, automatically identifying offensive language remains a complex task due to the ambiguous and informal nature of user-generated content and the social context in which it occurs. In this thesis, our goal is to develop methods for automatic detection of offensive language in social media. Multiple classification algorithms, including Multinomial Naive Bayes, Gaussian Naive Bayes, SVM, Logistic Regression, and LSTM, are implemented and evaluated. Key measures including accuracy, F1 score, and AUC score are used to evaluate how well these algorithms work. Results show that the Random Forest Classifier obtains an AUC score of 0.65 and an accuracy of 0.82 without word2vec. On the other hand, LSTM demonstrates a competitive AUC score of 0.78 when compared to the Random Forest Classifier. These findings provide insights into the effectiveness of different algorithms for offensive language detection. The research contributes to the field by providing valuable tools and insights to enhance Turkish language processing and prioritize online safety, particularly in combating cyberbullying and fostering a tolerant online environment. The findings also pave the way for future research endeavors in natural language processing and have practical implications for protecting individuals and promoting a secure online space.

Linguists argue women's linguistic politeness is influenced by societal perceptions, but as gender equality advances, the concept of women's language evolves, involving debates on offensive language. Therefore, this study investigated the utilization of offensive language by women TikTokers in the Free Palestine campaign. The research focuses on the study of issue statements regarding the various forms of offensive language used by women TikTokers participating in the Free Palestine campaign. This study employs Battistella's (2005) theory, which posits four distinct categories of offensive language. This study employed a qualitative approach, utilizing data obtained from the transcriptions of three female TikTok users, namely Kayla, Katie, and Heba. According to the research findings, women who use TikTok employ all of Battistella's offensive language categories a total of 223 times in their videos. Among women TikTokers, the term "obscenity" is the most frequently utilized, appearing a total of 159 times. It is followed by "epithets," which appear 30 times; "profanity," which appears 19 times; and "vulgarity," which appears 15 times. This study presents empirical evidence demonstrating that the linguistic patterns exhibited by Kayla, Katie, and Heba, who are female TikTokers, deviate from the conventional characteristics of women's language, specifically in relation to the usage of swearing as described by Lakoff. Kayla, Katie, and Heba exercise a greater degree of autonomy in expressing themselves through the use of offensive language, without fear of criticism or judgment.

Today, some sixty years after passage of the Taft‐Hartley amendments to the National Labor Relations Act, it seems that the centerpiece of the Act has become the right to refrain from protected, concerted or union activity. The original 1935 legislation was enacted, of course, to protect the right to engage in that activity, and to encourage the practice of collective bargaining. For nearly sixty years after Taft‐Hartley added the “right to refrain” to Section 7's employee protections, the Board has struggled to reconcile the sometimes competing statutory goals of promoting the stability of collective bargaining relationships and the individual freedom of choice, preserved by Section 7. That has changed, however, as the National Labor Relations Board, in several recent decisions, has said for the first time, that freedom of choice—which is to say, the freedom to reject union representation—prevails in the statutory scheme. It is as if the law, in abandoning the primacy of achieving economic justice through collective action, has been turned inside out. The stakes for this shift in policy are great.

Broken Promise details the post-Taft-Hartley course of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). Resting on exhaustive research in Board files and other relevant archives and on the results of a massive oral history project that James Gross has directed, it is a unique and authoritative study. No federal agency has had its records so thoroughly examined, its personnel and clientele so extensively interviewed, or its activities so copiously documented. Gross's discussions of the Board's decisions, its internal operations, and its relationship to employers, unions, and Congress and the president are clear, insightful, and judicious. Along with his preceding two volumes on the NLRB, Gross's Broken Promise stands as a monumental work of scholarship.' This is the story of a New Deal agency that has come to serve virtually opposite purposes from those its originators intended. Once the handmaiden of a rising labor movement, the NLRB became in the 1980s, if not before, an obstacle to organized labor and to the stated purposes of the original law. Today, the only defense of the NLRA [National Labor Relations Act] comes from the business community, declares the director of the AFL-CIO's Task Force on Labor Law.2 Having failed repeatedly to achieve legislative reform, unions today turn only reluctantly to the NLRB. The original National Labor Relations Act (the Wagner Act, passed in 1935) grew out of three decades of debate over federal labor policy. Senator Robert F. Wagner and his staff sought to craft a law that would encourage collective bargaining as a means of boosting consumer demand, reducing conflict over union recognition, and extending democratic rights to the workplace. They wanted to right the wrongs that had become apparent during the work of the labor boards established under the National Recovery Administration, notably the National Labor Board (1933-34), which Wagner chaired, and the first National Labor Relations Board (1934-35). The distinctive features of the new law-its stipulation of majority rule, listing of unfair labor practices, outlawing of company unionism, creation of an authoritative independent agency,

