August 13th, 2026

IN THE NEWS

The NLRB is nearly back at full strength. On August 7, the Senate confirmed two nominees to the Board in a batch of 74 other confirmations that was not widely reported. One was James Macy, a former management side labor attorney and DOL official. The other was David Prouty, renominated to a second term as the Board’s lone Democrat. Together they bring the Board to four members, but Macy’s seat is the one that could actually change things. He joins Chairman James Murphy and Member Scott Mayer as a third Republican vote.

The third vote matters as much or more than the first two did because the Board has operated with a Republican majority since early this year, but Murphy and Mayer stuck to a long-standing norm that you don’t overturn precedent without at least three affirmative votes in support. A 2-1 majority could tip close cases, but it couldn’t go back and unwind the Biden Board’s work based on that standing “tradition.” However, a 3-1 majority can. Cemex, the 2023 decision that created a streamlined path to union recognition without an election, is the case most attorneys expect to be first on the list. There very well could be others.

If you’re an employer who, for the past few years has been cautiously operating because of the Cemex decision, or have been bargaining with some concern of Board precedent that assumed a different political roster, this is the moment to revisit that posture with counsel. The rules haven’t changed yet. But the people who write the rules just did. In labor relations, that’s usually the leading indicator that change is coming.

WHAT I’M FOLLOWING

More than 100 women’s college basketball players signed on last week to form a union under the United College Athletes Association, making this the largest organized push by college athletes to date. Oregon State’s team filed a petition with Oregon state labor regulators, not the NLRB. I don’t think that was an accident.

Every prior attempt at college athlete unionization has run into the same wall… the NLRB. Northwestern football players tried it in 2014 and the NLRB rejected the petition. Dartmouth’s men’s basketball team voted to unionize in 2024 and then withdrew once it became clear the incoming NLRB would not be friendly to the effort. The UCAA has apparently learned that lesson. Rather than fight for federal recognition under an NLRB that is not going to hand them a win anytime soon, they are testing individual state labor law instead.

This is worth watching for reasons that go beyond college sports. If this strategy gains traction (meaning actual wins), it becomes the playbook (sorry!) of how organizing campaigns step around an unfriendly federal Board. State labor agencies vary widely in how they define employment relationships, and a multi-state employer could end up facing a patchwork of different standards depending on where an organizing effort happens to crop up. It is also a reminder that trying to take the NLRB out of this equation means state agencies could end up wielding more power. State law is very much in play, and it is worth knowing where your operations sit relative to state agencies that may be more receptive to novel employment arguments than the current Board.

This news broke just days after the College Football Players Association announced that Stanford’s football team formed the first player-led union chapter. You may recall we discussed that a couple of weeks back. It appears these athletes are not waiting around for the NLRB to come back around to their side.

SOMETHING TO MAKE YOU THINK

I have been a member of a labor consortium that includes senior labor relations executives from a range of Fortune 200 companies all from various different industries, most with similar union relationships, and we all had (have) similar roles. I won’t name the people or the organizations, but suffice to say, excluding myself, this was a group of heavey hitters in the corporate labor relations world. At one meeting a few years ago, one of them floated an idea that’s stuck with me since. Unions should have to recertify every five to ten years.

The logic for this idea is this. A lot of the employees currently covered by a given contract weren’t there when the union was originally certified. They didn’t vote for or against representation because they weren’t there at the time. In many states, they joined because the contract required it, typically within 30 days of hire, take it or leave the job. So the workforce a union represents today may look nothing like the one that chose it decades ago, and a meaningful share of current members never actually had a say in whether they wanted representation at all.

Unions will call this what it looks like from their side of the table: a permanent, employer-funded decertification campaign supported by labor law. There’s also a very real and practical problem. A union that has to spend real time and money defending its existence every five years has less time and money left to actually represent people. And employers, in many cases, would use every one of those recertification windows as a chance to make their case for going union-free, the same way they do in an initial campaign.

I don’t know that I land firmly on one side of this discussion. But I keep coming back to the main question here. Should a union have to actually go through a process and survive a vote to justify their ability to represent their members? Or is the real question, should employees/members be given the right to decide periodically whether they want to be represented…especially if they never had a say in that decision. I am curious what you all think. Leave a comment. It’s an interesting debate.

RANT OF THE WEEK! A.K.A. THIS WEEK’S OTTO MOMENT

I want to talk about something that truly makes me angry. Believe it or not, sometimes the union’s own bargaining committee is the problem in reaching a deal. People love to talk about “bad” management tactics and overreach, and yes, that does exist. That said, I’ve actually spent 35 years cleaning some of it up. But nobody wants to talk about the other side of the table when it goes sideways. I’ve sat across from committees where two or three loud voices ran the whole show, usually they were the most senior people in the room. They were also the ones with the least to lose and the ones most willing to sell out other groups in order to gain something more for themselves. Meanwhile the majority of the membership, the people actually living under whatever contract gets ratified, never received regular updates or at least accurate ones. I recall a strike we had in Indiana where the committee decided to strike over roughly a dime and a potential to vote down the road on making a healthcare change that would have netted each member thousands of dollars. Six weeks in, the cowards who started the strike had quit…leaving 125 people out on the streets and an eventual settlement that was less than originally offered. That wasn’t representation. That was a committee representing itself…and then quitting.

This should bother union leadership as much as it bothers me because when this happens, it not only creates a bad contract but it also erodes members’ trust. Members who feel unheard by their own committee usually don’t get more engaged, they tend to check out. They stop showing up to meetings, maybe they stop voting…or they do both. And eventually somebody wonders why decertification talk starts happening, or why the next election has terrible turnout. You don’t need an employer campaign to erode trust in a union. Sometimes the committee does it all by itself.

If you’re on the employer side reading this thinking it’s not your problem, I would advise you to think again. A bargaining committee that isn’t actually doing their job means you’re negotiating against a handful of personalities instead of against your actual workforce’s real concerns, and that just makes it harder to get to a deal that will actually get ratified.

TIP OF THE WEEK

When a bargaining committee stops representing its own membership, one legal move is to go straight to the workforce with what actually happened at the table. I’ve done this a few times but there are some guidelines I would suggest before going this route.

First, this only works if you follow the rules as laid out by the NLRB. You are allowed to tell employees the truth about your own proposals and the state of negotiations. You are not allowed to negotiate with them directly, offer them anything new, or say anything that undermines the union’s standing as their representative. The rule of thumb I use: if the union has already heard it across the table, you can share it. If not, you cannot have this be a part of your communication to the workforce.

To do this correctly, keep things simple: Here is what we proposed. Here is what the union said. Here is where things stand. Do not provide extra commentary, do not make any promises, absolutely do not make any threats. Just deliver the facts and truth of where things stand. The audience sometimes will be hostile and skeptical, however I have also seen many people relieved to hear an update because their union has not provided one themselves.

I have used this when a committee was actively misleading the workforce on what was happening at the table, starting rumors and outright fighting against getting a deal. Is that bad faith bargaining? I think so but my solve was not to file a charge, it was to go “Factory direct.” This tactic does not fix a bad committee. But it does mean the workforce is not left in the dark while two or three people at the table decide what everyone else needs to hear. Check with counsel before you do this, every situation and jurisdiction has its own wrinkles, but the general right to communicate accurate information exists for a reason. Use it…judiciously.

One other note here. I have had executives who saw how effective this was and then wanted to do this with every negotiation. In my opinion (which they sometimes did not like), if the negotiation is progressing and the union is working towards a deal, this is not the tactic to use. There is no good reason to undermine their efforts unless they are undermining yours. For what it’s worth…

FRIDAY FUN

The Quorum

Handle with care…

• 2 oz gin

• 3/4 oz dry vermouth

• 2 dashes orange bitters

• 1 dash Angostura bitters

• Lemon twist, for garnish

Stir the gin, vermouth, and bitters over ice until well chilled. Strain into a rocks glass over one large cube. Twist the lemon peel over the top to release the oils, then drop it in.

One glass won’t get you a “majority.” Pour a second and you might have created a precedent…

(Mocktail version: swap the gin for soda water with a splash of white grape juice, keep the bitters, same garnish.)

Cheers, you’ve almost made it to Friday.

Thanks for visiting.
JC

Labor Pain is published by Jay Conlin, Founder and Principal of ManGar Solutions, a premier Labor and Employee Relations consulting firm.

If you have labor and/or employee relations questions, issues or concerns, please reach out to me at Jay@mangarsolutions.com for a free, confidential consult.

Mangar Solutions

Unless I specifically indicate, I am not compensated for any endorsements I might provide in Labor Pain.

AS A REMINDER, LABOR PAIN WILL TAKE A THREE WEEK BREAK RETURNING ON SEPTEMBER 10TH.

A SPECIAL ONE-OFF FROM LABOR PAIN

THE REGULAR FORMAT IS BACK NEXT WEEK. AS A REMINDER, AFTER NEXT WEEK’S ISSUE, LABOR PAIN WILL TAKE A THREE WEEK BREAK RETURNING ON SEPTEMBER 10TH.

On Wednesday, the Teamsters in California sued the state DMV. Their target: regulations enacted back in April that, for the first time, let autonomous trucks over 10,000 pounds operate on California public roads. California had been the last holdout state banning heavy-duty self-driving vehicles, a ban that existed largely because unions fought for it.

The Teamsters aren’t (primarily) arguing that self-driving trucks are unsafe or shouldn’t exist. They’re arguing the DMV cheated the process. Under California’s Administrative Procedure Act, a “major regulation,” defined as one with more than $50 million in first-year economic impact, triggers a mandatory Standardized Regulatory Impact Assessment, which includes studies and public comments. The DMV’s own estimate put the cost of this rule at $5.8 million. Conveniently or not, that number is well under the threshold. The Teamsters’ complaint has their number at roughly $288 million in direct costs and $576 million once indirect effects are included. The suit argues the DMV knew, or should have known, that the number was nowhere close to $5.8 million.

To be fair to the DMV, there’s a real argument on the other side. California has a documented driver shortage, and the state has watched companies like Aurora build out this technology in other states while California sat on the sidelines; the DMV isn’t wrong that the world is moving here with or without them. It’s also worth granting that the DMV would likely argue its process wasn’t misleading but rather, that its economic model followed the same methodology it always uses for regulatory updates, and reasonable people can and do often disagree on what counts as a direct versus indirect cost.

The complaint estimates the rule could eventually eliminate more than 200,000 employee semi-truck driving jobs in California, with a comparable number of owner-operators also exposed. California leads the nation in truck driver employment. It’s the state with the largest trucking workforce in the country. They are also home to many of the tech companies pushing this type of technology. That might be the true conflict behind this story.

This lawsuit also happens in the middle of a governor’s race, with labor and Silicon Valley on opposite sides of a technology California has spent a decade courting and growing. Companies like Aurora have already demonstrated 1,000-mile driverless hauls and are actively planning West Coast expansion. This one lawsuit won’t decide the future of trucking, but it’s the opening shot at a bigger question the state hasn’t answered: how much say should workers get before technology reshapes their jobs out from under them. My guess…technology wins here. Technology doesn’t complain when things get tough.

Why do I think employers outside trucking should pay attention? Set aside the trucking specifics for a second. What the Teamsters are actually doing here is establishing a plan: when an agency (or arguably, an employer) understates the workforce impact of an automation decision to avoid a disclosure or study requirement, that understatement itself might become the legal exposure. You don’t have to win an argument about whether the technology is good or bad. You just have to win an argument about whether the impact was honestly disclosed. That’s a much easier case to bring, and a much harder one to defend, because technology or not, the math is the math. Numbers don’t usually lie…unless they aren’t accurately reported.

But!!!!! Technology slowing down business “progress” is very difficult to argue. I saw this in 1999 (Don’t judge!!!!) at Anheuser-Busch when they put in automated forklifts in Columbus, Ohio or when they used a new vacuum pack to eliminate people manually filling can lids into an assembly line.

If your organization is rolling out AI or automation that touches headcount, whether it be in warehousing, manufacturing, distribution centers, or even trucking, give some real thought to the people impact. Yes, I know, organizations want to do more with less, and last time I checked, robots don’t file grievances or start union drives, but people are watching how you treat your employees because they can see a direct threat to their roles as well. Downplaying the people impact may very well be bad for your business, at least when it comes to employee trust. Customer trust…gamble if you will.

It will be fascinating to see whether the court finds the DMV’s cost estimate defensible, and whether this becomes the template other states’ Teamsters locals (or other unions entirely) reach for whenever a state agency tries to push an automation rule through on a technicality. My guess, and that’s all this is, is that this is the opening move in a potentially very long game.

Cheers! It’s Friday! You made it.

Thanks for visiting.

JC

Labor Pain is published by Jay Conlin, Founder and Principal of ManGar Solutions, a premier Labor and Employee Relations consulting firm.

If you have labor and/or employee relations questions, issues or concerns, please reach out to me at Jay@mangarsolutions.com for a free, confidential consult.

Mangar Solutions

Unless I specifically indicate, I am not compensated for any endorsements I might provide in Labor Pain.

August 6th, 2026

IN THE NEWS

WestJet (A Canadian airline for those wondering) flight attendants walked off the job Sunday, and within 36 hours they reached a tentative deal but only after the airline had canceled nearly 500 flights and stranded a quarter million travelers over a long weekend. The dispute wasn’t really about the headline wage numbers. WestJet’s offer included a 13% bump in October and raises each January after that. It was about ground pay. CUPE 8125 said flight attendants weren’t getting compensated for the work they do before a plane ever pushes back from the gate; the airline pointed to its “credit hour” system and said they were. This has been an on-going issue in Canada and here at home. Air Canada’s flight attendants stranded 100,000 travelers over the exact same issue last summer.

Here in the States, the industry has started to tackle this issue to some degree with Delta being first, and…without a union at the table. In 2022, Delta became the first major U.S. airline to pay flight attendants for boarding time, at 50% of their hourly rate. American, Alaska, and United have since matched it. That wasn’t necessarily generosity on Delta’s part. The change occurred around threats of active organizing. Delta’s flight attendants have voted down unionization three separate times since 2002, and remain the only major U.S. cabin crew without one today. Compare that to Delta’s pilots, who’ve been represented by ALPA since 1934 and never had reason to leave. It’s admittedly a unique situation.

Then consider that WestJet and Air Canada absorbed through strikes, a pay gap that Delta closed voluntarily three years ago specifically to keep a union off its property. Fix the “grievance” before it becomes the petition you didn’t want. You can never lose a campaign you didn’t have.

WHAT I’M FOLLOWING

MLB’s collective bargaining agreement expires December 1, and this fight has been building since spring. Owners have put a salary cap on the table for the first time since 1994, and the union appears to be digging in. MLBPA executive director Tony Clark has already told reporters he expects a work stoppage once the CBA expires. The last time these two sides hit an impasse, it was a 99-day lockout that pushed back the start of the 2022 season.

What makes this one different from a typical wage fight is that a salary cap isn’t an easy number either side can just split the difference and move on. It’s a significant, formal change to how the entire economic system of the sport works, and MLBPA has treated salary cap proposals as a non-starter since Marvin Miller’s era for exactly that reason. When the fight is just over dollars, there’s usually a deal somewhere in the middle. But as I have said before, professional sports unions don’t function quite the same as your typical manufacturing site. Pay, that is player salaries, are negotiated individually not collectively. This concept would partially change that though other pro leagues seem to be managing it fairly well.

What I’m watching for is whether either side tries to get ahead of this with a creative “solution” or whether they run the clock to December 1 and hope the other side is bluffing. I don’t think either side is bluffing so enjoy this season.

SOMETHING TO MAKE YOU THINK

The Self-Awareness Gap

I found this tidbit quite interesting. Researchers who study this for a living have found that 95% of people believe they’re self-aware. In reality, only 10 to 15% actually are. Most of us, according to this statistic, assume we know how we come across in a tense meeting, how our silence gets interpreted, whether our door is actually as open as we tell people it is. And we’re usually wrong, not always because we’re bad at our jobs, though that is sometimes true, but because we rarely get true, honest feedback in our workplaces.

The fix is pretty simple in concept and difficult in reality. It’s asking one person you trust a question you might not like the answer to, and then actually sitting with what they say instead of explaining it away. Who’s the one person who’d tell you the truth if you asked? And when’s the last time you actually asked them?

RANT OF THE WEEK! A.K.A. THIS WEEK’S OTTO MOMENT

Every couple of years some executive asks, with true sincerity, “why do our people want a union?” I’ve sat through that meeting more times than I can count, and I’ll tell you the answer nobody wants to hear: most don’t actually want a union. They want the thing the union is promising to get them, and you haven’t given it to them yet. Fair treatment, a voice, listening and acting on feedback. They seek some semblance of job security and recognition for a job well done, which includes getting paid accordingly.

Delta figured that out in 2022. Flight attendants had been on again off again trying to organize, Delta knew the main issue which was unpaid boarding time and instead of hiding from the issue they proactively worked to fix it. Three failed union votes later and counting, Delta’s flight attendants are still the only major cabin crew in the country without a union.

I want to be clear about this. This isn’t an anti-union rant (I have been employed a long time because of unions) nor is it a union-avoidance seminar. My point is this: if you already know what your people are angry about, and you have the authority to fix it, waiting until they’ve decided to seek third party representation is the single most expensive way to eventually give them the same thing. WestJet and Air Canada experienced this in real time, with canceled flights and alot of disgruntled passengers.

If you need a union campaign to tell you where the pain point is then you stopped listening or caring, or perhaps both at the same time. And if that is your situation, that’s on you…as is the campaign.

TIP OF THE WEEK

After years of crisscrossing the country for work, I’ve learned one rule that saves more travel days than anything else. It’s simple: book the early flight. The later a flight leaves, the more chances the system has to break down. Weather delays start adding up creating a domino effect. Planes start fighting for gates, and crews. Crews start to time out. By 8 p.m., if you’re flying you are doing so dealing with the accumulated problems of the whole day.

