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Interest of Amici Curiae
The University of Massachusetts Labor Relations and Research Center (Center), founded in 1964, as an integrated program of graduate education, research, and direct service to workers and the labor movement. A primary concern addressed by the Labor Center’s research and educational missions is the decline of collective bargaining and the rise of inequality that has accompanied the rapid growth of precarious forms of non-‐ standard and contingent employment. To this end, the Center initiated a Future of Work Project in 2004 to provide labor and government policy-‐makers with fact-‐driven research that examines the growth of the low-‐wage, contingent labor force as well as the economic and technological forces that are driving this development.
The Labor Center, along with labor centers at other University of Massachusetts campuses, has funded research and published a series of books and reports on the future of work. 1 The Center also sponsored numerous conferences attended by hundreds of labor advocates and government officials where these issues were discussed and debated. The Future of Work Project complements two other of the Center’s research areas. A Labor-‐ Community Research Project explores how unions and community-‐based groups can mobilize in partnership to address labor market shifts, plant-‐closings, subcontracting, with particular emphasis on how these problems impact low-‐wage workers, persons of color, women and immigrants. The Center has also developed a strategic corporate research program allows unions and their allies to efficiently access and analyze comprehensive corporate business data to facilitate their responses the shifting terrain in which labor union organizing and collective bargaining are taking place.
1 The authors of this brief have co-‐wrote a report published by the Future of Work Project, as well as other legal and sociological research cited herein, addressing the role of the temporary staffing industry. They have also both taught courses on the legal and sociological issues posed by the use of temporary staffing arrangements and have consulted extensively with worker centers and other organizations involved in defending the workplace rights of the temporary staffing industry workforce.