The Employee: A Political History Jean-Christian Vinel. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013.Today, millions of workers in the United States find themselves excluded from the legal category of the employee-a critical distinction that would otherwise permit unionization and collective bargaining. In this book, combining labor history, sociological analysis, and legal history, Vinel traces the history of this term from its entry in the public lexicon during the Progressive Era through the New Deal order to recent efforts to amend federal labor law. All the while, this French Americanist connects his expose' to the larger narrative of American progressivism and liberalism, management practices, and the history of social thought on both sides of the Atlantic. Vinel provides deeper insights through cross-national comparisons, especially with France and Britain. Through a meticulous analysis of Supreme Court rulings and National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) decisions, he demonstrates that the definition of employee has always been politically contested and influenced by competing claims on the part of business and labor.In the context of the 1947 Taft-Hartiey Act, businessmen pressured Congress into amending the 1935 National Labor Relations Act (or Wagner Act) so that foremen in the nation's leading automobile, steel, and mining companies would not be allowed to organize and make common cause with rank-and-file workers. Relying on a concept inherited from the colonial master and servant doctrine, corporate America insisted that unless they were production workers, employees owed a duty of loyalty to their employers. They reasoned that, for supervisors, foremen, and managers, unionism was incompatible with the faithful exercise of duty because it would result in divided loyalties, that is, these workers would be torn between their allegiance to the union and their responsibilities toward their employer. As a result, since the 1940s the protection of the right to organize in the United States has been subject to a tension between freedom of association and loyalty. The book shows that at different junctures business executives were seriously concerned about the possible defection of workers they deemed essential to their authority over the workplace, including foremen, procurement buyers, nurses, and even university professors, as in one famous case that culminated in the 1980 Supreme Court decision NLRB v. Yeshiva University that largely blocked collective bargaining for private college faculty members.In offering his political genealogy of the Wagner Act, Vinel argues that opposition to class antagonism shaped elite conceptions of labor relations at the turn of the twentieth century and informed views of the democratization of the workplace. During the Progressive Era, labor reformers-mostly middle-class men and women-formulated their own version of the nineteenth-century conservative discourse of social harmony and thereby took a middle position between classical liberalism and socialism, emphasizing the pursuit of the public interest and the promotion of the working-class's welfare as a means toward social cohesion. A leading figure in this effort was John R. Commons, the founder of the Wisconsin school of labor history, who offered a new vision of social harmony in the workplace: by fostering collective bargaining it was possible to inculcate cooperative values in workers and to deflect class antagonism. …

The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) recently announced a “Know Your Rights” card series, to be published in both English and Spanish, to advise workers of their rights under the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA). According to NLRB General Counsel Jennifer Abruzzo, “This card series is one of many steps we're taking to ensure that all workers know their workplace rights and understand that there is a federal agency, the NLRB, that they may seek help from if they feel that their rights have been violated. The cards will advance the NLRB's efforts to remove barriers for workers in underserved communities through education, outreach, and process so that all workers can safely access the NLRB.”

Well over a century ago, legal and policy analysts realized that the days of purely individual action in matters of business and labor were over, and that legal rules must adapt to the social and economic power of large corporations. Among the rules that changed were archaic limitations on joinder of claims and parties in litigation and laissez faire “liberty of contract” doctrines invalidating labor legislation. Recently, lawyers representing large corporate employers have urged a revival of old rules limiting class actions and labor rights. But, as this Article will show, it is not at all clear that their clients will benefit from the legal regime the lawyers have created. As long as employers have large workforces working under uniform policies, they will face dozens or hundreds of similar claims challenging pay practices, discrimination, and harassment. Group adjudication arose to address efficiently the many similar claims that arise when large institutions adopt uniform policies. Individual arbitration of such claims may result in fewer claims being filed, especially if confidentiality provisions keep co-workers from learning from each other about how to assert successful claims. But unless or until employers figure out a way to shift all the costs of dispute resolution onto the claimaints (and thus far courts have resisted such efforts), and to silence all claimants and their lawyers, employers will face many similar claims, will be paying part or all of the costs of lots of identical arbitrations, and will be paying lawyers to handle them separately rather than on a classwide basis.The National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) protects the right of employees to engage in “concerted activities for the purpose of collective bargaining or other mutual aid or protection.” The National Labor Relations Board (“the Board”) has long held that protected activity includes asserting claims in courts, agencies, and in arbitration. In D.R. Horton, the Board found the NLRA to prohibit enforcement of an employer-imposed requirement that employees waive their right to bring a collective action challenging their working conditions. On petition for review, a divided panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit rejected the Board’s determination, holding that the Federal Arbitration Act (FAA) requires enforcement of the mandatory arbitration agreement, including its class action waiver.This Article explains why collective action waivers or requirements to arbitrate individually are unenforceable under the National Labor Relations Act and the Norris LaGuardia Act. The Article also explains why arbitration agreements requiring claims to be brought by individuals are not covered by the Supreme Court’s reasoning in Concepcion and Italian Colors to the extent they prohibit joinder of fewer parties than would be required to bring a large class action and, therefore, remain protected by labor law. The Article notes the inconsistency in the FAA cases about whether agreements can waive the right to file charges with some agencies and courts rather than others and therefore critiques the Fifth Circuit’s ruling that the FAA trumps the employees’ rights under NLRA sections 7 and 8(a)(1) to file group actions in court or arbitration but does not trump section 8(a)(4), which protects the right to file unfair labor practice charges. Finally, the Article raises some questions about the practical wisdom of the courts’ willingness to allow employers to require employees to pursue claims only as individuals. State and federal courts universally allow liberal joinder of plaintiffs and defendants because it is more efficient and avoids some truly thorny issues about the preclusive effect of judgments. The Fifth Circuit majority’s assumption, like the Supreme Court majority’s in Concepcion, that individual determination of claims is better suited to arbitration is simply wrong in many cases. Unless employers can opt out of the usual rules for the binding effects of judgments and the usual rules for joinder of claims and parties, the notion that individual arbitration is superior for everyone (including employers) is simply wrong.