And when your inbound plane is stuck somewhere else and weather’s the culprit, don’t wait it out at the gate hoping. Cut bait. Lock in a hotel room, then go find the gate agent and rebook yourself on the first flight out in the morning. You’ll beat the rush of everyone else who waited until the cancellation was official, and you’ll actually get a decent night’s sleep instead of camping at the gate until midnight only to scramble to beat the crowd to rebook and find those remaining hotel rooms.

FRIDAY FUN

Mocktail This Week: Watermelon Mint Cooler

Summer is great but it can also start to get too boozy. Don’t judge! Try this instead. And if you disagree…sure, add the vodka.

Ingredients: 1 cup fresh watermelon, cubed (or ½ cup watermelon juice) · ½ lime, juiced · 4–5 mint leaves, muddled · splash of soda water · ice

Muddle the mint at the bottom of a glass, add the watermelon and lime juice, fill with ice, top with soda water, and stir. Two minutes, no shaker required, and it still tastes like summer.

“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did.”
— Mark Twain

Cheers, you’ve almost made it to Friday.

Thanks for visiting.
JC

Labor Pain is published by Jay Conlin, Founder and Principal of ManGar Solutions, a premier Labor and Employee Relations consulting firm.

If you have labor and/or employee relations questions, issues or concerns, please reach out to me at Jay@mangarsolutions.com for a free, confidential consult.

Mangar Solutions

Unless I specifically indicate, I am not compensated for any endorsements I might provide in Labor Pain.

In The News

The AI Hiring Whiplash

Corporate America’s AI hiring story may have started changing. After a year of treating headcount as an expensive last resort, seen through cutting jobs, freezing hiring reqs, and telling investors that AI could absorb the slack, big employers are now starting to say something different. The Wall Street Journal reported this week that companies across tech, transportation, and defense are hiring again, and doing it because they actually need people…yes, people.

Booz Allen Hamilton is a one example among many. The government contractor cut thousands of jobs last year, and its COO now says the company is “a little bit behind” and moving to accelerate hiring. Lattice’s CEO put it more bluntly: some of her clients stopped hiring entry-level workers on the bet that AI agents would cover the gap, and are now realizing that having coding agents doesn’t mean you can stop hiring engineers. Alphabet, CSX, and ServiceNow are all signaling the same thing in earnings season. The hiring is modest but companies are hiring in certain concentrated growth areas.

I’m not saying that the AI hiring panic was wrong. It wasn’t and I believe it is still a concern. A recent Harvard/INSEAD study found AI-native startups run about 25% leaner than comparable companies, with 15% fewer entry-level hires and a meaningfully higher share of senior talent. Those are real numbers and, yes, they can be concerning. And a separate CNBC report from last month found some employers who cut aggressively because they believed AI was the “fix” are starting to regret taking that approach. IBM’s CHRO has been warning publicly that gutting the entry-level pipeline now means there won’t be a bench in three to five years, and companies that automated without investing in training left their remaining teams unprepared to actually run the AI they bought.

Whether or not AI nets out to more or fewer jobs over the next five years is genuinely an open question, and I’m not going to predict because many of the “hot” trends do indeed fizzle out. My concern is these fire/rehire cycles can do things to a workforce even if they retain or get their jobs back. It tells the people still standing that leadership didn’t actually know what it was doing (or went for a quick, short-term gain) and that the layoff wasn’t a considered strategic call. Rather, it was a guess, and they, the workers were the ones who paid for it. This type of behavior creates a serious credibility gap that shows up later as elevated voluntary turnover among your best people, as receptiveness to outside organizing messaging, and as a much harder sell the next time you need the workforce to trust a change initiative.

If you cut on an AI bet last year and you’re now rehiring, the conversation with your workforce matters. Own the reversal openly. Don’t call it an “evolving strategy.” Thats simply annoying and the credibility cost of pretending the whiplash didn’t happen is higher than the cost of admitting it did.

What I’m Following

Stanford Football and the Quiet Return of College Athlete Organizing

Stanford football players announced Monday that they’ve formed a campus chapter of the College Football Players Association (CFBPA) making them the first team to formally partner with the organization. The organizations’ long-term goal is collective bargaining for college athletes. To be clear, this isn’t a union petition. The NLRB has not (yet) been asked to declare these players employees. But it’s the clearest sign yet that the organizing efforts include lessons from when the last one failed.

A decade ago, Northwestern’s football team went straight at the NLRB and lost. The Board declined jurisdiction rather than risk creating a rule that applied to only 17 private FBS programs and none of their public-school competitors. This time, CFBPA leadership is running a different playbook which is to build chapter by chapter, school by school, and go conference-wide before they ever file for an election. Stanford center Fisher Anderson and linebacker Ernest Cooper, the chapter’s leaders, told ESPN the plan is to sign up a majority of players across every school in the ACC before taking any formal step toward unionizing. By their own estimate is that it could take years. CFBPA’s executive director says several other programs in the ACC and other power conferences are close to forming their own chapters though he won’t say which ones yet. I’ve said before, unions at the professional sports level function loosley like unions in more typical work place settings. I‘ve also seen the Teamsters try to organize Uber drivers on the west coast. It isn’t easy.

They are showing patience this time and they have to be, because the legal ground has shifted against them since the last cycle. The Biden-era NLRB General Counsel had gone on record saying scholarship athletes at private schools met the legal definition of employee. The current administration’s NLRB rescinded that memo in February 2025, and Congress has been advancing the SCORE Act, which, in its current form, would solidify that college athletes are not employees at all. In other words: CFBPA is building leverage under an NLRB that currently has no appetite to help them, betting that the political and legal environment looks different by the time they’re ready to file. That’s absolutely a long game, and it says something about how seriously organized labor is taking college athletics as a long-run target.

This is the same jurisdictional question (who counts as an “employee” under the NLRA) that shows up in gig work, healthcare residents, and grad student organizing. The playbook CFBPA is running (build overwhelming scale quietly before ever filing, structure the demand so a single unfavorable ruling can’t kill the whole effort) is the same one you should assume any sophisticated organizing campaign in your own industry is running right now, regardless of sector. If your read on organizing risk is still “we’d hear about it well before an election petition shows up,” this story is a good reminder that the modern approach is built specifically to deny you that lead time. Union organizers are getting smarter (yes, younger too) and they know that technology can help them gain traction while keeping employers in the dark. Pay attention.

Something to Make You Think

Profitable and Cutting Anyway

More than 2,600 layoff events have hit WARN filings across the U.S. so far in 2026, affecting over 230,000 workers. New Jersey alone has logged roughly 12,000 layoffs through July 21. This is already 3,500 more than the state saw in all of the first seven months of 2025. Big names like Samsung, Novartis, Mars Wrigley, and Verizon are among this month’s names. If you focus just on tech specifically, the pace is still striking: 322 layoff events this year, impacting roughly 206,000 people which averages out to an average of nearly 1,000 job losses a day. Another number that stands out…54% of this year’s layoff events explicitly cite AI, automation, or machine learning as the driver.

That’s a majority of this year’s job cuts, in employers’ own words, tied to the same technology they’re simultaneously spending billions to build out. See above for the potential shift here by the way that this story seems to contradict.

Microsoft cut 4,664 positions in July which is the single largest announcement of the month. Amazon is laying off workers at its Port St. Lucie, Florida facility ahead of a two-year shutdown and renovation, the second Florida site hit this year after Homestead in April. Cisco cut nearly 4,000 jobs, about 5% of its workforce, despite beating profit and revenue expectations, with its CFO stating plainly this wasn’t cost-cutting but a deliberate realignment of resources around silicon, optics, security, and AI. Cloudflare did the same thing in May, cutting 20% of its workforce (1,100 people) the same quarter it posted the highest revenue in company history, with its CEO telling remaining staff that most of those let go were “measurers” meaning, middle management, finance, legal, internal audit. Oops. Thats going to come back to haunt someone.

For most of the last three years, layoffs came with a plausible external pressure…rates, demand, a bad quarter, “market conditions.” Employees could tell themselves the company had no choice. Cisco and Cloudflare didn’t offer that story, because it wasn’t true, and at a rate of a thousand tech job losses a day with more than half the field naming AI as the cause, shows this is the leading edge of where this could be headed. When a meaningful share of cuts start looking like strength-based restructuring instead of hardship-based survival, the workforce narrative that’s carried most companies through the last few years, “painful, but necessary” stops being available to lean on.

Some of these are logistics-driven, some are cost-driven, and some are the newer kind: cuts made from strength, not weakness. This isn’t totally new. Sure, companies cut in tough times but they have for years found they could improve revenue and profits by having fewer people. The math just might be accelarating because of AI. Maybe. Cisco and Cloudflare weren’t in trouble. Both were setting records. Both cut anyway, and both said so in public, without the usual cover story about softening demand or macro headwinds. Regardless, employees are watching and worrying and some are probably planning. I’ll say it again. Pay attention.

Tip of the Week

Never let the other side’s opening proposal derail your bargaining team

The most common mistake at the table I’ve seen isn’t a bad counter, it’s what I’d call an inexperienced one. Say the union opens high (or the employer opens low), and suddenly your team starts measuring every subsequent move as a percentage of their number instead of a percentage of your actual target. Some call this anchoring, I call it annoying and it works less so on experienced negotiation teams but quite well on the green ones.

My fix is pretty simple, and we did this at Pepsi when I was leading the labor function (and it was done this way for decades before me), write down your real target and your walk-away point before you hear their opening. We had a process designed for early alignment to avoid, as much as possible, getting thrown off by the unions early demands. Once their proposal is made, compare it against your own pre-set numbers, not against some instinctive gut reaction to how far apart you seem. Yes, distance matters but less so early on. If your team caucuses and someone says “well, we’ve come down a lot already,” that’s the inexperience talking. The only question that matters is whether you’re closer to your number, not whether you’ve moved a lot from theirs.

The Otto Moment

Training Is a Great Tool…It Just Isn’t A Labor Strategy

I see many comanies looking for supervisor training with the idea they need to improve their overall capability. The training, they hope, will also help with union avoidance..and it can but only to a point. Annual trainings happen all the time, safety, environmental, policy changes, etc.

To be clear: some training is better than nothing. A once-a-year refresher still puts language and awareness in front of supervisors who might otherwise have neither. I’d rather a company do the bare minimum than nothing at all. But “better than nothing” and “a strategy” are two very different things, and I’ve watched too many organizations mistake one for the other.

A one-time training won’t fix a supervisor who’s been ignoring the same complaint for three weeks in a row. It can’t undo a schedule change that got announced in a mass email instead of an honest conversation. It can’t explain why raises have been “under review” for months. Employees don’t organize because their supervisor misunderstood a slide about the NLRA. They organize because they’ve stopped believing anyone above them is actually listening. No amount of once-a-year training prevents that if nothing changes the rest of the year. In my experience in over thirty-five years of doing this, it is doing the following three things together, not just one thing alone because there “isn’t the time or money.”

1. Training that’s ongoing, not annual This needs to be reinforced throughout the year and it helps if it is tied to real scenarios supervisors are actually facing.

2. An honest culture assessment It is important for organizations to be willing to actually go look at what’s happening on the floor, not just what the engagement survey says. Check out grievance trends and timelines. Review, periodically, turnover by shift. Observe whether your supervisors actually know how to run a an effective shift meeting. Finding “gaps” is actually a good thing…now you can fix them.

3. An actual strategy that ties them together This is not a training calendar being called a plan. This is leadership development, culture monitoring, and a real read on organizing risk, with a plan to find and correct the gaps.

Do the training. It’s worth doing. Just don’t let it be the whole plan. The gap between “we did the training” and “we have a strategy” is exactly where organizing finds its opening.

Friday Fun

Keeping it simple but refreshing this week…

Absolut Elderflower Collins

Ingredients
1.5 oz Absolut Vodka
1 oz Lemon Juice
.5 oz Elderflower Cordial
5 oz Soda Water
2 Wheels Lemon

Instructions
Fill a highball glass with ice cubes. Add all ingredients. Garnish with two lemon wheels.

Cheers, you’ve almost made it to Friday.

Thanks for visiting.

JC

Unless I specifically indicate, I am not compensated for any endorsements I might provide in Labor Pain.

Labor Pain is published by Jay Conlin, Founder and Principal of ManGar Solutions a premier Labor and Employee Relations consulting firm.

Questions? Reach out at Jay@mangarsolutions.com for a free, confidential consult.

Mangar Solutions

PLEASE NOTE THAT LABOR PAIN WILL BE TAKING A SHORT END OF SUMMER BREAK. A COMBINATION OF PERSONAL TRAVEL AND CONSULTING WORK MAKE THIS NECCESARY. THE AUGUST 13TH ISSUE WILL BE THE LAST ONE UNTIL SEPTEMBER 1OTH. THANK YOU FOR UNDERSTANDING.

Petition volume fell in FY2025. Unions and employees filed just 2,100 RC petitions, the fewest since 2022. Employer-filed RM petitions (the ones triggered when a company gets a written demand for voluntary recognition) also dropped sharply, from 489 in FY2024 to 237. On paper, that looks like organizing activity is cooling off, and by the numbers it is.

But the win rate tells a different story. Unions closed out FY2025 winning 81.9% of representation elections, only a slight dip from the year before. Fewer petitions, but a win rate that high, means that when unions are filing, they’re filing with confidence, not testing the waters. For employers, that’s the number to pay attention to. The win rate matters more than the volume drop here. A quieter year on the front end doesn’t mean an easy victory when a petition does land on your desk.

WHAT I’M FOLLOWING

Sean O’Brien just won another five years running the Teamsters, and he didn’t have to get a single rank-and-file member to vote for him. At the union’s convention in Las Vegas, O’Brien and his running mate Fred Zuckerman were reelected by convention delegates, not the membership at large. Under the Teamsters constitution, a challenger needs to hit a minimum delegate-support threshold just to force a full membership vote. Nobody was able to do so. That meant the O’Brien-Zuckerman slate won by acclamation, a first in Teamsters history, and 1.3 million members never got a ballot.

To be fair, this isn’t some backroom trick. It’s how the Teamsters constitution has worked for a while. But strip away the process question and what’s left is a clear demonstration of power. O’Brien didn’t win by acclamation because members had no complaints; he won because nobody could clear the bar to challenge him, and that’s a different thing entirely. He can point to real numbers to justify running unopposed: the Amazon organizing push, triple-digit-thousands of new members, and the 2023 UPS contract he still calls “the template for how workers should be paid nationwide.” The UPS win in particular hasn’t aged the way he sold it, though. The union has spent the past year publicly pressing UPS over “unmet” commitments on the deal, which takes some shine off the victory lap. Not to mention thse layoffs.

What this means for employers: a leader who just consolidated power without a membership vote, and who’s shown he’ll go public when a negotiation isn’t moving as he expects, isn’t likely to soften his approach at the table. Expect the Teamsters to lean harder into the “we deliver, they don’t” pitch in the next round of organizing and bargaining.

SOMETHING TO MAKE YOU THINK

For years, the organizing pitch was simple: unionize, and your raises get bigger, your benefits get richer, the gap between you and the nonunion shop down the street widens in your favor. The newest BLS numbers complicate that pitch, slightly.

Union wage growth is still outpacing nonunion wage growth, but the gap is shrinking, not growing. On benefits, the story is similar. Nonunion employers are now closing ground on total benefits growth faster than union shops are pulling away.

That matters because a big chunk of the organizing argument is “we’ll get you more than they will.” That argument gets harder to make with a straight face when the market is closing the distance on its own, driven by competition for the same workers everyone’s fighting over. That said, this doesn’t mean organizing stops; the value proposition shifts, from “we’ll win you more” toward things money doesn’t buy: voice, process, protection from favoritism and arbitrary decisions. If you’re making strides on wages and benefits but still neglecting your people through poor or dismissive leadership and policies, your organizing risk is still right in front of you. Wages matter, so does treatment.

TIP OF THE WEEK

When you’re about to correct someone in front of others, stop and ask yourself one question first: could this wait five minutes? If the answer is yes, it should. Public correction feels efficient in the moment, but it teaches the rest of the room that speaking up in a meeting carries risk. Save the real feedback for a hallway conversation or a closed door. Your best people will remember how you handled it as long or longer than they’ll remember what they got wrong.

THE OTTO MOMENT

Every budget season, somebody would hand me a spreadsheet with a merit pool number on it and ask me to reward the high performers. The math rarely worked. It’s presented, shoulders shrug, and they say, “make it happen.” The problem is nobody wants to spend time figuring out who on your team is quietly deciding whether this is still worth it.

We’ve all seen it: a star performer suddenly has an outside offer and everyone races to save the star. But the efforts usually fall short, and not just because they don’t match the new number. It’s because that star already decided it was better to go outside and test the market. The organization didn’t make them feel valued and didn’t do more than simply running the merit budget play. And sadly, the replacement cost to fill that now-open role typically costs even more, possibly for a less productive employee and certainly not a star. Nobody in that budget meeting saw it coming, because nobody was in the room asking about it. Pay is the thing people notice when everything else has already gone wrong...or in some cases, even when things are going fairly well.

FRIDAY FUN

This week, we’re skipping the shaker for a knife and a citrus press. Summer ceviche: you’ll need just five ingredients, ten minutes of actual work, and you should get a result that tastes like you hired someone.

Classic Shrimp and/or White Fish Ceviche

1 lb fresh shrimp (peeled, deveined, diced small) or firm white fish like halibut or snapper…or both • 1 cup fresh lime juice (about 8–10 limes, and yes, fresh, the bottled stuff will not “cook” it properly) • 1/2 red onion, thinly sliced • 1 jalapeño, seeded and minced • 1 cup diced tomato • 1/2 cup chopped cilantro • 1 avocado, diced • salt to taste.

