Ryan Quinn

From Movement Lawyering to Prefigurative Lawyering: Living Out Liberatory Values Now As the far right consolidates power at the federal level, many progressive lawyers are turning to state policy or crafting rebuilding plans for after the storm. Yet this moment also offers a chance to...

Today, Veryl Pow and Mohini Mookim describe their approach to prefigurative lawyering at the Sustainable Economies Law Center.

By striving to embody the values we wish to see in a liberated future, they argue, we can build a new world in the carcass of the old.

Hale, “Coercion and Distribution in a Supposedly Non-Coercive State” (1923)

An image of the Massachusetts Attorney General's Office Fair labor Division's workplace complaint form, which as of today includes a "Pay/Salary transparency" category and subsidiary violations of the law including the employer's failure to include pay range in a job posting, in an offer of promotion or transfer, in a response to a request for salary range information, or the employer's failure to file an EEO report with the state.

They will also need to provide pay ranges for an incumbent employee's own position upon request. Repeated failure to do so can result in fines. Employees should report violations to the Attorney General's Office, which has added to its workplace complaint form: www.mass.gov/how-to/file-... 5/5

and "just cause" discipline in a collective bargaining agreement provides much more protection against retaliation than the statute does. But still, this is an important new law in Massachusetts. Every employer with 25 or more employees will need to begin posting pay ranges when they post jobs. 4/

Collective bargaining provides both greater information and a stronger bargaining position. A union will have far greater access to information about wages (including wages outside an individual's current job description) than the access under this law... 3/

The law is modeled on a theory that individual bargaining will remedy racial, gender, and national origin pay inequality. And the evidence from other states and other countries suggests that pay transparency does help achieve those goals! But individual bargaining is quite limited. 2/

A screenshot of a newscast showing a bearded man in a plaid shirt and houndstooth sport coat. The WHDH Channel 7 logo is on the bottom right of the screen. The banner under the man's face says "Ryan Quinn, Northeastern University"

Today is the effective date of Massachusetts's new pay transparency law, which means your local labor law professor is on local news, talking about how pay transparency can be one method for moving toward pay equity. 1/ malegislature.gov/Laws/General...

New Season of Civil Wrongs Podcast Centers on Tennessee Killing Investigated by CRRJ | The Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project Civil Wrongs Season 6 now available, centers case of Phillip Hatley, killed in 1939.

🎙️ LISTEN: Latest season of @npr.org and @wkno.bsky.social's Civil Wrongs podcast out now, centers on case of Phillip Hatley, WWI veteran killed by Memphis police officers in 1939. @nusl.bsky.social's CRRJ has worked with Hatley's descendants for many years. Read more:
crrj.org/efforts/new-...

right. given the numbers, “how to win back the working class” should be as much about care and service workers as hard hats. and yet.

There are no circumstances where human beings should be without food. There are no qualifications that make someone undeserving of access to food. If you are a human being, you should get food. I don’t care about ability, job status, legal status, or anything else. If people are hungry, feed them.

The central aesthetic question of our time is "do you respect wood?"

Q: When is "something my boss tells me to do" not something I have to be paid for? A: When the Supreme Court thinks it isn't indispensable to my principal activities.

Q: When is "something my boss pays me" not part of my wages? A: When the SJC thinks it isn't payment for my "ordinary" pay. 11/11

The decision is a triumph of legal formalism and a loss for workers in Massachusetts. It calls to mind Integrity Staffing Solutions v. Busk, which narrowed the definition of compensable "principal activities" under the Fair Labor Standards Act by ignoring the realities of the workplace. 10/

The retention bonus payments at issue in this case do not fall within any of the enumerated forms of benefits or compensation that the Legislature has included in "wages"; they are neither vacation or holiday payments, nor are they commissions.6 Indeed, the plaintiff does not contend otherwise. Nonetheless, the plaintiff asks that we deem the retention bonus payments to be "wages" because they are "a pledge or payment of usually monetary remuneration by an employer especially for labor or services."