STRIKES FAIL, CHICKS DIGS SCABS, BUT THE DUTY TO BARGAIN IN GOOD FAITH LASTS FOREVER: What The Replacements Can Teach About U.S. Labor Law, The Professional Football Union, And The Future of Both

Work stoppages have become commonplace in American professional sports. Whether it takes the form of a strike or a lockout, a work stoppage, or the threat thereof accompanies nearly every labor dispute between owners and players. This is hardly surprising, though, because the current system for resolving labor disputes-the National Labor Relations Act and its implementing body, the National Labor Relations Board is ill-fitted to the unique challenges posed by sports labor issues. Additionally, there is no institution tasked with directly overseeing professional sports in America. The same is not true in Europe. Oversight bodies are common throughout Europe and help to resolve sports labor disputes before they turn into full-blown work stoppages. As this Article discusses, American professional sports need this type of oversight. Therefore, this Article advocates a two-tiered approach to solving American professional sports' culture of frequent work stoppages. First, the United States should enact new legislation to govern the resolution of sports labor disputes, as it has already done to regulate labor disputes in other American industries. Second, the United States should create a body charged with overseeing professional sports and implementing this newly-created legislation. By taking these two steps, the United States can end the pattern of work stoppages that plagues professional sports labor disputes and provide stability to this critical American industry.

This article is a detailed historical exploration of the 1975 United States Supreme Court case Western Addition Community Organization v. Emporium Capwell. In this case, the Court held that the National Labor Relations Act does not allow African American workers who are represented by a labor union to bypass that union in order to bargain about issues of racial discrimination directly with their employer. Using archival source materials as well as oral histories of some of the participants, the article chronicles the litigation from its inception in San Francisco in 1968, through its adjudication before the National Labor Relations Board, the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, and the Supreme Court. It argues that the conflict that emerges within the case – between black workers’ right to combat racial discrimination and American labor law’s fundamental commitment to workplace majoritarianism – reflects a broader conflict within the legal and political culture of the late 1960s. American liberalism, the article suggests, was severely weakened by its inability to reconcile its commitments to both racial egalitarianism and progressive wealth redistribution. The Emporium Capwell case and the doctrine that emerged from it is thus the legal analog of the political crisis that weakened liberalism at the end of the 1960s.

President Joe Biden made strong support for organized labor a central part of his 2020 presidential campaign and has made good on that commitment from day one of his presidency. In the hours and days following his inauguration, the President implemented a flurry of personnel and policy changes at the National Labor Relations Board, the federal agency charged with protecting the rights of private sector employees under the National Labor Relations Act.

Employee Electronic Communications in a Boundaryless World

The nature and sources of the New Deal Constitutional Revolution are among the most discussed and debated subjects in constitutional historiography. Scholars have reached significantly divergent conclusions concerning how best to understand the meaning and the causes of constitutional decisions rendered by the Supreme Court under Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes. Though recent years have witnessed certain refinements in scholarly understandings of various dimensions of the phenomenon, the relevant documentary record seemed to have been rather thoroughly explored. Recently, however, a remarkably instructive set of primary sources has become available. For many years, the docket books kept by a number of the Hughes Court justices have been held by the Office of the Curator of the Supreme Court. These docket books supply a wealth of information concerning the internal deliberations of the justices. Justice Pierce Butler’s docket book in particular provides a remarkably rich set of notes on the Court’s discussions of cases in conference. Yet the existence of these docket books was not widely known, and access to them was highly restricted. As a consequence scholars knew very little about the Court’s internal deliberations in the landmark cases of its 1936 October Term. This article, which is based upon a review of all of the surviving docket books from that Term, considers what those sources can teach us about the cases comprising what some have called the “switch-in-time”: West Coast Hotel Co v Parrish, which upheld Washington State’s minimum wage law for women and overruled Adkins v Children’s Hospital; the Labor Board Cases, which upheld the constitutionality of the National Labor Relations Act; and the Social Security Cases, which upheld the constitutionality of provisions of the Social Security Act establishing an old-age pension system and a federal-state cooperative plan of unemployment insurance, as well as corresponding state unemployment compensation statutes. Considered in concert with information previously known, the data revealed by these docket books shed considerable new light on the nature of the Court’s deliberations in each of these three sets of cases, on the reasons for its decisions, and on the contention that the justices wrought a “Constitutional Revolution” in the spring of 1937.