Submerge the shrimp and/or fish in the lime juice, cover, and refrigerate for 20–30 minutes. The acid does the cooking; you’ll know it’s ready when the flesh turns opaque. Drain off most of the juice, then and in the onion, jalapeño, tomato, and cilantro. Season with salt, add in the avocado gently at the end so it doesn’t turn to mush, and serve cold with tortilla chips or tostadas. Best eaten the same day…

Quote of the week: “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.” — Frederick Douglass

Cheers…you’ve almost made it to Friday!

Thanks for visiting.

JC

Unless I specifically indicate, I am not compensated for any endorsements I might provide in Labor Pain.

Labor Pain is published by Jay Conlin, Founder and Principal of ManGar Solutions a premier Labor and Employee Relations consulting firm.

Questions? Reach out at Jay@mangarsolutions.com for a free, confidential consult.

Mangar Solutions

Workplace News Worth Reading…I think so anyway.

In the News

The Brigham Lockout: A Costly Lesson in Homework

4,000 nurses at Brigham and Women’s walked out for one symbolic day on July 8th. This was the biggest nurses’ strike in Massachusetts history and it appears to have backfired...for now.

Mass General Brigham had already signed contracts guaranteeing its ~1,300 replacement nurses a minimum five-day assignment. So when the union’s one-day strike ended, MGB didn’t let any strikers back in, because it was paying for five days of temp coverage once the nurses walked out. On the surface, turning the strike into a five-day lockout cost the hospital nothing extra. It cost the union a week’s wages and a very public “wait...what?” humiliation on the evening news.

The part that should sting for the Massachusetts Nurses Association is this wasn’t clever or vindictive management. Okay it kind of was but it was also a simple math problem. Someone on the union side either didn’t know the terms of MGB’s temp-staffing contracts, or knew and gambled that a symbolic one-day action would be just that...a one-day action. We now know it wasn’t. Massachusetts Governor Healey has been working to get both sides back at the table, but as of this writing, no talks are scheduled. The nurses are back working...for now.

What I’m Following

Volkswagen’s Works Council Just Said No To Massive Job Cuts...I kinda Get It.

Volkswagen wants to cut up to 100,000 jobs and shutter four German plants, doubling down on cuts it had already planned last year. Times are tough right now at the world’s number two automaker...operating margins are around 4.3%, costs are running 20% above rivals, and Chinese EV makers are beating VW on both price and technology. CEO Oliver Blume’s message to employees was blunt: the original plan for cost cuts “is not enough.”

For U.S. Labor professionals, what can seem like an unwieldy NLRA and NLRB (though that’s changing), VW’s workforce didn’t protest this, negotiate around it, or strike over it. On July 10, VW’s works council and IG Metall representatives blocked the restructuring outright at the board level. How? Keep reading.

That’s not a tactic available anywhere in American labor relations, and it’s worth understanding why. Under German co-determination law, VW’s supervisory board is split 50/50 between shareholder and labor representatives, and Lower Saxony, the state, holds a blocking minority stake specifically to protect regional jobs. Unlike here, Labor is a co-owner of the decision.

Watch this one closely. If VW can’t get this restructuring past their own board, the pressure won’t just disappear, but it could force other moves; more automation to route around headcount limits labor can’t block as easily, or an accelerated push to shift production outside Germany’s co-determination framework entirely. Either way, it’s a live example of what happens when a company’s restructuring plans run into a legal structure that gives workers a seat at the actual decision-making table, not just a seat across from it. I’m not saying that’s actually a bad thing...I’ve always believed if you asked the people actually doing the work how to save time and money, they would be able to tell you much faster than many in the C-suite. That said, there is a risk that the number of jobs at risk gets much higher than the revised restructuring plan. Yes...I am watching this one.

Something to Make You Think

A Tale Of Two Job Markets

The headline unemployment rate is 4.2%. That sounds pretty good but it isn’t telling us the full story. Nearly 1.9 million Americans have now been out of work for 27 weeks or longer, the highest that number has been since 2017 outside the pandemic spike. The long-term unemployed now make up roughly one in four of everyone counted as jobless. And last month, 720,000 people simply left the labor force entirely, the sharpest one-month drop in decades, pulling participation down to its lowest level in 50 years outside Covid.

Put those together and you get a job market that looks calm from 30,000 feet but is brutal from the ground level. The unemployment rate is staying low partly because people are giving up the search, not because they’re finding jobs. That’s a concern that may grow and/or linger.

If you happen to be on the employer side of the table, this type of labor market changes leverage in ways that don’t show up in any BLS release. The people still employed feel increasingly reluctant to leave a job, because they’ve watched what happens to the ones who don’t have one. Some may mistake this for employee loyalty but in reality it’s fear driven. If you’re negotiating anything, wages, work rules, flexibility, against a workforce that feels trapped rather than valued, you’re not building the kind of relationship that survives the next downturn or the next organizing drive. Reward those who stay beyond just “the job.” If and when the dynamics shift (I think they will...mostly) your organization will be better off.

Tip of the Week

Know The Fixed Costs Before You Pull the Trigger

The Mass General Brigham fiasco is a lesson. Before you plan a “low-risk” symbolic action, a one-day strike, a brief slowdown, a short-notice walkout, you should understand what the other side might do in response. Ask a few questions to yourself...how might they react? How might the community react? What have we not thought through completely? In this case, Management had a minimum-commitment contract they were going to pay one way or another, your clever move might be the thing that lets them turn a one-day inconvenience into a week-long demonstration of who needs whom more. This is still playing out but the nurses let adrenaline rule the day instead of a taking a thoughtful approach. Oops.

The Otto Moment

Meta’s Watching What Their Employees Type. Duck!

Let’s talk about Meta for a minute, because something caught my eye this week that was pretty concerning. Then again, what isn’t with Meta? They have quietly installed software on employees’ work computers that logs every mouse movement, every click, every keystroke, and grabs periodic screenshots across a list of their work apps. The official line is that it’s not performance monitoring, it’s AI training data. They need millions of examples of humans clicking through dropdown menus and navigating workflows so the AI can eventually do it without them. Either message is frightening from my perspective.

In essence, they are surveilling their own people, keystroke by keystroke, specifically to build the thing that replaces the tasks those people are doing right now. And the sales pitch to employees is...don’t worry, we’re not grading you on this, we’re just recording everything you do so we can automate you out of a job later. I don’t know which part of that is supposed to land as reassuring. I know that’s not what they said but I think it is what they mean.

My problem with this, and it’s not completely about Meta specifically. It’s that as capitalism evolves, we appear to be (yes this has been a long term problem) discarding employees as disposable commodities. But, at some point, without enough people earning a respectable/living wage, companies will see profits sink too. It could very well have the opposite of the intended consequence. This disposable commodity concept is spreading. A Yale law professor pointed out this is the kind of granular tracking normally reserved for gig workers and delivery drivers, not white-collar employees with offices and titles and stock grants. Somebody at Meta decided that distinction didn’t matter anymore, and did it quietly enough that it took a leaked memo for anyone to notice. I get it...why did it take the potential hit on the white collar workforce before more of us got scared. I’ve been scared for some time...truly.

And look, I’ve spent thirty-five years telling employers that if you treat people like adults and communicate honestly, you don’t need a union to force you into it. This is the exact opposite of that lesson. If you want your workforce seeking protections from keystroke-level surveillance with no real consent and no clear boundary on how the data gets used...this is a genuinely excellent way to do it. They might ask for outside help, they might sue...they might quit. Choose your poison. Companies that get out ahead of it, transparently, with real limits and real opt-outs, are going to look a lot smarter in five years than the ones betting nobody notices.

Friday Fun

We made two New York Times recipes this week. One was a pan-fried halloumi dish and the other, a pan-seared salmon. Nothing pairs better with a home-cooked meal like that than keeping things simple, which is basically the entire philosophy behind this week’s drink.

The Cocktail: A Gin Rickey

Warm-weather, three-ingredient, zero-fuss. Gin, fresh lime juice, soda water, over ice, garnish with a lime wheel. No shaker, no syrup, thankfully no vermouth. It exists specifically for nights when you already did the hard work in the kitchen and don’t feel like doing more work at the bar cart.

2 oz gin • 3/4 oz fresh lime juice • Top with soda water • Lime wheel garnish

This Week’s Quote

“Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” — Benjamin Franklin

Unless I specifically indicate, I am not compensated for any endorsements I might provide in Labor Pain.

Labor Pain is published by Jay Conlin, Founder and Principal of ManGar Solutions a premier Labor and Employee Relations consulting firm.

Questions? Reach out at Jay@mangarsolutions.com for a free, confidential consult.

Mangar Solutions

PECO Strike Ends — Three Days, One Historic Win (According to Both Sides)

There was a strike this past week…you may or may not have heard about it given the short duration. PECO, the southeast Pennsylvania utility company had a short strike that is now over… IBEW Local 614 walked out at 12:01 a.m. on July 4, the first strike in the utility’s 145-year history, and had a tentative deal by Monday night, three days in. The union got what it said it wanted from day one: cash balance pension plans, full retirement medical coverage, wage increases for all 1,600 members (4% annually for four years, 4.5% in year five for field workers), and better working condition language on overtime notice and outside-scope pay.

What’s worth an employer’s attention here isn’t the outcome, it’s the speed. PECO held out through a heat wave, storm outages, and a very public fight over its own outage map, then gave up within 72 hours once the operational pain got real. That’s the calculus every utility and essential-service employer needs to run before a strike deadline, not during one: how long can we actually absorb the disruption, and does our contingency plan match that number or just look good on paper. PECO found out the hard way that 1,600 specialized workers aren’t easily replaced by out-of-state contractors when the lights are actually out. My bigger concern is not just the short duration but that the short duration will create some bad “learned” behavior. I know, you are sick of me talking about this but short strikes, while sometimes unavaoidable also create the liklihood of another strike the next time the two sides get back to the bargaining table. We’ll see in five years.

WHAT I’M FOLLOWING

Three Numbers, One Story

Three things caught my eye this week that don’t look related until you put them next to each other. The trade deficit jumped 42% in May to $77.6 billion, the widest gap in over a year, driven by a surge in capital goods and semiconductor imports tied to the AI buildout. Yes, AI is happening and not only is it a drain on power but it is also adding to the trade deficit.

June job growth came in at just 57,000, half of what was expected, with April and May both revised down a combined 74,000. And…the US just launched fresh strikes on Iran after attacks on tankers in the Strait of Hormuz, reversing an interim ceasefire and reimposing oil sanctions.

None of these is a labor relations story on its own. Together they’re the environment every labor relations professional will be dealing with for the next few months if not years.. A widening trade gap and a on again off again Hormuz situation both point toward higher input costs and supply chain risk. Soft job growth means less leverage for workers walking into 2026 contract talks even as inflation keeps outpacing wages. If you’re building a comp strategy or strike contingency plans for the back half of the year, the macro backdrop just got a lot less predictable. It is this kind of uncertainty that shows up at the bargaining table making everyone uncomfortable…and not in a good way.

SOMETHING TO MAKE YOU THINK

Hyundai, Robots, and Who Owns the Value

Hyundai’s workforce bargaining situation in Korea is putting a question on the table that US labor professionals should be watching closely: as automation takes on more of the actual output, who gets a piece of the value the machine creates. The robots aren’t just replacing headcount, they’re generating output that used to belong to a person’s labor, and the union is asking a very simple yet difficult question: if a machine is doing the work and generating the profit, why doesn’t the person who used to do that work get a piece of what the machine produces?

I know what my answer would be, however I’d bet money this exact argument shows up in a US bargaining unit within the next two or three cycles, especially anywhere warehousing, manufacturing, or logistics is layering in robotics. If you’re not already thinking through how your own comp philosophy holds up when “productivity gains” increasingly means “a machine did it,” you’ve got a head start available right now that won’t exist in three years. Language tied to automation will be crucial in these discussions.

The takeaway: the automation conversation is quietly shifting from “how many jobs does this cost” to “who owns the value this creates.” I think it’s important to shift that conversation back to reskilling and upskilling workers instead of debating how displaced employees can continue to stay on the payroll. Don’t get me wrong, automation is here and it reduces certain jobs. How companies deal with their impacted employees matters. Treat employees as commodities and not people, and the rest of your workforce will not only notice…they’ll run for cover…and security. You know what I mean…

TIP OF THE WEEK

The Two-Question Close

End every check-in, whether it’s with a direct report or that dreaded union steward, with two questions: “What’s something I should know about that I don’t?” and “What’s one thing that would make the job easier?” This takes a couple of minutes, it surfaces problems before they become grievances, and shows employees you actually want to hear it. If…you follow-up.

THE OTTO MOMENT

Declare Victory…But Hurry

PECO and IBEW Local 614 settled Monday night, and within about ninety minutes both sides had press releases out. The union: “historic win,” “landmark contract,” “greed does not go unchecked.” PECO: reached “an agreement that reflects our commitment to recognizing the important contributions of our represented employees.” Everybody won. Everybody always wins now…apparently.

Here’s what I believe actually happened. The two parties who both needed this to end, ended it. The union got real things, pensions, medical coverage, wage bumps, and gave up a few other things to get them. PECO gave ground it didn’t want to give and got its workforce back before the outages turned into a real political problem that would not go away quickly. The only thing that was historic was the strike. The deal they cut…that’s what a negotiated settlement has looked like for as long as I’ve been doing this.

What bugs me isn’t that they spun it. Everybody spins it these days. I’ve seem many a union committee distribute plenty of internal talking points that made a mediocre deal sound like a ground breaking moment. What bugs me is how fast the victory lap has gotten, and how loud. Thirty years ago you settled, you shook hands, you went home and told your own side what you got and what you gave up, and you let the deal speak for itself over the life of the contract. Now the press release drops before the ink is dry, because the audience isn’t the other side of the table anymore, it’s social media, and the members who weren’t in the room but who have unrealisitic expectations. Thats how things work these days…get your story out before someone else can give their spin…even if your story is exaggerated or worse. I know…thats the world we live in…but it doesn’t mean I have to like it.

I’ve been in 400-plus of these. I can count on one hand the ones I bragged about the next morning. The ones I’m actually proud of, the ones that held up, that both sides could still defend five years later and yet never said a word publicly. You don’t get a press release for a deal that’s still working in year four. You just get to keep doing your job.

FRIDAY FUN

The Fifty-Fifty (Plus the Hyphen)

A cocktail for anyone who’s ever watched someone try to negotiate the rounding error.

● 1.5 oz gin

● 0.75 oz dry vermouth

● 0.25 oz Aperol (a little bitter, on purpose)

● 2 dashes orange bitters

● Lemon twist

Stir with ice, don’t shake it, this isn’t a fight. Strain into a coupe. Twist the lemon peel over the top to release the oil, then drop it in. Split the pour exactly down the middle if you want to make a point. Somebody will still ask for a little more.

This Week’s Quote: “There are some men who, in a 50-50 proposition, insist on getting the hyphen, too.” — Lawrence J. Peter

Cheers, you’ve almost made it to Friday.

Thanks for visiting.

JC

Labor Pain is published by Jay Conlin, Founder and Principal of ManGar Solutions, a premier Labor and Employee Relations consulting firm.

If you have labor and/or employee relations questions, issues or concerns, please reach out to me at Jay@mangarsolutions.com for a free, confidential consult.

mangarsolutions.com

Unless I specifically indicate, I am not compensated for any endorsements I might provide in Labor Pain.

Newsworthy:

JAWS turned 50 on June 20^th and while that made me stop for a minute as I wondered how fifty years could go by so quickly, it also made me realize how this movie endures. Yes, it has some odd editing and if you look closely, you can see a flaw or two (more on that below) but people still watch it; we do in my family every July 4^th weekend (Saturday night this year). There is some good reporting on the movie and the filming which I have provided the links below. Happy reading and don’t be afraid to go in the water…even though I am. Could it be I have seen the movie at least twenty times?

Everything JAWS

https://www.capecodtimes.com/story/entertainment/2024/07/06/jaws-filming-sharks-amity-marthas-vineyard-spielberg/74266081007/

Something To Make You Think:

I mentioned above that there are a few hiccups in the movie JAWS. The two that always stand out to me are the scene where Chief Brody (Roy Scheider) is walking through town towards his office. If you look at the trees, you’ll see they are just starting to bud…in July? No. Some of the movie was filmed in March and April to avoid the summer crowds. The second is the townhall scene where they debate closing the beaches. The same thing here…the trees in the background are not even budding yet. There are others but I thought I’d let you try to find more at your leisure.

Tip of The Week:

Watch JAWS of course!!! Do it this weekend…unless you are at the beach. Watch it anyways…

Friday Fun:

It’s America’s 250th Birthday! What to do and how to celebrate? I’ll leave that up to you but might I suggest, go to that parade, build in some pool time, beach time, family time, friends time…perhaps consume something with gin in it? Oysters! Yes, for sure and its the only time of year I eat a hot dog…and I do add ketchup on top of the mustard. Sorry Chicago.

Don’t forget the fireworks…though leave that to the professionals…I have a story to share some day. Stay safe and Happy Fourth of July!

Thanks for visiting. You’ve almost made it to Friday.

JC

Unless I specifically indicate otherwise, I am not compensated for any item or product I might endorse.

Labor Pain is published by Jay Conlin, Founder and Principal of ManGar Solutions, a premier Labor and Employee Relations consulting firm.

Questions? Reach out at Jay@mangarsolutions.com for a free, confidential consult. Do so before you have a problem!

ManGarSolutions.com

In the News: MLB Is Determined to Remind Everyone How This “Works”

The MLB collective bargaining agreement expires at 11:59 p.m. on December 1, 2026. The players’ union has essentially said a lockout is coming. The commissioner has said publicly, out loud, that a lockout would be “a positive” because leverage is how the process works under the NLRA.

He’s not wrong. He’s just probably not supposed to say it.