So we have an incoherent test for "wages" under the Massachusetts Wage Act which ignores the remedial purpose of the statute and which instead uses the legislature's past attempts to remedy narrow judicial interpretations to offer yet another narrow judicial interpretation. 9/

The structure of the bonus here differs only in that it additional created conditions precedent to payment (i.e. "you only get it if you stay until X date"). But those conditions were met! Just as with commissions "definitely determined," which the statute counts as wages, these bonuses were due. 8/

The fact that the retention bonus was intended to incentivize the employee to stay with the employer also provides very little analytical value. Higher weekly wages may also be offered with the same intent. 7/

To begin with, every payment made by an employer to an employee is "in exchange for labor and services," or else they have some other legal relationship (e.g., if the employer--outside its capacity as employer--purchased a car from the employee, the payment would not be wages). 6/

Put otherwise, they were additional compensation that was contingent, or conditioned, on his continued employment to dates set by Syncsort to which the plaintiff agreed. They were also further conditioned on the plaintiff remaining in good performance standing with no reduction in his regular work schedule. The bonus payments were not made solely in exchange for the plaintiff's labor or services.

The Legislature has specified that the term "shall include any holiday or vacation payments due an employee under an oral or written agreement," and "so far as apt, . . . payment of commissions when the amount of such commissions, less allowable or authorized deductions, has been definitely determined and has become due and payable to such employee."5 G. L. c. 149, § 148. See Weems v. Citigroup Inc., 453 Mass. 147, 151 (2009). Beyond that, the act provides that wages shall be paid "weekly or biweekly," or monthly for certain employees, giving some indication that "wages" are akin to ordinary payment from an 8 employer to an employee in exchange for labor or services.

The Supreme Judicial Court (Wolohojian, J.) lays out a distinction between "ordinary payment[s]...in exchange for labor and services" and other types of compensation "not made solely in exchange for the [employee's] labor or services." This is not a theoretically clear distinction! 5/

So the issue is whether a "retention bonus" is "wages" under the MA Wage Act. One might think this would be an easy win for the employee because--surely--"wages" must include required and conditional payments the employer promises to an employee where the employee meets the condition precedent. 4/

Under the MA Wage Act, it is a clear violation to fail to pay an employee all wages on the date of their termination. M.G.L. c. 149, § 148. Paying wages eight days late opens up the employer to treble damages, attorney fees, and costs. M.G.L. c. 149, § 150; see law.justia.com/cases/massac... 3/

The facts are straightforward: employer offered a "retention bonus" to employee to be paid out on two dates. Employee was employed on the first date and was paid. Employer laid employee off effective the second date, but paid him the second part of the retention bonus eight days later. 2/

Disappointing Massachusetts Wage Act case from the Supreme Judicial Court today in Nunez v. Syncsort: www.mass.gov/doc/nunez-v-... . 1/

If the federal Executive Branch is going to repeatedly violate the law by withholding appropriated funds that they owe to state and local governments, and the other federal branches don't stop them, at some point the state and local govts will feel compelled to withhold money they owe the feds.

In about three years the entire university pivot to AI curricula and schools and programs is going to be so deeply embarrassing. We will all pretend it never happened and I will be standing there, looking at people with a mirror in my eyes. This is all so embarrassing.

I think it is about time that Democrats started familiarizing themselves with Lincoln’s response to Dred Scott instead of accepting the tacit premise that whatever a bare majority of the Supreme Court decides, dictates our constitutional fate

Rebrand towns without municipal sewers as “shithole towns” to reflect the absurdity of everyone having to have a little private septic system. As in: “I wish my shithole town could be annexed by the city next door that has public sewers” or “we’d have denser housing if we weren’t a shithole town.”

When even the investors believe the company ought to finalize a contract:

The entire Republican Party strategy for achieving what are comprehensively & wildly unpopular policy objectives now consists entirely of bypassing Article I of the Constitution through wildly illegal abuses of both Article II and Article III.

Court reform is the only way out of this authoritarian trap. Expand, restructure jurisdiction, channel, new courts—the works.

You don't have to judge Columbus by the standards of today. His tenure as governor of Hispaniola was so horrific that he was dragged back to Spain in chains to answer for his many crimes.

Plus he never set foot on any land that would ever be a part of the United States of America.