I entered academia to publish the type of scholarship that I would have found useful in my time in practice as an in-house labor counsel.
Professor Alvin Velazquez
Indiana University Maurer School of Law
Workplace law scholar Alvin Velazquez (Indiana) has published an essay, Using Business Law to Build Labor Power, in the Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review, demonstrating how the labor movement can deploy corporate and bankruptcy law as tools to build worker power.
Bringing his perspective as a former Associate General Counsel to the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), Professor Velazquez provides on-the-ground accounts of unions successfully using business law to advance organizing and bargaining goals. He describes how the Communication Workers of America (CWA) used the prospect of federal scrutiny of Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision Blizzard to secure a neutrality agreement covering more than 10,000 workers. Similarly, he reveals how an SEIU-backed labor coalition used a threatened proxy fight at Starbucks to help bring the company to the bargaining table after extensive delays. From these examples, Professor Velazquez develops four concrete strategies for union lawyers: (1) drawing on fiduciary principles to justify the deployment of union pension assets in organizing campaigns; (2) leveraging union pension funds’ investments in public companies to press for worker representation on corporate boards of target companies; (3) exercising unions’ rights as creditors in bankruptcy to give workers a greater voice in restructuring decisions; and, most provocatively; (4) filing for Chapter 11 protection to shed or restructure unions’ potentially serious tort liabilities arising out of organizing drives or bargaining disputes.
The essay extends Professor Velazquez’s earlier work on labor and bankruptcy, including Lucha Si, Entrega No: How Retirees Used An ‘Awkward Power Sharing Arrangement’ to Upend a Plan of Adjustment, his study of how retirees and unions in Puerto Rico used the territory’s restructuring process to resist pension cuts. Together these works show how unions and their lawyers can put business law to practical use on behalf of workers. As Professor Velazquez explains, “I entered academia to publish the type of scholarship that I would have found useful in my time in practice as an in-house labor counsel.” These practice-relevant works are a fine example.