What makes this negotiation different from the last one is the sides aren’t just arguing over money within an agreed-upon system. The owners want to blow up the system entirely, installing a hard salary cap for the first time in MLB history. The union wants no part of it. When two parties are negotiating frameworks rather than numbers, the distance between them isn’t measured in dollars. It’s measured in philosophy and determination. And both take a long time to bridge.

The gap on the “field” tells you something too. The Dodgers are carrying a payroll north of $379 million. The Marlins are at roughly $31 million. That’s not a competitive balance problem...that’s two very different circumstances pretending to be in the same league with the same logo.

For those of us in labor relations, the most interesting subplot is what Commissioner Manfred said quietly and what it signals loudly: ownership came into this negotiation with a strategy, not just a position. That’s a meaningful distinction. Positions get negotiated. Strategies get executed.

If you manage a workforce, bargain contracts, or advise employers, I suggest you watch this one closely. Baseball has a way of reminding the rest of us how collective bargaining actually works when both sides have real leverage and neither one blinks first.

The last lockout lasted 99 days...

What I’m Watching: The Real Reason Bosses Want You Back

I’ve been tracking the return-to-office debate for nearly two years now, and a piece in the New York Times this week by Adam Grant and two Wharton researchers finally put words to what I’ve been seeing with clients. The headline says it plainly: The Real Reason Bosses Want You Back in the Office Full Time (It’s Not Productivity).

It’s ego. That’s the argument. And the data backs it up.

A BambooHR survey of more than 1,500 U.S. managers found that a quarter of C-suite executives admitted they hoped employees would voluntarily quit after return-to-office mandates were implemented. One in five HR professionals said the same thing out loud. That’s not a workforce strategy. Or at least not a wise one. It appears to be more of a power move hidden behind a policy memo.

I’ve watched this play out for some time now. The RTO mandates that have worked, really worked, were built around a legitimate business rationale, communicated clearly, and phased in with some respect for the people being asked to change their lives. The ones that blew up were the ones driven by executives who were uncomfortable not being able to see who was at their desk.

There’s a leadership lesson buried in here for anyone who manages people: if you can’t articulate why you need someone in the office beyond “because I said so” or “that’s how we’ve always done it,” you don’t have a workforce strategy. You have a preference. And preferences differ drastically depending on where your office or cube or shared “Hotel” space exists. CEO or CHRO preferences make poor policy.

The best leaders I’ve seen navigate this asked a different question entirely. Not “how do I get them back?” but “what are we actually trying to accomplish, and what environment supports that?”

That’s a much harder question. It’s also a much better one.

Something to Make You Think: Are We Losing the Ability to Think?

We just might be losing the ability to think. Not in the dramatic, science-fiction sense...but in the quiet, incremental way that happens when convenience replaces effort. When was the last time you sat with a difficult problem...no phone, no Google, no AI assistant, and just worked through your issue? For most of us, that answer is uncomfortable.

Critical thinking was rarely taught as a subject so much as it was developed through “hard lessons.” We learned to think by being wrong, by having our assumptions challenged, by reading something that didn’t confirm what we already believed. The workplace used to provide those lessons naturally. Disagreements in conference rooms, managers who pushed back, colleagues who saw things differently. We didn’t always like it...but it made us sharper.

The risk today isn’t that technology is making us lazy. It’s subtler than that. It’s that we are outsourcing judgment. We get answers faster than ever, but we’re asking fewer of the right questions. In labor relations, and really in any field that involves human beings, the ability to read a room, weigh competing interests, anticipate second-order consequences...those skills don’t come from a search box. They come from practice, from mentorship, from making decisions and living with the outcomes.

Tip of the Week: Reading the Room Is a Skill -- Treat It Like One

Most people think the skill of reading the room is something you either have or you don’t. It isn’t. It’s a practiced skill, and like most skills, it atrophies when you stop using it.

Here’s a simple habit I’ve used for years, whether walking into a negotiation session, a grievance meeting, or an executive briefing: before you say a word, take 30 seconds and observe. Who’s talking to whom? Who’s quiet? Who moved their chair back from the table? Who came in last and sat nearest the door? Who has their arms crossed and a scowl on their face? The “room” is already telling you something before anyone opens their mouth.

The next step is more challenging: wait on your agenda long enough to actually hear what’s being said underneath what’s being said. Tone, pace, word choice, what’s notably absent from the conversation...these are data points. Most people are so focused on their next point that they stop receiving information the moment they sit down.

In a world where we’re increasingly processing everything through screens and summaries, the ability to be fully present in a room, to pick up on the unspoken clues, is becoming genuinely rare. Which means it’s becoming genuinely valuable.

Practice it this week. Go into your next meeting with one goal: observe first, talk second. You might be surprised by what you pick up.

The Otto Moment: We Used to Compete to Win

This past week at the US Open, several fans were ejected from Shinnecock Hills. Not for being drunk. Not for fighting. For cheering against Wyndham Clark...and being genuinely rude. They weren’t cheering for Scottie. They were rooting against his competitor.

I’ve seen a lot in nearly 35 years of labor relations. Strikes, corporate campaigns, grievance barrages, hand billing at 5 a.m. in a February parking lot. I’ve watched both sides play hardball and, honestly, I respect it when it’s done right, when it’s purposeful, when it’s connected to something someone actually wants. What I don’t respect at all is competing to wound.

The Teamsters, the SEIU, the UAW under Shawn Fain...they’ve all leaned into this. The UAW’s 2023 stand-up strike wasn’t just about wages. It was a performance. Plants called out one at a time for maximum disruption and maximum camera time. Corporate campaigns designed not to win a contract but to make the employer bleed publicly. The use of social media pile-ons, especially when they are bending or completely fabricating the truth is just so...low. Using community pressure calibrated not just to get members a raise but to demonstrate what the union can do to you is now commonplace...and sickening. It’s an odd form of leverage theater. It works sometimes. But usually only in the short term.

But here’s what I know that the pressure campaigners seem to have forgotten: you’re going to sit across that table again. And the one after that. And the one after that. Every round of “watch what we can do to you” is a deposit into an account that earns nothing but resentment.

The fans at Shinnecock weren’t rooting for anyone. They were just rooting against. That’s not passion. That’s hostility dressed up as fandom.

I’ve watched the same thing play out at the bargaining table my entire career. And it never ends well for either side. The UAW said they “won” and then...the layoffs started.

Friday Fun: The Bees Knees

There’s a lesson buried in every good cocktail if you look hard enough. Yes, sometimes that lesson is to NOT have another but I digress.

The Bees Knees was born during Prohibition...not out of abundance, but out of necessity. Bartenders were working with gin that was, to be kind, undrinkable. Because of this they were forced to improvise. They added honey to smooth out the medicinal taste. Fresh lemon was added to brighten it. The name was 1920s slang for the best of the best...which is a pretty good outcome for a drink invented to hide a problem.

I’ve seen the same instinct at the bargaining table more times than I can count. The framework is broken, the process isn’t working, and somebody on one side or the other gets creative. The best labor agreements I’ve been part of weren’t built on perfect conditions. They were built on people who figured out how to make something good out of what they had. It would be nice to see that happening again.

The Bees Knees

What you need:

• 2 oz gin (Hendrick’s or Bombay Sapphire work beautifully)

• 3/4 oz fresh lemon juice...fresh only, no shortcuts

• 3/4 oz honey syrup (2 parts honey, 1 part warm water, stirred until combined)

• Lemon twist to garnish

How to make it:

Combine all three ingredients in a shaker with ice. Shake hard for 15 seconds. This one needs the chill. Strain into a chilled coupe glass. Express a lemon twist over the top and drop it in.

Three ingredients. Simple. Delicious. Summer.

Cheers. You’ve almost made it to Friday.

Thanks for visiting.

JC

Unless I specifically indicate otherwise, I am not compensated for any item or product I might endorse.

Labor Pain is published by Jay Conlin, Founder and Principal of ManGar Solutions, a premier Labor and Employee Relations consulting firm.

Questions? Reach out at Jay@mangarsolutions.com for a free, confidential consult. Do so before you have a problem!

ManGarSolutions.com

In the News

Amazon and Whole Foods have spent the better part of 18 months trying to make a union election in Philadelphia disappear. This week, the NLRB told them it isn’t going anywhere.

In January 2025, workers at the Whole Foods on Pennsylvania Avenue in Philadelphia voted 130 to 100 to join UFCW Local 1776, becoming the first unionized store in the Amazon-owned chain’s history. Whole Foods immediately challenged the result, arguing that the Biden-era ban on “captive audience” meetings had violated their free speech rights and skewed the election, and that the vote shouldn’t have been certified while the NLRB lacked a quorum.

This past Monday, the Board confirmed it wasn’t buying it. In a unanimous order, the NLRB dismissed both objections, finding that Whole Foods had raised “no substantial issues warranting review.” UFCW Local 1776 President Wendell Young IV wasted no time, announcing the union would formally demand bargaining and calling on Whole Foods to come to the table. “There’s no reason at this point Whole Foods/Amazon shouldn’t sit down and begin bargaining right away,” Young said…then added: “although I suspect they won’t.”

He’s right. Whole Foods strongly disagrees with the ruling, and Amazon hasn’t exactly rushed to the bargaining table before. In fact, they’re still contesting the 2022 Staten Island store vote in federal appeals court. Expect this one to follow the same path: ULP charges, federal court, potentially years of delay. The NLRB says the union won the election. When and if bargaining begins is another matter entirely.

And yes…I understand this type of circumstance makes the recent house legislation requiring faster contract timelines seem appropriate to some. My opinion hasn’t changed even with a story like this. You can understand why by revisiting last week’s issue.

What I’m Watching

What happens next in Philadelphia is a case study that will have far-reaching ramifications for years to come. What’s at stake is how organizations deal with the aftermath of a certified election.

With Amazon, the playbook has been as follows: The union wins an election. The employer objects. The NLRB rules. The employer appeals to federal court. The federal court takes anywhere from one to three years to rule. The whole time, there’s no bargaining obligation. No contract. No recognition, practically speaking. Workers who voted yes get frustrated. Some leave. Organizing momentum fades. And if the employer is lucky (or unlucky, depending on your perspective) a decertification effort eventually takes hold.

Amazon effectively deployed this approach in Staten Island. Four years after that election, they’re still in federal court, still not bargaining, still not recognizing the Amazon Labor Union. The Philadelphia Whole Foods situation appears to be following the exact same script.

I’m watching this one for a few reasons. First, the current NLRB’s appetite for aggressive remedies, which includes bargaining orders, make-whole relief, and enhanced backpay, could make delay strategies like this a thing of the past. I’ll let you decide if that’s a good or a bad thing. Second, the captive audience issue isn’t dead. It’s going to federal court eventually, and how circuits rule on it will reshape what employers can say and do during organizing campaigns for years to come. Third, this is the only unionized Whole Foods store in the country. If UFCW Local 1776 eventually gets a contract, every Whole Foods worker in America will be watching what’s in it…and that’s exactly why Amazon has taken this delay path.

Stay tuned.

Something to Make You Think

Early in my career, I was across the table from the IBEW in Missouri. I was young enough that I was still learning what the job actually required and experienced enough that I’d been trusted to lead a negotiation as first chair for the first time. We’d done our homework. Our economic limits were fair…genuinely fair…and we had room to move if we truly needed to.

As we neared the end of a late-night session, I presented our latest economic offer. I did not call it a last, best and final offer, but it was a good, solid offer, and I believed in it. I laid it out. Walked them through every element. Made the case clearly. And then I stopped talking. So did everyone on my side of the table.

The silence that followed was one of the most uncomfortable things I’d experienced in a professional setting up to that point. Three minutes of nothing. No shuffling papers, no sidebar whispers from their side, no counter-questions. Just…silence. I could feel the pull to fill it…to clarify something I’d already explained. To add context that wasn’t needed. To essentially argue against my own proposal just to end the discomfort.

But I didn’t. And neither did my team. After nearly three minutes, they accepted the offer. I’ve thought about that moment many times over the decades since. What I learned in that conference room in Missouri wasn’t a trick or a tactic. It was something more fundamental: the person who speaks first after an offer is made almost always loses ground. The discomfort you feel in that silence? The other side feels it too. Silence, used at the right moment, is not the absence of negotiation. It’s the most powerful move at the table.

Tip of the Week

If you take one thing from this week’s Something to Make You Think, make it this: silence only works if your whole team is in on it.

Before you make a significant economic offer across the table, brief your team explicitly. Tell them: after I finish presenting, no one speaks until the other side does. Not to add a point. Not to answer a question they haven’t asked. Not to fill the quiet. Nothing. Because all it takes is one person on your side…usually the most well-intentioned one in the room to lean in and say “what we really mean by that is…” and the moment is gone. You’ve signaled uncertainty. You’ve invited a counter. And you’ve given up leverage for no reason.

The pre-negotiation silence briefing takes about 30 seconds. It might be the most valuable 30 seconds of your preparation. Three minutes feels like a very long time when no one is talking. But in comparison to another three hours of negotiation…

The Otto Moment

A maintenance supervisor at a manufacturing facility disciplines an employee for leaving his work area without authorization. It’s a legitimate concern. It is well-documented by the supervisor and witnessed by two other supervisors. It should be an open and shut case. But it isn’t. On the disciplinary write-up, under “reason for action,” the supervisor writes: “Employee has a bad attitude.”

The union files a grievance. The company’s labor relations team reviews the file. The witnesses are solid. The contract language is clear. The actual conduct of leaving the work area without authorization is absolutely defensible. But now they’re stuck defending “bad attitude.”

The arbitrator, predictably, finds the discipline too vague to sustain. The employee is made whole. The supervisor spends an afternoon in training. And somewhere, a labor relations professional stares at the ceiling and wonders how many times they’re going to have to explain the difference between what someone did and how their supervisor felt about it.

Document the behavior. Always the behavior…not the attitude, not how you felt about it.

Friday Fun

It’s Father’s Day weekend, and the U.S. Open tees off today In Long Island. Somewhere right now, a grown man is sitting in a golf cart, pretending he’s analyzing his lie when he’s really just enjoying the quiet. In the spirit of the occasion, here’s the Labor Pain Father’s Day Weekend Cocktail: The Last, Best & Final.

You’ll need:

• 2 oz bourbon (something with backbone! This is not a negotiation)

• ½ oz honey syrup (because even a firm offer should have something sweet in it)

• ¾ oz fresh lemon juice (a little acid keeps everyone honest)

• 2 dashes Angostura bitters (for the years of experience)

• Ice. A big cube. Not the sad little ones.

Combine bourbon, honey syrup, and lemon juice in a shaker with ice. Shake firmly but don’t overdo it. Add the bitters. Strain over one large cube. Do not garnish. Do not explain yourself.

Present it to someone across the table and say nothing. If they ask what’s in it, just smile. Silence is the most powerful move at the table.

Happy Father’s Day to all the dads reading this. Enjoy the Open. And if your Sunday plans involve a golf cart, a bourbon, and approximately three minutes of peaceful silence…know you’ve earned it.

Cheers, you almost made it to Friday.

Thanks for visiting.

JC

Unless I specifically indicate otherwise, I am not compensated for any item or product I might endorse.

Labor Pain is published by Jay Conlin, Founder and Principal of ManGar Solutions, a premier Labor and Employee Relations consulting firm.

Questions? Reach out at Jay@mangarsolutions.com for a free, confidential consult. Do so before you have a problem!

ManGarSolutions.com

IN THE NEWS

The Numbers Don’t Lie and Workers Do Pay Attention

A KPMG economist made some noise earlier this year with a chart she called ‘haunting.’ It’s not hard to see why. Corporate profits as a share of U.S. GDP have nearly doubled since 1982, going from 8% to just under 16%. Over that same period, employee compensation as a share of GDP has dropped from 66.6% to 61.9%. That’s a lot of big numbers but here’s the one that matters: the gap between those two trend lines is now at a post-World War II record high. Then, just last week, Axios put a finer point on it: corporate profits are currently taking the largest share of America’s total income since the early 1950s, while the share going to worker pay has shrunk to the thinnest on record.

KPMG’s Diane Swonk described it as having an “undercurrent of betrayal.” A friend of hers apparently calls it the “revolution chart.” Time will tell but workers pay more attention than organizations believe and when they see record profits...they want in.

Here’s the labor relations reality: organizers don’t need sophisticated arguments when the numbers make their case for them. You can have competitive wages, solid benefits, and a genuine open-door policy...and yet still be vulnerable if your employees feel like they’re watching the scoreboard and losing. The gap between what a company earns and what workers take home isn’t just an economic abstraction. On a shop floor, in a warehouse, on a Zoom call with a dispersed workforce, it becomes a story. And stories travel. Even if the facts get blurred.

The employers who are least vulnerable right now aren’t necessarily the ones paying the most, though that helps. They’re the ones who have made sure their people understand how the company’s success connects to their own and they make sure everyone benefits. Socialism? No. Smart business? Absolutely.

WHAT I’M WATCHING

PepsiCo Is Driving Trucks Without Using Drivers...

The Wall Street Journal broke the story Monday. Forty-one driverless trucks, running on public roads across Arizona, Texas, and Arkansas, hauling Doritos and Fritos from distribution centers to Walmart and Dollar General stores. Built by Isuzu, powered by autonomous startup Gatik. No driver. No safety operator. Reportedly the first time any U.S. company has publicly disclosed running autonomous trucks on public highways at scale.

I spent 25 years at PepsiCo. I know that supply chain well. And here’s what I also know: those drivers and warehouse workers weren’t oblivious. They’ve watched the Gatik trucks running routes for months. They knew. Most of them kept their heads down and did their jobs. That’s what people do when they’re uncertain...they wait and they watch. But there’s a difference between a rumor on the dock (though this wasn’t a rumor in those locations) and a Wall Street Journal front-page story. The first you can quietly ignore. The other you can’t. A story like this doesn’t create the anxiety, it legitimizes it. It gives workers permission to say out loud what they’ve been thinking privately, and it hands union organizers exactly the kind of external validation that turns a slow burn into a real conversation. The Teamsters didn’t need to say a word Monday morning. The Journal said it for them.

