Compensation, Work Hours and Benefits

Each year, the New York University Annual Conference on Labor calls on outstanding scholars and practitioners in the field to come together to survey and analyse new developments and trends in U.S. labor law and practice. Reproduced here are papers delivered at the 2004 conference, the 57th in this venerable and highly influential series, with other articles either reprinted from earlier publications or written for this volume. The theme of the 2004 Conference was “Compensation, Work Hours, and Benefits.”

The broad range of contexts in which compensation, work hours, and benefits issues and disputes arise is clearly on display in the many relevant aspects with which the authors engage. These issues are gathered into nine categories as follows:

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• problems in ensuring acceptable compensation and work conditions in a global economy;
• attempts by states and municipalities to implement living wage measures and the potential conflict between such attempts and the doctrine of private labor law preemption;
• the possible demise of traditional pension benefits;
• recent workplace developments arising in response to the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA);
• the legality of policies surrounding attempts to keep workers’ pay secret;
• special compensation claims typically found in securities industry arbitration;
• state protections for non-salary forms of compensation;
• regulation of multiemployer benefit plans by the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA); and
• compensation, work hours and benefits issues with regard to multinational organizations.

As always, this important annual publication offers definitive current scholarship in its theme area of labor and employment law. As such, it will be of inestimable value to practitioners, government officials, academics, and others interested in developments in U.S. employment and labor relations law and practice.