Name Benjamin Sachs | ||
 | ||
Professor Benjamin Sachs speaks at HLS 2013 Class Day
Benjamin I. Sachs (born 1971) is Kestnbaum Professor of Labor and Industry at Harvard Law School, a chair previously held by Harvard economist James L. Medoff (1947-2012). A member of the Advisory Committee of the Labour Law Research Network, he also serves (with Harvard economist Richard B. Freeman) as a faculty co-chair of the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law School. He is co-founder with Harvard Law professor Jack Goldsmith) of the blog "Onlabor”.
Contents
- Professor Benjamin Sachs speaks at HLS 2013 Class Day
- Career
- Academic work
- Honors
- Books
- Law review publications
- References
A specialist in the field of labor law and labor relations, Sachs teaches classes with the following titles: "Labor Law," Employment Law," and "The Law and Social Change Workshop." His publications in law reviews primarily cover labor organizing as well as the activities and legal status of unions in U.S. politics. His proposal in 2012 for reform of campaign finance rules has stimulated debate on how best to rein in corporate power after the landmark decision in Citizens United v. FEC (2010) by the Supreme Court of the United States.
Career
Sachs obtained a BA from Oberlin College in 1993. He then attended Yale Law School, receiving a JD in 1998. After graduation, he became a judicial law clerk during 1998 and 1999 for Stephen Reinhardt of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. He would later publish in the Yale Law Journal an analysis of Reinhardt’s jurisprudence in the field of labor law. Reinhardt made around 150 rulings in US labor law cases, and Sachs focused on three aspects: the protection of workers from retaliation for organizing under provisions of the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA),the ability of undocumented workers to assert rights under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the scope for unions to spend member dues on organizing new workers.
Sachs worked from 1999 to 2002 as an attorney for Make the Road by Walking, a Brooklyn-based community organization representing working-class neighborhoods in New York City and Long Island. He then took the post of Assistant General Counsel for the Service Employees International Union between 2002 and 2006.
He held the Joseph Goldstein Fellowship as well as lectureship appointments at Yale Law School starting in fall 2005.He joined the Harvard Law School faculty in 2008.
Academic work
Sachs writes about labor issues through the blog "onlabor.org" and op-ed pieces that have appeared in the New York Times. In the latter, he has argued that the law should recognize “food workers” as a legal category and then offer a set of heightened employment protections to this class of employees in order to ensure food safety and public health. He has also called for greater rights for workers to form political unions at the workplace, a kind of organization that could be “unbundled” from the collective bargaining function of traditional unions.
In the aftermath of the 2010 decision in Citizens United v. FEC, in which the Supreme Court ruled that corporations have broad rights to spend monies from corporate treasuries on political campaigns, Sachs wrote in the Columbia Law Review that since labor unions face the constraint imposed by the federal government permitting individual members to opt out and ask for a refund of dues used for political spending, corporations should also be compelled to provide an opt-out provision for shareholders who object to political spending from corporate treasuries. In the New York Times (July 13, 2012), Sachs described what he saw as a fundamental injustice in this legal lack of symmetry: “What Citizens United failed to account for…. is that a significant portion of the money that corporations are spending on politics is financed by equity capital provided by public pension funds — capital contributions that the government requires public employees to finance with their paychecks. This consequence of Citizens United is perverse: requiring public employees to finance corporate electoral spending amounts to compelled political speech and association, something the First Amendment flatly forbids.”
Sachs’s writings about the Citizens United decision has provoked debates. Matthew T. Bodie, professor at the St. Louis University School of Law, countered in the Columbia Law Review with an interpretation suggesting that both labor unions and corporations should be regarded as economic actors pursuing business interests. In contrast to Sachs, he believes that the correct path to attaining legal symmetry is to remove the Supreme Court’s imposed rules requiring labor unions to provide opt-out rights and compensation for members.
Jamin B. Raskin, professor of constitutional law at American University and majority whip of the Maryland State Senate, discussed Sachs' proposed reform delivered the 2014 Jerry Wurf Memorial Lecture at Harvard. Raskin expressed dislike for how the Supreme Court is increasingly treating corporations as political membership groups while undermining that status for labor unions. In his view, unions have much deeper provisions for democratic one-person, one-vote rules for the membership than corporations dominated by big shareholders. For Raskin, moreover, the Sachs reform ultimately cannot stem the rising tide of corporate wealth overwhelming the political system. Arguing that Citizens United represents such an acute rupture and power shift from previous rulings, he judges that rule changes Sachs proposes "would make little practical difference." He observed, “Corporations have trillions of dollars in the treasury—not from the generosity of individual political contributors but from business and investment activity completely apart from politics--and they can spend billions of dollars on political ventures quite effortlessly. The labor movement has shrunk in size, wealth, and power, and has only the dues of its embattled working-class members to contribute and spend. This is a sum measured today not in trillions or billions but in millions. Labor cannot enter a fair political fight on the terrain that has been defined by Citizens United."
Honors
In 2013, Harvard Law School gave Sachs the Sacks-Freund Award for Teaching Excellence. Previously he was the Joseph Goldstein Fellow at Yale Law School where he won the Yale Law School teaching award in 2007.
Books
Sachs, Benjamin I. Reorganizing Work: The Evolution of Work Changes in the Japanese and Swedish Automobile Industries (Garland Publishing 1994).
Law review publications
Sachs, Benjamin and Catherine Fisk, “Restoring Equity in Right-to-Work Law,” 4 U.C. Irvine L. Rev. 857 (2014)
Sachs, Benjamin I. "The Unbundled Union: Politics Without Collective Bargaining," 123 Yale L. J. 100 (2013).
Sachs, Benjamin I. “How Pensions Violate Free Speech,” New York Times, July 13, 2012, p. A23.
Sachs, Benjamin I. "Unions, Corporations, and Political Opt-Out Rights After 'Citizens United'," 112 Columbia Law Review 800 (2012).
Sachs, Benjamin I. "Despite Preemption: Making Labor Law in Cities and States," 124 Harvard Law Review 1153 (2011).
Sachs, Benjamin I. "David E. Feller Memorial Labor Law Lecture: Revitalizing Labor Law," 31 Berkeley Journal of Employment and Labor Law 333 (2011).
Sachs, Benjamin I. "Enabling Employee Choice: A Structural Approach to the Rules of Union Organizing," 123 Harvard Law Review 655 (2010).
Sachs, Benjamin I. "Reinhardt at Work," 120 Yale Law Journal 573 (2010).
Sachs, Benjamin I. "Employment Law as Labor Law," 29 Cardozo Law Review 2685 (2008).
Sachs, Benjamin I. "Labor Law Renewal," 1 Harvard Law & Policy Review 375 (2007).