This isn’t a PepsiCo problem or a trucking problem. It’s a communication and trust problem that exists right now in every industry touching automation. The question isn’t whether autonomous vehicles, AI-powered scheduling, robotic picking systems, or automated customer service will displace roles. They will. The question is whether your employees hear about it from you first...or from a news alert on their phone while they’re on break. And they want to know what it means for them; not the organization. Them.

A quote in the article said everything without meaning to: “One of the things that we can do is be able to grow the business without having to add as many employees.” That’s the honest version. And to be fair, it’s probably true. But read that sentence again through the eyes of a driver who’s been with the company for twelve years. Then consider that a significant number of PepsiCo’s drivers are represented by the Teamsters, a union that has spent years and millions of dollars lobbying against autonomous vehicle expansion. I was on the front end of these discussions, and the Teamsters are not fans of this technology. I get both sides here. Part of the issue is where collective bargaining exists, companies will find it tough to implement this technology. Where there is no union...companies can and will implement this technolgy...and that’s the rub. The Teamsters didn’t respond to comment requests. They didn’t need to. That quote did their organizing work for them.

Automation announcements, handled poorly, are organizing gifts. They create fear, they create anger, and they create the exact “us versus them” narrative that makes a union card look like a reasonable response. If your organization is anywhere near automation (think logistics, manufacturing, call centers, food service, healthcare) you need to have a proactive communication plan for how technology changes connect to your workforce’s future, and where they might land. Watch how this plays out not just in Arizona and Texas but nationwide. The next six months should be telling. The trucks aren’t the story. The reaction to the trucks is the story.

SOMETHING TO MAKE YOU THINK

The Manager Problem Nobody Wants to Talk About

Gallup dropped a number recently that deserves more attention than it got: global employee engagement fell to just 20% in 2025. This is the lowest level since 2020. Ten trillion dollars in lost productivity worldwide. That’s a pretty grim headline...and a big number.

But here’s the part that actually matters for anyone in a leadership role: managers account for roughly 70% of the variance in team engagement. Not strategy. Not compensation. Not the C-suite. The manager directly above the employee. And manager engagement itself is declining.

There’s a compounding problem buried in there. Disengaged managers produce disengaged teams. Disengaged teams are easier to organize, harder to retain, and more likely to interpret every company decision through a lens of suspicion. The Edelman Trust Barometer this year found that 42% of employees would rather switch departments than report to a manager with different values. Think about that number. Nearly half your workforce making lateral moves, or maybe just as bad, quiet quitting, not because of pay, not because of the work, but because of who they report to. When we did manager training at PepsiCo for the North American Beverage business, we often asked supervisors a simple question: “Would you want to work for you?” The blank stares back were telling.

Most labor relations problems don’t start in the union hall. They start in a supervisor’s conversation, or the lack of one. The manager who doesn’t explain decisions. The one who’s too busy to listen. The one who treats policy as a wall instead of a framework. Gallup’s research shows that employees who say their manager is always willing to listen to work-related problems are 4.2 times more likely to say they trust the organization’s leadership. Not their manager specifically. The whole organization. People rarely quit companies...they quit bosses.

Ask yourself this week: do you know which managers in your organization your employees would transfer away from if they could?

TIP OF THE WEEK

The Mug That Explains Everything

Here’s a classic behavioral economics experiment worth knowing about.

Researchers gave a group of people a coffee mug. It was an ordinary mug...nothing special. Then they asked the people who received the mug how much they’d sell it for. They asked another group, people who did not have the mug, how much they’d pay for it.

The sellers wanted about twice what the buyers were willing to pay. The only thing that changed was ownership. Once the mug was theirs, giving it up felt like a loss. And losses, as behavioral economists have demonstrated repeatedly, hit about twice as hard psychologically as equivalent gains feel good. Let me say that again...losses hit twice as hard as what might be considered an equivalent gain. This is called the endowment effect. It could also be called why change is so hard.

How does this apply to the workplace? Well, when you take something away from employees, a preferred schedule, a perk (those dreaded Thanksgiving turkeys), a process, a workspace, a title, even a parking spot (especially a parking spot) you are not making an insignificant adjustment. You are triggering the endowment effect going in the wrong direction. The thing you’re removing was worth a certain amount to them before. The moment it becomes “theirs,” it grows in perceived value. And no matter how reasonable your business rationale, the math in their heads doesn’t work the way yours does.

Smart leaders don’t just manage change. They account for what people feel they’re losing...and they address it directly before the grievance has a chance to form. Things are small on the way in. They get very big on the way out. Do the math again...because they are doing it as well.

Source: Kahneman, D., Knetsch, J.L., & Thaler, R.H. (1990). “Experimental Tests of the Endowment Effect and the Coase Theorem.” Journal of Political Economy, 98(6), 1325-1348. Richard Thaler was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences in 2017.

THE OTTO MOMENT

Multiple Years and Still Clueless

I want to talk about the manager who’s been around forever. You know this person. Maybe you are this person. They have at least ten years with the company. They know the product cold. They know the process inside and out. They know where the bodies are buried and how to avoid them. They are introduced at every all-hands meeting as “one of our most experienced leaders” and nobody in the room disagrees. They truly know the business.

And yet...if you asked this person right now what their three best people are worried about, they couldn’t tell you. If you asked what they want from their careers, this person would stammer and maybe shrug their shoulders. They might even say that’s not their job. If you asked whether any of them have been approached by a union organizer in the last six months, they might look at you like you just asked them to speak Mandarin. Ten (or more) years of experience. Zero updated intelligence on the people they lead. At Pepsi, we used to call this “a lack of nerve endings.”

We often treat tenure as a proxy for capability. We assume that someone who’s been doing the job a long time must be doing it well. And in a lot of ways, maybe they are. But managing people isn’t like running a machine. The machine doesn’t change its mind. The machine doesn’t scroll job boards at lunch. The machine doesn’t sit in a break room and listen to someone explain why a union card might not be the worst idea.

People change. The workforce changes. What employees want, what they’ll tolerate, what they’ll walk away from...it can and often does shift. And the manager who learned everything he or she knows about employee relations in college or through years of “time tested” experience but hasn’t continued to learn or hasn’t utilized avaialble resources to become a better manager in today’s environment, is a liability. A (mostly) well-meaning, hard-working, genuinely experienced liability.

To be clear, I’m not letting myself off the hook here either. Thirty-five years in HR and labor and employee relations, and I still get surprised sometimes. I still learn things...even if I’d rather not. I still have conversations that make me rethink something I thought I had figured out. That’s not a confession of weakness...that’s my job. That’s your job. That’s everyone’s job. The moment you think you’ve got everything figured out is the moment you stop paying attention. And now you are that liability.

The best managers I’ve seen, treat their people knowledge as continuing education. They haven’t seen it all, so they constantly adjust...maybe just a little, but they know their ability to succeed depends on their people, so they stay “current” and continue to adapt.

So, if you’ve got a “seasoned” manager on your team who performs well by the numbers but not by the people...that’s not an asset, that’s a gap in your labor relations defense. And gaps have a way of getting filled by people you didn’t invite.

What’s the “solve?” Continually upgrading supervisory and managerial capability and...some honest feedback.

FRIDAY FUN

Sear Something Beautiful This Weekend

It’s June. The corn is (or soon will be) sweet, the basil is growing faster than you can use it, and the last thing you want to do is spend an hour in a hot kitchen. This one takes about 25 minutes start to finish and looks like you tried a lot harder than you did.

Seared scallops with summer corn and basil succotash.

The only rule worth knowing before you start: buy dry-packed scallops, not wet-packed. Wet-packed scallops are treated with a solution that makes them release water in the pan — and water is the enemy of a good sear. You want that deep golden crust. Dry-packed gets you there. Pat them bone dry, season well, hot pan, don’t touch them. Ninety seconds. Flip. Baste with butter. Done. There is a temptation to constantly flip scallops. This is when they stick and tear apart.

For four people you’ll need: 1.5 lbs. dry-packed sea scallops...4 ears of fresh corn, kernels cut off...1 cup cherry tomatoes halved...1 zucchini diced small...1 shallot...2 garlic cloves...fresh basil...3 tbsp butter...olive oil...a splash of dry white wine...one lemon...salt and pepper...sea salt to finish.

Build the succotash first in a large skillet...shallot, garlic, zucchini, then the corn until it gets a little char on it. Add the tomatoes, the wine, a pat or two of butter, lemon juice and zest, and half the basil. Keep it warm on low. Then sear the scallops in a separate screaming hot pan. Cast iron is ideal if you have one. Ninety seconds per side, baste with butter as it foams. Place them on top of the succotash, finish with fresh basil and a pinch of sea salt.

Pour yourself a glass of Columna Albarino 2024, Rias Baixas, Spain. It’s about $26 and widely available at Total Wine. More than I like to pay, but it’s light and refreshing and I don’t say that about many white wines.

Cheers. It’s nearly Friday. Thanks for visiting.

JC

Unless I specifically indicate otherwise, I am not compensated for any item or product I might endorse.

Labor Pain is published by Jay Conlin, Founder and Principal of ManGar Solutions, a premier Labor and Employee Relations consulting firm.

Questions? Reach out at Jay@mangarsolutions.com for a free, confidential consult. Do so before you have a problem!

ManGarSolutions.com

June 4, 2026

IN THE NEWS

Harvard Just Ended Its Longest Strike in History. Without a Contract.

I just caught this and I think it deserves your attention, especially if you’re in healthcare or higher education, where graduate workers and clinical staff are increasingly organized and becoming very impatient.

The Harvard Graduate Student Union, which is affiliated with the UAW, of all unions, representing more than 4,000 student workers across Harvard’s 13 schools, ended a 40-day strike on Monday. The longest in the union’s history. They picketed through finals. Through commencement. The Boston mayor canceled her commencement appearance in solidarity. Harvard hired replacement workers just to submit final grades. Research labs ground to a halt. And after all of it, they went back to work without a contract.

What moved them off the picket line wasn’t a deal. It was what the union called the “first indication of engagement” from Harvard after 14 months at the table. Harvard bumped its four-year raise offer by 1 percent. Added full dental coverage for PhD students. Expanded access to a few benefit funds. The union called it short of their demands on living wages, harassment protections, and safeguards for non-citizen workers, but enough of a shift in tone to end the strike and return to bargaining. Next bargaining sessions: June 9 and June 23.

Here’s what I want you to take from this. The move by Harvard wasn’t all that significant, but with classes and graduation over, the union’s leverage dropped dramatically. This won’t be popular with some of you, but when I was leading negotiations and a strike happened, I suddenly became much harder to reach.

At Pepsi we always had multiple contracts in some stage of negotiation or prep, so I simply moved my attention there. Why? Because once employees go on strike, anything short of a month out is a mistake by the employer. Too often you’ll see a five-day strike or maybe it lasts for two weeks. The reality in those strikes is the employees got themselves a short, adrenaline-fueled vacation. This leads to learned behavior in my opinion, and so I actually wanted six weeks to be clear that striking was going to be not a vacation but a painful experience the strikers never wanted to endure again. Harsh? Brutal? Uncaring? No. Reality. Strikes hurt both sides but way more often than not, they hurt the employees more than the company. Not always, but usually. Companies cannot thrive when there is continual labor unrest. Yes…it’s bad for business. And workers frankly suffer as well. So if I could avoid a strike I worked hard to do that. When the union decided a strike was their best option…I did what I could to prevent it and if that failed, I did what I could to create a lasting memory.

Connecticut Signs the First AI-in-Employment Transparency Law

Connecticut Governor Lamont signed SB 5 last week, and if you use any kind of automated tool in your hiring, promotion, discipline, or discharge decisions, this matters even if you’re not in Connecticut.

In short, starting October 2026, employers filing WARN Act notices must disclose whether layoffs are related to AI or other technological change. Starting October 2027, employers must provide written notice to employees and job applicants whenever an AI tool is a “substantial factor” in an employment decision. That covers recruiting software, performance scoring tools, scheduling algorithms, attendance management platforms, and anything else that uses data and computation to inform a decision about a person’s job.

There’s more. The law explicitly states that using an AI tool is not a defense against discrimination claims. If your AI made a biased decision, saying “the algorithm did it” is not a legal protection. The law also creates whistleblower protections for employees who report AI-related safety concerns. I’m still working out what those look like in practice, but they’re in the law.

Connecticut joins California, Colorado, Illinois, and New York City in this space. There is no federal standard, and the Trump administration has signaled it prefers a preemption approach rather than state-by-state regulation. Don’t count on federal preemption saving you from compliance work. These laws are moving faster than the federal timeline.

WHAT I’M FOLLOWING

The Great Compliance. And Why It Worries Me.

A survey made the rounds this week with a data point that many in the HR community are treating as good news. The survey stated the share of employees who say they would quit over a return-to-office mandate has dropped from 51 percent to 7 percent in a single year. One year ago, half the workforce said they’d walk. Now it appears almost nobody will. They’re calling it “The Great Compliance.” They say management won. They say workers backed down. They say the leverage has shifted. I say…be careful.

This number says to me that employees aren’t staying because they’re happy. They’re staying because the job market has tightened, because February’s employment numbers came in at -156,000 (Revised downward to this number in April), because people are scared. Jobs are difficult to secure, and AI has made the screening much more difficult to get past. Compliance under economic pressure is not the same thing as engagement. And it is definitely not the same thing as trust.

Stanford research this week puts a sharper point on it. The probability of skilled employees departing after RTO mandates is 77 percent higher than less-skilled workers. The people most likely to leave are the people you can least afford to lose. The ones who stay are often the ones with fewer options.

What I’m following: whether employers read 7 percent as permission to stop doing the relational work. Because that’s what happened in 2019. The market softened, leverage shifted back to employers, and a lot of organizations exhaled and stopped paying attention. Then 2020 happened, and then the Great Resignation happened, and everyone acted surprised.

The quit rate told you something on the way up. The “compliance” rate is telling you something now. The question is whether you’re watching the right signal.

SOMETHING TO MAKE YOU THINK

The Trust Gap Is Real. And Programs Won’t Close It.

The 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer dropped earlier this year with some remarkable findings. Trust in institutions, including employers, continues to erode. But buried in the data is something more useful than the headline number.

When researchers asked people what would actually rebuild trust, the top answer wasn’t better communication. It wasn’t a new benefits package. It wasn’t a town hall or a pulse survey or a DEI initiative. It was genuine, sustained interpersonal relationships. Seventy-four percent of people said bringing employees together, with people different from themselves, would be an effective trust-building strategy.

Think about what most employers are doing right now. Remote work is fading, but the traditional office model has gotten…well…strange. Some hybrid arrangements, Teams calls with people not on video, more open but oddly shared spaces, no set desk space, “talk rooms” that double as spaces the cool kids get to use, and yet with all of this “open concept” thinking, organizations are providing fewer of the small daily moments that build the kind of trust you actually need when things get hard. I’ve written about it before, but the end of the office happy hour sends up a red flag. Organizations are engineering the conditions for low trust and then wondering why employees don’t believe them when they talk. Many times it is because they don’t know the leadership. Sometimes they don’t even know their peers.

I’ve sat across the table from unions in first contract negotiations where the employer’s biggest problem wasn’t the economics. It was that the workers on the other side of the table had spent years watching management say one thing and do another. And, they never felt included…part of the success. By the time you’re in that room, you’re not negotiating a contract. You’re trying to recover from years of accumulated distrust and emotional neglect. It’s expensive. It’s slow. And it was almost always preventable.

The employers who experience high levels of employee engagement aren’t running programs. They’re building relationships. There’s a massive difference.

TIP OF THE WEEK

Know What You Can Actually “Afford” Before You Sit Down

With a contract-heavy fall coming, I think this one is timely. Verizon’s contract with 20,000 Northeast and mid-Atlantic workers expires in August (by the way they are notorious for short strikes). Kaiser nurses in Northern California, 24,600 members, expire in August as well. The League of Voluntary Hospitals in New York, 80,000 healthcare workers, expires in September. And the MLB Players Association expires in December.

Most employers walk into negotiations knowing what they want to say. Not enough have done the work to know what it will cost to say yes…or no. That gap is where bad deals get made. You agree to a wage pattern at the table because it feels reasonable in the moment, or because you want to close. Then you get back to your desk and run the numbers and realize the compounding effect over three years, loaded with benefits and premium pay and overtime, is something you can’t absorb without cutting somewhere else.

Or…the opposite is true. “Finance” says the offer is not “within budget” so they nix a potential deal. The problem in both cases is without a true understanding of the costs you might make a bad deal or kill a good one. Either way…it costs you time and money. Finance doesn’t factor in turnover or a much lower level of productivity when a deal falls short. They do factor in what seems like an “overspend” even if the market data suggests otherwise because it wasn’t budgeted.

The simple version of what you should do before you sit down? Build a cost model. Wages are the obvious piece, but model the full load: shift differentials, overtime impact, benefit cost increases, any premium pay provisions, the compounding effect of year-over-year increases. Run it at three or four different wage scenarios so you know exactly where your walk-away point is before the union makes its first proposal. This was standard practice at Pepsi, we actually created our own costing model and it made a huge difference.

You don’t negotiate better contracts by being smarter at the table. You negotiate better contracts by doing the work before you get there. The table is too late to figure out what you can or cannot afford. And by the way…never say that you “can’t afford it” at the table. But that is for another time.

RANT OF THE WEEK: THE OTTO MOMENT

The Great Compliance Is Not a Win

I want to go back to that 7 percent number for a minute, because I think the way it’s being talked about in HR circles is going to cost some organizations real money in the months ahead. The story line is this: workers backed down. Management won. The age of employee leverage is over.

