Fair Labor Standard Act Mandate: How Do Higher Education Human Resource Departments React?

Mandates from the United States government may create drastic changes in the university landscape. The Fair Labor Standard Act (FLSA) Mandate that was expected to go into effect in December of 2016 provided a means to understand how required changes impact the human resource (HR) departments within institutions. This paper addresses the primary concerns of institutional human resource departments as the FLSA mandate required status changes for up to 15% of the campus workforce. Analysis of forecasted issues with employee engagement generated central issues regarding ability to communicate with constituents, resources available to HR departments, faculty and staff morale, compensation fairness, while not concentrating on employee engagement.

“‘A Sweat Shop of the Whole Nation’: The Fair Labor Standard Act and the Failure of Regulatory Unionism”

The history of the American welfare state is often recounted as a long line of missed opportunities. As the story goes, the absence of a labor party, or American exceptionalism, helped create a weak welfare state. Initially, some political scientists, labor economists, and historians attributed American exceptionalism to the pure and simple unionism of the American Federation of Labor (AFL). In the 1990s, however, a number of political scientists and legal historians revised their understanding of American exceptionalism. Given the legal bias within the common law that benefited individuals rather than groups, conservative state and federal court judges pursued peremptory legal strategies, like the labor injunction, that shaped the course of the American labor movement. It was repressive state action, the revisionists argue, that explains why organized labor, and the unions that came to dominate the movement, pursued a less expansive vision of trade unionism and the American state.