After nearly 35 years in this business I know employees who stay but stop believing in you are not a retention success. They are a slow leak. Compliance and commitment are not the same thing. They never have been. An employee who shows up every day and does exactly what’s required and feels no loyalty to the organization is not an asset. They are a risk that hasn’t materialized yet.

What worries me about the Great Compliance narrative is that it gives managers permission to stop paying attention. To stop asking. To stop investing in the kind of relationships that actually hold organizations together when things get hard.

The quit rate told you something real on the way up. People were willing to absorb real financial risk to get out. That feeling didn’t disappear because the job market tightened. It went underground. And things that go underground in labor relations have a way of surfacing at the worst possible moment, in the worst possible form.

Seven percent will quit. The other 93 percent are telling you something too. Are you paying attention to what it is?

FRIDAY FUN

My Ponte Vedra Summer Drink

It’s early June in Northeast Florida. It’s hot. You’ve almost made it to Friday. Here’s what should be in your hand as the weekend arrives.

This is an old staple in our house as summer hits…

3 oz gin (of course)

1 oz campari (for both color and flavor…crimson and bitter)

3 oz tonic (club soda if watching calories)

Lemon or lime

Sprig of mint if so inclined

Stir all ingredients in a cocktail glass with lots of ice.

It’s actually very refershing and not so over powering that a second would land you a letter from your local HOA about bad behavior. I cannot attest to what having a third does….but I might owe the HOA some money.

Cheers. It’s nearly Friday. Thanks for visiting.

JC

Unless I specifically indicate otherwise, I am not compensated for any item or product I might endorse.

Labor Pain is published by Jay Conlin, Founder and Principal of ManGar Solutions, a premier Labor and Employee Relations consulting firm.

Questions? Reach out at Jay@mangarsolutions.com for a free, confidential consult. Do so before you have a problem!

ManGarSolutions.com

In the News

Congress Just Tried to Rewrite the Rules of First Contract Bargaining

This one snuck up on a lot of people, but it shouldn’t have. I mentioned this a couple of weeks back.

On May 20th, a discharge petition for the Faster Labor Contracts Act hit 218 signatures in the House, the threshold needed to bypass leadership and force a floor vote. Speaker Johnson wasn’t going to bring it to the floor. So, Rep. Donald Norcross (D-NJ) went around him. And it worked.

Here’s what the bill does: if an employer and a newly certified union can’t reach a first contract within 90 days of bargaining, the bill mandates mediation. If mediation fails, a government arbitration panel steps in and imposes binding contract terms. The bill also requires employers to come to the table within 10 days of a union election win.

Unions love it for obvious reasons. The average time to a first contract right now is 458 days. Admittedly, this seems like a long time period, and it is. Some will say that’s because companies delay and stall in an effort to wear down the union and perhaps get to the one-year time period where employees could attempt to decertify the union. There is some truth to that; however, 10 days is not realistic to start bargaining and 90 days to complete a deal is just silly. Every aspect of the contract has to be negotiated. Each and every clause and unless the company just gives in to the union’s demands...that process can take a while. As I said before, unions will now have an incentive to propose even more unrealistic items than before because the chances of an arbitrator “splitting the baby” are high. So why not aim as high as possible in order to get halfway there?

Here’s what employers need to understand: mandatory interest arbitration is not collective bargaining. It’s a coin flip with a government arbitrator who doesn’t know your business, your margins, your workforce, or your market. The NLRA was built on the principle that parties reach their own agreements. This bill fundamentally changes that principle for the most consequential negotiation an employer will ever have with a union...the first one.

The bill still has to pass the House, survive the Senate, and clear a White House that hasn’t exactly been union friendly. But the fact that it got to the floor at all, with bipartisan support, tells you something about where the political pressure is building.

If you’re a non-union employer watching this, pay attention. The bill’s premise is that employers delay first contracts on purpose. Whether or not that’s true in your shop, the legislation doesn’t ask. It just starts the clock.

Employers Spend $1.7 Billion a Year on Union Avoidance. Is It Working?

A new report from the Economic Policy Institute dropped this week with a number worth sitting with: U.S. employers spend roughly $1.7 billion a year on union avoidance consultants and law firms. Amazon alone topped $26 million in 2025.

That’s a lot of money. Here’s the question nobody in that industry wants to answer: what’s the return?

Unionization in the U.S. has grown to its highest levels in 15 years. Unions are winning most of the elections they file. First contract campaigns are more aggressive than ever. The $1.7 billion is being spent, and organizing is going up anyway.

So what separates the consultants who actually move the needle from the ones just running up a bill?

The good ones don’t show up with a playbook that worked somewhere else in 2019. They assess your specific workforce, your specific vulnerabilities, and tell you things you may not want to hear...before a petition gets filed, not after. They’ve sat across the table from unions, not just advised clients about them. They know what a real organizing campaign looks like from the inside, because they’ve been in the room.

The ones who don’t deliver are usually selling a process. The ones who do are selling judgment. That’s a harder thing to put in a proposal, and a much harder thing to fake.

If you’re going to spend money in this space, spend it on someone who will tell you the truth about your workplace first. Come to think of it…I might know a group to consider…

What I’m Following

Amazon, the 11th Circuit, and the Meeting You Might Not Be Allowed to Hold

This one is still in flight, but it’s worth understanding before it lands.

In November 2024, the NLRB issued a landmark ruling in the Amazon case declaring captive audience meetings unlawful. For those who haven’t had to think about this yet: a captive audience meeting is when an employer requires employees to attend a meeting during a union organizing campaign where the company shares its views on unionization. Employers have used them for decades. The NLRB said they’re now a violation of Section 7 rights under the NLRA.

Amazon appealed. Oral arguments at the 11th Circuit happened this week. Amazon’s argument is essentially a First Amendment one; that the government can’t prohibit an employer from speaking to its own employees on company time. The NLRB counters that the coercive nature of mandatory attendance is the problem, not the speech itself. I used these meetings quite effectively at Pepsi. The rules of those meetings were clear, I could not make promises, I could not threaten jobs or job security, but I could tell them about how unions operate and my history with unions. I could also explain how I approached first contracts; hint, it was quite different than bargaining a long-standing contract. What’s frustrating here is unions can make promises during a campaign. The rules already favor them. Whether they can uphold those promises is always the question, but employees often don’t know this. That’s why the meetings were so valuable. Employees did actually get new information...information to help them make an informed decision.

Here’s why this matters beyond Amazon: captive audience meetings have been one of the most common and effective tools in an employer’s union campaign toolkit for 75 years. If the 11th Circuit upholds the NLRB ruling, that tool is gone. It basically is anyway but, if it reverses, the Biden-era precedent starts to unravel.

The current NLRB general counsel has actually asked the Board to reconsider the ruling internally, which adds another layer of uncertainty. So, you have a case that might get resolved in court, might get reversed by the Board itself, or might just sit in legal limbo while employers try to figure out what they’re allowed to say and when.

For now: if you have an organizing campaign underway or on the horizon, talk to counsel before you schedule anything that looks like a mandatory all-hands on the union question. The rules are genuinely unsettled but favor unions at this point.

Something to Make You Think

The Rules Keep Changing. Your Relationships Don’t Have To.

Look at what happened this week in labor relations.

Congress is moving to mandate arbitration when first contract bargaining stalls because they believe organizations don’t want to bargain in good faith. Maybe. Maybe not.

I’ve spent a long time in labor and employee relations. What I know is this: the employers who sleep best at night aren’t the ones with the best legal team on speed dial. They’re the ones whose employees don’t feel like they need a union to get a fair shake and if they do have one, whose relationship with that union is built on something more durable than the current regulatory environment.

Rules change. Administrations change. Court decisions change. What doesn’t change is whether the people on the other side of the table believe you’re dealing with them fairly and honestly.

That’s not soft advice. That’s the most practical thing I can tell you. Whether you have a union or not.

Tip of the Week

Audit Your Relationships Before Someone Else Does

Most employers do compliance audits. Wage and hour reviews. I-9 checks. Policy updates. Someone puts it on the calendar, it gets done, boxes get checked.

Very few do relationship audits.

Here’s a simple one. Pick three groups of people whose trust matters to your organization...a union you bargain with, a work group that’s shown early organizing signals, a department with unusually high turnover. Then ask yourself four honest questions about each one:

When did someone from leadership last have a real conversation with them? Not a town hall, not a survey, an actual conversation.

Do they believe the company deals with them honestly, even when the answer is no?

If something went wrong tomorrow, would they come to us first or go around us?

And the hardest one: if they organized or grieved or escalated right now, would we be surprised and/or would we already know why?

You don’t need a board meeting to do this...you need an honest hour and the willingness to not like some of the answers and also a willingness to truly fix problems.

The employers who end up in front of arbitrators or in NLRB proceedings usually didn’t get there suddenly. They got there because nobody asked these types of questions when the asking was still easy.

Do it now. While it’s still easy...even if it doesn’t feel like it.

Rant of the Week: The Otto Moment

Nobody Got Honest When Colbert Got Canceled. Shocking.

Stephen Colbert’s Late Show ended on May 21st. CBS announced it with the kind of carefully worded corporate statement that says everything except the truth. Something about “restructuring the late-night landscape.” “Evolving viewer habits.” “A difficult but necessary decision.” Sure.

Here’s what actually happened. Colbert was too honest, too often, about too many things that powerful people would have preferred he leave alone. And in 2026, that’s apparently a business liability. So, he’s out. And we are not the better for it. But nobody will say that. CBS won’t say it. The trades won’t say it. The sponsors who quietly stopped returning calls won’t say it. Everyone gets to hide behind the quarterly earnings report and call it strategy.

I’m not here to bury late night television. I’m here to point out that this happens every single day in American business and too often we’ve all just agreed to pretend otherwise.

A company announces a “strategic reorganization to drive operational efficiency.” Translation: the number was bad last quarter, and we need to look like we are taking action. The workforce gets a town hall with slides. Leadership uses words like “right-sizing” and “harmonization” and “aligning resources to growth priorities.” Nobody in the room believes a word of it. But everybody nods. Because that’s what we do.

I have sat in those rooms. I have watched senior leaders deliver messages they didn’t write about decisions they didn’t make for reasons they weren’t allowed to say out loud. And I have watched employees...smart, experienced people who’ve been around long enough to know exactly what’s happening and just sit there and take it. Not because they’re naive. Because they’ve learned that asking the real question out loud often doesn’t end well.

Here’s what that costs you. Every time leadership delivers a message that everyone knows is a half-truth dressed up in PowerPoint, you make a withdrawal from an account that doesn’t refill easily. That account is called Trust. And unlike a quarterly earnings miss, you don’t always see the damage right away. You see it eighteen months later when you’re trying to negotiate a contract and the other side won’t take your word for anything. Or when an organizing drive shows up in a facility where you thought things were fine. Or when your best people leave and the exit interview says, “other opportunities” and you know that’s not even close to the whole story.

Colbert got canceled for saying true things. Most of us don’t have a late-night show to lose*. But we do have the choice, every time we walk into a room, about whether we’re going to say the real thing or the safe thing.

The safe thing is easier. That doesn’t make it right.

*I’m taking name suggestions for my upcoming late-night talk show...

Friday Fun

Go Watch Only in Monroe. Right Now.

I spent this week’s rant telling you people aren’t honest anymore. So let me end with the exception.

The night after Stephen Colbert signed off from The Late Show for the last time, he showed up unannounced on Monroe Community Media, a public access channel in Monroe, Michigan. No network. No corporate oversight. No carefully managed farewell tour. Just Colbert, back where he first introduced himself to the world in 2015, doing exactly what he wanted to do.

The episode had musician Jack White, actor Jeff Daniels, actor Steve Buscemi in a pizza commercial, a chili dog taste test, and ended with Colbert smashing the set. It was chaotic and funny and completely what was needed on Friday..

And then because apparently only the universe has a sense of humor, CBS started issuing copyright takedown notices on fan uploads of the episode. A show that existed specifically because a network canceled the guy. The backlash was immediate, CBS backed down, and the episode is now living on Colbert’s own YouTube channel where it belongs.

Even on the way out, somebody couldn’t help trying to manage the message. Go watch it. It’s the most honest thing on television this week, which is appropriate, because it’s not actually on television. WARNING! THIS LINK IS LOADED WITH ADS SO BE READY TO SKIP!!!

Only in Monroe — May 22, 2026

Cheers. You made it to Friday. 🍹

Thanks for visiting.

JC

Unless I specifically indicate otherwise, I am not compensated for any item or product I might endorse.

Labor Pain is published by Jay Conlin, Founder and Principal of ManGar Solutions.

Questions? Reach out at Jay@mangarsolutions.com for a free, confidential consult.

ManGarSolutions.com

IN THE NEWS

The LIRR Finally Did It. Now What?

We saw this coming. Last week I told you the LIRR clock was ticking. At 12:01 a.m. Saturday, it ran out.

Five unions representing roughly 3,500 workers including locomotive engineers, signalmen, machinists, electrical workers, and trainmen all walked off the job, shutting down North America’s busiest commuter rail system for the first time since 1994. The strike lasted three days. Both sides met again Sunday and negotiated, with a brief break overnight, until they reached an agreement Monday evening. Governor Hochul announced the deal, and LIRR service resumed Tuesday at noon. The disruptions linger.

Here’s what I want you to notice about how this played out, because it’s a masterclass in how not to negotiate.

The core financial gap was not enormous. The unions wanted 16% over four years. The MTA offered roughly 14%. The sticking point seemed like it was wages, in particular a fifth year lump sum. That lump sum was in the final deal. So what was the big issue? It was healthcare. The MTA asked future hires to contribute 10% of their healthcare premiums. That’s a fraction of what most private-sector employees pay. The unions said no. It’s not uncommon for companies and unions to structure deals which impavct future employees/members but it appears the unions (remember there were multiple unions at the table) were unable to at least initially, find common ground.

The final deal gives workers a four-year contract with a six-week extension, annual raises of 3%, 3%, 3.5%, and 4.5% in the final year, a $3,000 lump sum payment, and full retroactive pay. The healthcare contribution language that triggered the whole thing? Not mentioned in the settlement terms that have been released. I’m still trying to find out where they landed.

Here’s the takeaway that has nothing to do with New York: when a strike happens, the relationship failed long before the deadline. The picket line is just the public announcement. And the deal you eventually sign? It was probably available three days earlier. Someone just wasn’t ready to move.

The commuters got three days of shuttle buses and three-hour traffic jams. The unions got their raises. The MTA got its settlement. Everyone declared victory. That’s how it usually ends.

The Overtime Rule Is Dead. Employers, Take Note.

While everyone was watching trains not move in New York, the Department of Labor quietly walked away from one of the more consequential regulatory fights of the past two years.

The Biden-era overtime rule, which would have raised the salary threshold for overtime eligibility from $35,568 to $58,656, is officially done. Two Texas federal judges had already vacated it, and the Trump DOL told the court last week it won’t be defending it any further. The rule never took effect. It’s now dead.

For employers, this matters in two directions. The immediate relief is obvious: you don’t need to reclassify exempt employees or restructure compensation to clear a threshold that’s now off the table. But the longer-term implication is worth sitting with. The Biden rule was attempting to address a real problem; that is, the original threshold hadn’t been meaningfully updated in decades and had lost significant ground to inflation. That problem doesn’t disappear because the rule did. Employees who feel underpaid relative to their workload still feel underpaid. And the political appetite to revisit this threshold isn’t going away permanently.

Use the reprieve wisely. Don’t just exhale and move on.

WHAT I’M FOLLOWING

Costco and the Teamsters: Don’t Look Away

Teamster-represented Costco workers voted last week to authorize a nationwide strike. This isn’t unusual but it does not mean a strike will happen. But…it is a signal. Strike authorization votes are how unions build leverage before a deadline, and the vote count matters. A high authorization percentage tells management the membership is unified and ready. A low one tells them the opposite. Though unions rarely tell their company counterparts the actual strike vote numbers.

Costco has built a reputation as one of the better large employers in American retail including higher wages, real benefits, lower turnover than its competitors. If the Teamsters are drawing a hard line here, it’s worth asking what the underlying friction is. Sometimes good employers get complacent at the table. Sometimes unions test a favorable environment to see what more they can get. Either way, this one is worth watching. Retail labor relations tend to move in patterns, and Costco just might set one.

The Legal Fight Over Anti-Union State Laws

A quieter but potentially significant battle is developing over whether southern governors are violating federal law with their anti-union legislative campaigns. The question at the center: are state-level card check bans preempted by the NLRA?

The argument isn’t new, but the current political environment is giving it new legs. If federal preemption arguments succeed, it would effectively nullify a wave of state-level labor legislation passed in the last several years across the Southeast and beyond. If they fail, states retain significant latitude to shape the organizing landscape within their borders. For employers operating in multiple states this is worth tracking. The outcome shapes where campaigns happen and what rules apply.

SOMETHING TO MAKE YOU THINK

The Person Who’s Never Wrong

Think about the last leader you worked with who never admitted a mistake. Not someone who was occasionally defensive but someone who structurally could not acknowledge being wrong. They reframed. They redirected. They found a way to make every outcome, even the bad ones, look like a choice they’d made intentionally.

Research on leadership derailment consistently identifies this pattern as one of the most reliably destructive traits in senior executives. Not incompetence. Not poor strategy. The inability to say “I got that wrong.” Trust me, the other traits mentioned are still infuriating.

Here’s the interesting part: the leaders who derail this way often aren’t insecure. They’re frequently the most confident people in the room. The problem isn’t a fragile ego, it’s a closed feedback loop. If you can never be wrong, you can never learn. And if you can never learn, you’re running the same playbook in 2026 that worked (or didn’t) in 2019.

The leaders who tend to last, and more importantly, the ones people actually want to follow, share a quiet habit. They say “I was wrong about that” without a follow-up explanation that reassigns the blame. Just the acknowledgment. It turns out that’s one of the most disarming and trust-building things a leader can say.

You probably already know someone who should read this. You might also be them. I have been, more than once. I think….

TIP OF THE WEEK

Stop Preparing to Speak. Start Preparing to Listen.

Most leaders prep for conversations the wrong way. They think through what they want to say. They anticipate objections and pre-build responses. They walk in ready to talk.

Here’s the problem: by the time the other person says something unexpected (and they always do) you’re not really listening anymore. You’re just waiting for your turn.

The prep that actually changes outcomes is different. Before a difficult conversation, a negotiation, a performance discussion, spend two minutes on this instead: What do I actually not know about this person’s position? What might they say that would change my mind? Then go in curious instead of armed.

In labor relations, the best negotiators I’ve ever watched weren’t the ones with the best speeches. They were the ones who heard things other people missed because they weren’t so focused on what they’d planned to say next.

It works the same way at home. Try it once this week and see what happens. I should probably take this advice.

RANT OF THE WEEK: THE OTTO MOMENT

16% vs. 14%. Do the Math.

I want to be careful here because I’m not going to tell you who was right in the LIRR dispute. That’s not what this is about.

What I am going to tell you is this: the gap between a deal and a strike was, at its core, somewhere between 2% and a healthcare contribution argument. And 275,000 people ended up taking shuttle buses and sitting in three-hour traffic jams because two sides couldn’t close it.

I have been in rooms where the math was this close. I have watched both sides; smart people, experienced people, people who genuinely cared about the outcome, talk each other out of a deal that was sitting right there on the table. Not because the economics were impossible. Because someone wasn’t ready to move. Because someone had something to prove. Because someone’s back was up about something that happened six months ago that had nothing to do with year four of a wage proposal.

Strikes are rarely about the final number. They’re about everything that happened before the final number got to the table. But here’s the thing: A three day strike, while terrible for the commuters, is even worse for the LIRR. Three days? Thats a vacation. They even paid them retroactive pay so its as if the strike did not happen for the strikers. What’s the big deal? You’ve just told them next time…strike again. It’s now learned behavior and the ramifications for striking…there weren’t any. Unless you were a commuter.

FRIDAY FUN

The Best Seat in the House Might Be in the Lobby

Food & Wine just released their 2026 Global Tastemakers Awards list of the top 10 hotel bars in the United States, and it’s worth a look because it’s a useful reminder that sometimes the best bar in a city isn’t the one you had to research for an hour. Sometimes it’s the one in the building where you’re already staying.

The list runs from Miami Beach to D.C. to Chicago and includes some genuinely interesting spots. The Carousel Bar at Hotel Monteleone in New Orleans came in at #3. I have been there. It literally revolves, and the Vieux Carré they serve has been made the same way since 1938. The #1 overall winner, for what it’s worth, is the Champagne Bar at the Four Seasons Surf Club in Surfside, Florida. Not a bad consolation prize if New Orleans isn’t on your travel calendar.

The full list is worth clicking through See link below: Next time you’re traveling for work, check the hotel bar before you go looking for something else. You might already be there.

Top 10 Hotel Bars

And since we’re talking hotel bars…the drink:

The Vieux Carré

New Orleans, 1938. Still perfect.

1 oz rye whiskey

1 oz cognac

1 oz sweet vermouth

½ tsp Bénédictine

2 dashes Peychaud’s bitters

2 dashes Angostura bitters

Stir with ice. Strain into a rocks glass over a large cube. No garnish necessary — this drink doesn’t need decoration.

It’s complex, it’s strong, and it rewards patience. A little bit like good negotiations.

Cheers. You made it to Friday. 🍹

And Happy Memorial Day. A special Thank You to those who have served or are serving today.

Thanks for visiting.

JC

Unless, I specifically indicate otherwise, I am not compensated for any item or product I might endorse.

Labor Pain is published by Jay Conlin, Founder and Principal of ManGar Solutions.

Questions? Reach out at Jay@mangarsolutions.com for a free, confidential consult.

ManGar Solutions

In The News:

The Squeeze Is Real...And It’s Coming From Many Directions

This week delivered a double gut punch to every worker in America...whether they realized it or not. The Bureau of Labor Statistics dropped the April inflation report Thursday morning, and the number wasn’t pretty. Prices rose 3.8% over the past year. This is the highest rate since May 2023, and it is driven largely by an energy shock tied to the Iran conflict that sent gasoline prices up nearly 30% annually. Housing costs are climbing again after a brief reprieve. Food is up. Airline fares are up over 20% in twelve months. You name it, it costs more.

But here’s the part that should make every worker sit up straight: real average hourly wages fell. They did not stay flat...they fell. Down 0.5% for the month, down 0.3% annually. That means the paycheck got bigger on paper but actually was smaller in your pocket. Buying power is lower. That’s the squeeze. And it’s not subtle anymore.

Meanwhile, Ford Motor Company is living its own version of this story. Two fires last fall at the Novelis aluminum plant in Oswego, New York, the facility that supplies the aluminum sheet for the F-150’s body, knocked a critical piece of equipment offline and sent Ford scrambling. The company has already absorbed a $2 billion hit from the supply disruption and expects another $1 billion in tariff costs this year alone. Ford asked the Trump administration for temporary relief from the 50% tariff on imported aluminum it now pays for metal sourced from Europe and South Korea. The answer was no. I’m surprised they even answered.

The result? F-150 production dropped by up to 100,000 trucks. Sales of the F-150 fell 16% year-over-year in the first quarter. Ford cancelled summer shutdowns at four plants and added crew shifts to try to make up ground. That sounds like good news for the workforce. More work. Except at some point they may not have enough aluminum to deploy any workers.

The aluminum story and the inflation story aren’t separate. They’re the same story told from two different angles. Tariffs push up material costs. Material costs squeeze margins. Squeezed margins create workforce pressure...up and then maybe down.

What I’m Following:

The LIRR Clock Is Ticking…And So Is Yours

Note: As of this writing Thursday evening, talks are still ongoing. By the time you read this, there may be a deal...or a pending strike.

Face-to-face negotiations between the MTA and a coalition of five LIRR unions wrapped up Wednesday with proposals exchanged but no agreement. Talks resumed Thursday with a Saturday midnight deadline looming.

The core dispute is narrow but instructive. Both sides have agreed on three years of a four-year contract. The sticking point is year four. The unions want a 5% recurring raise, the same figure recommended by a federal mediation panel. The MTA says it has put that same dollar amount on the table, structured as a lump sum rather than a base wage increase.

That distinction is significant. A lump sum doesn’t carry forward. It doesn’t compound. And it sets a lower baseline heading into the next contract cycle. Some unions understand this math better than others. Structuring an offer that looks equivalent on paper but isn’t equivalent in practice is a negotiating move that can cost you goodwill and time. However, economic realities sometimes require both sides to get creative and lump sums, while frowned upon by unions, sometimes entice younger workers to bite. That said, when I used lump sums, it was usually early in the deal, say years one and two. Why? The thought of an immediate stash of money up front upon ratification often swayed the vote and...it helps contain costs which, in the long run is a pretty decent solution for both sides.

A shutdown would eliminate service entirely for nearly 300,000 daily riders, with no realistic substitute. Regional traffic analysts are projecting three-to-four-hour commutes into Manhattan if the railroad goes dark. The economic disruption would be immediate and significant.

The last LIRR strike was 1994. Both sides say they want to avoid one. Today we find out if that’s true.

UPS Gets A Bit Of A Hand Slap

While we’re on the subject of wages and unions, a federal labor judge handed down a ruling last week that every HR leader and labor relations professional should read carefully. An NLRB Administrative Law Judge found that UPS violated federal labor law by withholding pay raises from a group of workers who were in the middle of deciding whether to join a union. The company’s stated rationale was that it was trying to avoid an unfair labor practice charge; it didn’t want to be seen as bribing workers with raises during an organizing campaign. And that is fair...to a point.

The judge wasn’t buying it. The problem wasn’t them being cautious; it was the fact that they had previously announced these wage increases. Had they never announced the raises, maintaining the status quo would have been defensible. Here, after announcing them they withheld them because of the union vote. That doesn’t work. Further, they failed to assure workers they’d receive the raises after the election regardless of the outcome. That missing assurance is what turned a defensible position into a violation. UPS was ordered to pay up.

Something To Think About:

Are You Busy or Are You Effective? (There’s a Difference)

Here’s something worth sitting with this week: most leaders aren’t failing because they’re lazy. They’re failing because they’re exhausted from doing too much of the wrong stuff.

Research shows senior executives spend up to 23 hours a week in meetings. Twenty-three hours. That’s before email, before one-on-ones, before the fires that started while they were in the meeting about the last fire.

And when you ask those same leaders what they wish they had more of, the answer is almost never “more meetings.” It’s time to think.

There’s a quiet shift happening among the leaders who seem to have figured something out. They’re not trying to be everywhere anymore. They’re deliberately choosing where not to be. Less focus on the inbox. Fewer standing calls. More space to actually process what’s in front of them. Some researchers are calling it JOMO...the Joy of Missing Out, which sounds ridiculous until you realize the alternative is a calendar that runs your life while you fall further behind.

The insight isn’t new, but it keeps getting buried: being busy and being effective are not the same thing. In a world drowning in information, the skill that separates good leaders from great ones isn’t access. It’s discernment.

What are you doing this week that someone else should be doing...or that frankly doesn’t need to be done at all?

Tip of the Week: The 24-Hour Rule

Before you send that email, make that call, or fire off that text...wait a day.

It sounds simple. It is simple. It’s also one of the most consistently ignored pieces of advice in both professional and personal life, because the moments when you most need to apply it are exactly the moments when you feel most justified in not waiting.

In labor relations, the stakes are obvious. A poorly worded response to a grievance, a snippy reply to a union steward’s email, a frustrated comment in a discipline meeting...all of it becomes part of the record. What felt satisfying to send on Tuesday looks very different in an arbitration hearing on a Wednesday six months later.

But this isn’t just a labor tip. It’s a life tip.

The angry reply to a colleague. The frustrated voicemail to a vendor. The text to a family member you wrote at 11pm after a long day. None of these need to be sent right now. Most of them don’t need to be sent at all...and the ones that do will be better for the wait.

Here’s the test: if you’re about to communicate something because you’re feeling something, give it 24 hours. If it still needs to be said tomorrow, say it. If it doesn’t, you just saved yourself a headache.

Urgency is usually an emotion, not a requirement. Think all you want...just don’t hit send. I really need to take my own advice.

Rant of The Week: This Week’s Otto Moment

You know what I’m tired of? Other people’s emergencies.

Not real emergencies. Not some circumstance or situation that genuinely blindsided everyone and can have serious health, safety or financial consequences. I’m talking about the completely predictable, entirely avoidable, one-hundred-percent-self-inflicted crisis that somehow becomes your problem because someone else couldn’t be bothered to think more than a couple of hours ahead.

The report that was due Friday that they mention Thursday at 4pm. The meeting they forgot to prepare for until they’re walking into the room. The thing that’s been on the calendar for six weeks that they’re apparently seeing for the first time today.

And here’s the part that really gets me...they’re never embarrassed about it. They just show up with the crisis, hand it to you with a smile, and somehow, you’re the bad guy if you don’t drop everything to fix it.

Failure to plan on your part does not constitute an emergency for me. I didn’t make that up. It’s been on coffee mugs for thirty years. And yet... Here. We. Are.

Please! Plan ahead. Even a little...write things down, look at next week before it becomes this week. It’s not complicated. It’s just consideration for the people around you. You know what else? You’ll be happier too. Otto guarantees it. Plan on it.

Friday Fun

Let’s end the week on a high note.

A joke:

An optimist sees the glass half full. A pessimist sees it half empty. An engineer sees it as twice as big as it needs to be.

A drink: The Jungle Bird

Never heard of it? That’s the point.

The Jungle Bird is a tiki cocktail with a twist. It’s got a bitter edge from Campari that makes it unlike anything else in the tiki world. Sounds like an odd combination. Tastes like a Friday afternoon in Florida.

What you need:

· 1.5 oz dark rum

· .75 oz Campari

· 1.5 oz pineapple juice

· .5 oz fresh lime juice

· .5 oz simple syrup

What you do: Combine everything in a shaker with ice. Shake well. Strain over fresh ice. Garnish with a pineapple wedge if you’re feeling fancy.

Trust the process on this one. The Campari sounds wrong until it’s very, very right.

A Thought:

“There is more to life than increasing its speed.” — Mahatma Gandhi

Cheers! You made it to Friday. 🍹

Thanks for Visiting.

JC

Labor Pain is published by Jay Conlin, Founder and Principal of ManGar Solutions, a premier Labor and Employee Relations consulting firm. If you have labor and/or employee relations questions, issues or concerns, please reach out to me at Jay@mangarsolutions.com for a free, confidential consult.

ManGar Solutions

Unless I specifically indicate, I am not compensated for any endorsements I might provide in Labor Pain.

In The News

The NFL’s Referee Standoff: Closer to a Deal, But Not There Yet

The NFL and the NFL Referees Association are showing signs of progress toward a new collective bargaining agreement, but don’t put away the replacement official playbook just yet. The league distributed crew assignments to its existing referees this week...a positive signal, but is simultaneously training replacement officials as a contingency, with the current CBA set to expire May 31.

The primary sticking point: the NFL’s six-year offer includes average annual raises of 6.45%. This is not a terrible proposal, given that the average official earned $385,000 in 2025, however, the League is also pushing structural changes the NFLRA has resisted. The league wants to extend the probationary period for new officials, reduce seniority-based playoff assignments, and shorten the offseason “dead period” to allow more training time.

That last set of proposals has added the drama. The money is probably workable. The structural changes touch how officials earn security, advance, and are evaluated; something unions protect fiercely. You can debate whether that is for good reason or not. The League wants the “best” officials based on performance. The union fears favoritism. The truth probably lies somewhere in the middle but without clear parameters about which refs get the playoff assignments the whole process could feel very subjective.

Add in that the League is negotiating while onboarding replacements (a classic pressure strategy, and a deal is not yet complete. Whether it accelerates a deal or hardens positions depends entirely on how the NFLRA reads the league’s intentions.

BREAKING: A deal semingly has been reached and a ratification vote was scheduled for last night. Results pending…

What I’m Following

When Cheap Freight Has a Body Count

Craig Fuller, CEO of FreightWaves, wrote a blunt op-ed in the New York Times last week that I can’t stop thinking about. In 2023, 5,472 people died in crashes involving large trucks. Fuller’s argument: this isn’t bad luck...it’s the predictable result of a trucking lobby that manufactured a driver shortage narrative, used it to dismantle CDL licensing standards, and flooded the market with graduates of three-week certification mills while regulators looked the other way.

I spent years negotiating contracts with the Teamsters at PepsiCo, where our commercial fleet was enormous and driver qualification was taken seriously by both sides of the table. Standards weren’t just a management priority. The union had skin in the game too. Professional drivers don’t want to share the road with unqualified ones any more than the rest of us do. That said, I believe there truly was a driver shortage. There may still be...or at least a qualified driver shortage. The solution? Relaxing some training regulations probably wasn’t ideal and you can see that for yourselves when you drive on any major interstate today. Keep an eye out when driving.

Something To Make You Think

The Yellow Airline Is Gone

At 3:00 a.m. on May 2nd, the self-check-in kiosks at Spirit Airlines terminals across the country lit up with the same message: “We regret to inform you that Spirit Airlines has ceased global operations.” Thirty-four years. Gone before sunrise.

Spirit had been in talks with the Trump administration on a $500 million rescue package, but a key group of creditors rejected the deal, leaving the airline no choice. The war in Iran had sent jet fuel costs soaring and for an ultra-low-cost carrier, that’s a true financial problem. Larger airlines absorb the hit by raising fares and fees. Spirit’s entire model depended on fares so low that any meaningful increase chased away the customers it needed most.

The fallout here is Spirit’s pricing model didn’t just benefit Spirit customers; it forced every major carrier to offer stripped-down “basic economy” fares to compete. Fares I never choose by the way for so many reasons. Consumer advocates warned that without Spirit on certain routes, everyone will be paying more. The airline that millions mocked for charging extra to breathe was quietly keeping a ceiling on what the legacy carriers could charge. Now that ceiling is gone.

The labor side of this story deserves equal attention, and it’s gotten less of it. Seventeen thousand workers lost their jobs and most of them found out less than an hour before the official announcement. The Association of Flight Attendants sent a message to its 5,000 Spirit members at 1:00 a.m.: “We are delivering the hardest news of our lives.” These weren’t executives with golden parachutes. These were dispatchers with 23 years on the job, pilots who never got their retirement flight, gate agents who showed up for a shift and found the kiosks dark.

Spirit filed for bankruptcy twice since 2024. The writing had been on the wall for a while. But knowing a company is struggling and watching 17,000 people absorb the impact in real time are different things. The workers at Spirit didn’t design the business model. They just worked there.

There’s a larger lesson in the rubble. An airline built entirely on price with no loyalty cushion, no premium margin, no service reputation to fall back on has almost no resilience when costs spike. The same structural fragility that made Spirit’s fares attractive made its workforce permanently exposed. In labor relations, we talk about the relationship between an employer’s business model and its workers’ security. Spirit is a case study in what happens when the two are fundamentally misaligned.

The yellow planes are gone. The fares they held down may be next.

Tip of the Week

It’s Not Your Strength That Goes First

Here’s a quick test. Sit in a chair, cross your arms over your chest, and stand up and sit back down five times as fast as you safely can. Time yourself. Under 11 seconds? You’re in good shape. Over 14? Your body may already be compensating in ways you haven’t noticed yet.

What you’re measuring isn’t strength. It’s power...how fast your muscles produce force. And according to researchers who study functional independence in older adults, power declines significantly faster than strength after 60. The fast-twitch muscle fibers responsible for catching yourself when you trip, pushing up from a low chair, or clearing a curb atrophy two to three times faster than the slow-twitch fibers you use for walking.

Here’s the part that got my attention: walking doesn’t prevent this. Neither does light yoga or leisurely swimming. Research is consistent; walking alone does not train the rapid force production needed to recover from a trip.

The good news? Five simple movements: explosive sit-to-stands, step-ups, heel raises all done twice a week can reverse the decline. Studies show meaningful improvement in 8 to 12 weeks.

Worth knowing. Worth sharing with someone you care about. Now watch your step.

Rant of the Week

The $200 Rescue Fare Is Not the Story

Let’s give credit where it’s due. When Spirit went dark at 3 a.m. on May 2nd, the major carriers moved quickly. United capped rescue fares at $199. American, Delta, Southwest, and JetBlue followed with their own discounted offers. The Department of Transportation coordinated. Many people got home. Many others did not...at least not quickly. That’s the good news. Here’s the bad news: the generosity has an expiration date, and what comes next is the real story.

A CBS News analysis found that when Spirit previously exited a route, average fares jumped 23% — roughly $60 per round trip — and overall passenger volume fell 20%. That wasn’t a prediction. That was a data pattern from prior Spirit market exits, and it’s likely about to play out on a national scale simultaneously.

Consumer advocates have been clear about this for years: you don’t have to fly Spirit to benefit from Spirit. Their presence on a route forces every carrier on that route to keep prices honest. That pressure is now gone on hundreds of routes across the country, the legacy carriers just inherited a captive market with no low-cost competitor keeping them in check right as jet fuel costs are already elevated and summer travel demand is peaking.

Think about who actually flew Spirit. Not road warriors with corporate accounts and status upgrades. Families visiting relatives they might not be able to afford to see otherwise. First-time flyers Googling the cheapest ticket. One man interviewed at BWI said he simply searched for the cheapest airline ticket and bought it. He had no idea what was coming. That’s Spirit’s customer. And that customer just lost their seat at the table.

Travel expert Lee Abbamonte put it plainly: Spirit “almost singlehandedly kept pricing competitive in many markets in the country,” and without it, there is no pressure on legacy carriers to keep prices lower. The rescue fares are a two-week courtesy. After that, the market does what uncompetitive markets do.

Nobody is going to hold a press conference about the fare increases. They’ll happen quietly, route by route, as the airlines “right-size” capacity and “optimize yield.” That’s the language. The translation is: the people who could least afford to fly are going to pay more or stop flying altogether. One could argue that’s a good thing for those of us who travel for business. I’m not so sure.

It is unclear whether the executives who built Spirit’s unsustainable model are going to get a big payoff, but what is clear? The 17,000 workers are not. And the millions of passengers who depended on Spirit’s pricing to make air travel possible are about to find out what the market looks like without them. And we are all in that “millions” category. Buckle up.

Friday Fun

The Moultrie Lost Weekend

We spent last weekend in South Carolina with some friends including our host David Rosenberg, who has a gift for discovering drinks and then immediately improving them.

David stumbled across something called the Moultrie Holiday named for General William Moultrie, the Revolutionary War hero who held off the British Navy at Charleston in 1776 with a fort made of palmetto logs and sheer audacity. A man like that deserves a drink named after him.

David agreed. He also decided the original recipe needed a significant overall. Think addition by subtraction. Fruit juice: removed. What remained was something much stronger, less forgiving, and considerably more dangerous. He calls it the Moultrie Lost Weekend.

David does the honors in the video below. Watch at your own risk. We did not ask for the recipe because some things are better experienced than replicated.

Happy Friday. Drink responsibly. Or at least historically.

Thanks for visiting.

JC

Labor Pain is published by Jay Conlin, Founder and Principal of ManGar Solutions, a premier Labor and Employee Relations consulting firm.

If you have labor and/or employee relations questions, issues or concerns, please reach out to me at Jay@mangarsolutions.com for a free, confidential consult.

Mangar Solutions A Labor and Employee Relations Consulting Firm

Unless I specifically indicate, I am not compensated for any endorsements I might provide in Labor Pain.

How is this a “technical” glitch? No idea but I thought you might be more understanding if it seemed I had a computer problem…which I do but that is for Another time.

It’s Kentucky Derby weekend. Enjoy and Labor Pain will return next week.

Thanks for visiting.

JC

In The News

The MLBPA Is a Mess at the Worst Possible Time

If you needed a case study in what happens when union leadership loses its way, look no further than Major League Baseball’s Players Association. In February, executive director Tony Clark resigned after an internal investigation revealed he’d been in a relationship with his sister-in-law, who also happened to be a union employee. Bad enough. But that was just the beginning.

Last week, the union fired COO Xavier James and HR chief Michael O’Neill, both for cause, following an internal investigation tied to a federal probe by the Eastern District of New York into the union’s finances. The inquiry has also focused on Players Way, a youth baseball initiative that burned through an estimated $10 million with almost nothing to show for it, and OneTeam Partners, a group licensing venture the union co-owns with the NFLPA.

Here’s the problem: the current CBA expires December 1. Owners are expected to push hard for a salary cap, something the union has opposed for decades, and a lockout is widely considered likely if no deal is reached. The union is heading into the most important negotiation in a generation with its executive director, COO, and HR chief all gone, and a federal investigation still open. This is not a good start for the MLBPA.

GOP Flirts with the Teamsters...And Nobody Wins

The strangest political romance in Washington right now is the courtship between a faction of congressional Republicans and the Teamsters union. It’s built on mutual neediness...union membership in the private sector has fallen to just 6%, and some Republicans, most notably Missouri Senator Josh Hawley, think tilting labor law in the unions’ favor will translate into more votes for Republicans. Hmmmmm.

The latest effort of this odd-couple arrangement is the Faster Labor Contracts Act, which would allow federal mediators to essentially write first contracts if employers and unions can’t reach agreement within four months of a union election win. It sounds procedural. It isn’t. A hard four-month deadline hands unions enormous leverage.

Five New York Republicans have signed on, apparently calculating that Teamsters support is worth the cost to local employers. The Teamsters’ political arm donated to four of the five of them last year. Whether the romance survives intact with a midterm electorate remains to be seen. What’s clear is that the workers these bills claim to protect often end up with the least say in the matter.

This one is worth watching closely, especially if you have facilities in right-to-work states. Pass the popcorn.

What I Am Following

The Iran War’s Economic Shockwave Is Headed Our Way

Seven weeks into the U.S.-Israel conflict with Iran, the economic damage is spreading faster than almost anyone predicted, and analysts are warning that what’s hitting Asia right now is a preview of what’s coming globally.

With roughly a fifth of the world’s oil and liquid natural gas choked off since the conflict began February 28, the Asia-Pacific is in crisis. Airlines are slashing routes or facing insolvency. Factories in Bangladesh, Indonesia, and Vietnam are cutting output as energy and raw material costs spiral. Food prices are surging. The UN estimates up to 8.8 million people in the region are at risk of falling into poverty.

For employers, the downstream effects are already showing up...higher materials costs, disrupted supply chains, canceled shipments, and workforce instability in key manufacturing regions. The CNN piece that caught my eye notes that output losses in the Asia-Pacific could reach $299 billion, and that American policymakers who believe they’re insulated from all this may be in for a rude awakening.

This one is still unfolding.

CNN, April 14, 2026

Something To Make You Think

Who Killed the Florida Orange?

This one struck a nerve, given my many years dealing with some interesting union officials at our Tropicana facility before PepsiCo sold most of it to private equity. If you live in Florida, or if you have driven through Polk County lately, you may have noticed the orange groves are disappearing. Subdivisions named “Citrus Place” and “Valencia Acres” now sit on land where orange trees grew for generations. It turns out there’s a remarkable and heartbreaking story behind all of it.

In 2003, Florida produced 242 million boxes of oranges. This year, the USDA is forecasting fewer than 12 million...a collapse of more than 95% in less than 25 years. The culprit is a combination of citrus greening disease (incurable, now present in 100% of Florida’s trees), five major hurricanes, decades of aggressive chemical use that weakened the soil, and suburban sprawl that made selling grove land to housing developers more financially rational than farming it.

Alico, the largest citrus grower in America, shut down its 53,000 acres last year. Tropicana isn’t processing a single Florida orange this season. Your morning OJ is coming from Brazil, which, by the way, is now showing the same greening symptoms Florida saw twenty years ago.

It’s a long read, but worth the effort. One part eulogy, one part investigative journalism, and very much a Florida story.

Slate, April 20, 2026

Tip Of The Week

I am addicted to my phone. I am. I admit it. I’d rather lose my wallet than my phone. But some days I can feel it causing stress and ruining any productivity I still possess. So....try this. Silence your phone for 90 minutes. Not airplane mode...just Do Not Disturb, notifications off, face down. Pick one time block per day. You just might be surprised how much you get done, and how little you actually missed.

Rant Of The Week...This Week’s “Otto” Moment

Let’s talk about the Faster Labor Contracts Act for a second, because I can’t let it go.

The idea that federal mediators should be able to write a first contract if the parties can’t get there in four months is a huge overreach. Four months. To negotiate a first contract covering wages, benefits, scheduling, discipline, and a hundred other issues for a workforce that may have just voted, by a slim margin, to unionize.

Anyone who has actually sat across a bargaining table knows that first contracts are hard. Not because employers are stalling (though some do), and not because unions are being unreasonable (though some are)...but because the parties need to build a relationship, establish trust, and figure out how to live together for the next three to five years. You don’t rush that. You can’t rush that. Often times the union has no clue about how the business runs and they make ridiculous demands which, if implemented, would significantly hurt the business. Last time I checked, no business, no employees...or in this case, union members.

What the Faster Labor Contracts Act actually does is eliminate the employer’s ability to say no to a bad deal. If the clock runs out, a federal mediator who has never set foot in your facility and has no stake in the outcome writes the contract for you. Congratulations. You now have a collective bargaining agreement you didn’t negotiate and can’t live with.

But then again, DOGE gutted the FMCS down to the minimum fifteen employees required by law. So, in reality, it would take just as long to get a first contract...the delay would just be with the Federal Government. Yep. Still a terrible idea.

Friday Fun

The Florida Farewell

Since we just eulogized the Florida orange, it seemed only right to send it off properly. This one’s a riff on a classic Tequila Sunrise...but we’re calling it the Florida Farewell. I hope I am wrong.

2 oz tequila (blanco or reposado)

3 oz fresh orange juice (Florida’s, while you still can)

1/2 oz grenadine

Squeeze of fresh lime

Ice

Fill a tall glass with ice. Pour in the tequila and OJ and give it a gentle stir. Slowly pour the grenadine down the side of the glass...it’ll sink and then bloom up through the orange like a sunset. Finish with a squeeze of lime. Don’t stir it. Watch it for a moment first.

It’s a beautiful looking drink. I’m not a tequila guy, but for those who are...pour one this weekend while you read that Slate piece.

Thanks for visiting.

JC

Labor Pain is published by Jay Conlin, Founder and Principal of ManGar Solutions, a premier Labor and Employee Relations consulting firm.

If you have labor and/or employee relations questions, issues or concerns, please reach out to me at Jay@mangarsolutions.com for a free, confidential consult.

mangarsolutions.com

Unless I specifically indicate, I am not compensated for any endorsements I might provide in Labor Pain.

In The News:

LAUSD — Crisis Averted

The story I flagged last week ended in a late-night deal. With an April 14 strike deadline looming for three unions representing nearly 68,000 LA teachers and staff, LAUSD reached a tentative agreement with SEIU Local 99 at 2 a.m. Tuesday, just hours before a walkout was set to begin. The deal includes a 24% wage increase and expanded healthcare coverage for more workers. The teachers and principals unions had already settled their contracts over the weekend. Three unions and one deadline led to one very long night. For employers watching this: waiting until the last possible hour is a risky strategy and sometimes it works, until it doesn’t. Unions count on going to the last minute. I always liked “buying” the deal early with financial incentives that expired as the deadline approached. That said, organizations need to take a hard line if the union delays seeking more. Easier said than done.

https://laist.com/news/education/los-angeles-unified-school-district-unions-2026-strike-seiu-negotiation

ProPublica Journalists Walk Out — AI Is the Real Headline

Journalists at ProPublica engaged in a one-day strike after more than two years of contract negotiations. Over 100 reporters, copy editors, and communications staff represented by the Communications Workers of America walked out, citing the company’s refusal to bargain over wage increases, layoff protections, and AI...specifically, ProPublica’s rejection of any restrictions on replacing jobs with AI. Think the WGA AI language from last week was a one-off? It wasn’t. This is becoming a standard bargaining issue across industries. Start thinking now about what your AI policy says and what it doesn’t say. I get both sides on this...there has to be a happy medium because while people make errors and “cost” money, AI while learning still lacks the key element in nearly everything...being human.

https://onlabor.org/april-11-2026/

What I am Following:

Tariffs and the Job Market — The Uncertainty Tax

A year after Trump’s sweeping tariff regime took effect, economists note we have fewer manufacturing jobs than a year ago. This suggests tariffs haven’t delivered their intended impact. The bigger issue may be the uncertainty itself: one CEO described being “in a bit of limbo-land,” unable to make decisions when tariff policy could change month to month. Economists project the unemployment rate could rise to 4.5% by April 2027 and 4.8% by 2028 if hiring slows and layoffs tick up. For labor relations folks: when employers and employees are anxious about costs and headcount, that anxiety has a way of showing up at the bargaining table and rarely in a productive way.

https://www.marketplace.org/story/2026/04/01/how-trumps-tariffs-have-affected-manufacturing-jobs

Something To Make You Think:

Have you ever wondered how some people just seem to always catch a break? This has to be luck, right? Maybe not.

Psychologist Richard Wiseman spent years studying people who called themselves “lucky” versus those who called themselves “unlucky.” What he found was less about fate and more about behavior. Lucky people weren’t winning more...they were simply doing a few things consistently that unlucky people weren’t.

They stayed relaxed and open, which meant they noticed things others missed. In one famous experiment, both groups were handed a newspaper and asked to count the photos. On page two, in large print, was a note that read: “Stop counting! There are 43 photos.” Lucky people saw it. Unlucky people, heads down and focused, walked right past it.

Lucky people also trusted their instincts, didn’t dwell when things went sideways, and genuinely expected good things to happen, which made them more persistent and more likely to create the conditions for them to experience good outcomes.

The conclusion? Luck is mostly a mindset. Which is either great news or mildly irritating, depending on how your week is going. Here’s to good “luck.”

Source: Richard Wiseman, “The Luck Factor” (2003).

Tip of The Week:

Researchers at the University of Chicago found that most people quit asking too early; for favors, for help, for second chances, because they dramatically overestimate how often they’ll hear no. In study after study, the actual “yes” rate was nearly twice what people predicted.

The takeaway is simple: you’re probably stopping one ask short of the answer you needed. Keep asking...

Source: Bohns, V.K., “A Face-to-Face Request Is 34 Times More Successful Than an Email,” Harvard Business Review, 2017. Original research published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.

Rant of the week! A.K.A. This week’s “Otto” moment:

If you have ever driven I-95 through South Carolina, you already know what I am about to say. If you haven’t, consider yourself warned.

Somewhere near the Georgia-South Carolina border, three lanes of perfectly reasonable highway become two. Just like that. No warning, no logic, no apparent reason other than the fact that someone, somewhere, decided to not spend the federal money on a third lane and then apparently realized they weren’t going to win the Powerball so they probably resigned...leaving a two-lane mess at the border and through the entire state. The result is a bottleneck that stretches for miles and turns what should be a straightforward highway drive into a parking lot with a speed limit sign.

Now, South Carolina has received billions in federal highway dollars over the years. Billions. And I will give credit where it is due — construction has apparently just begun (after the guy resigned) on a third lane expansion. Progress!? Except you would never know it. There is no third lane. There are no signs of an imminent third lane. There is construction equipment, there is disruption, and there are orange barrels which somehow manage to make two lanes feel like one. So, now, they have taken a bad situation and made it worse while theoretically working toward better.

I am not a traffic engineer, but I am fairly confident that the entire point of federal highway funding is to avoid exactly this situation, not to spend decades getting around to it while the rest of us sit in traffic doing the “traffic accordion waltz.”

Do better, South Carolina. Check back in 2031. But don’t hold your breath.

Friday Fun:

Spring is here, it’s warm in Florida (it’s almost always warm in Florida), and it’s hot across most of the east coast. Last week we did the Azalea. This week we’re going a different direction with an Aperol Spritz — the unofficial drink of every outdoor patio from Venice to Ponte Vedra Beach and arguably the most refreshing thing you can put in a glass on a warm afternoon.

If you haven’t had one...well here you go.

The recipe couldn’t be simpler:

• Ice

• 3 oz Prosecco

• 2 oz Aperol

• 1 oz club soda

• Orange slice garnish

Fill a large wine glass with ice. Add Prosecco first, then Aperol, then a splash of club soda. Give it a gentle stir. Garnish with a fresh orange slice. Done.

According to those who enjoy them...it’s light, it’s slightly bitter, it’s fizzy, and it looks like a sunset in a glass. Perfect for a Friday afternoon on the patio, or for surviving the drive home from wherever I-95 deposited you this week. Yes I spent some time on I-95 this week…including South Carolina.

Cheers. You earned it. I might have suggested this before but…they are really great.

Thanks for visiting. JC

Labor Pain is published by Jay Conlin, Founder and Principal of ManGar Solutions, a premier Labor and Employee Relations consulting firm. If you have labor and/or employee relations questions, issues or concerns, please reach out to me at Jay@mangarsolutions.com for a free, confidential consult.

ManGar Solutions

Unless I specifically indicate, I am not compensated for any endorsements I might provide in Labor Pain.

April 10th, 2026

In The News:

Forgive me for some self-indulgent behavior here as this isn’t in the mainstream news. Several of you wanted to know what my “Big Project” was all about and would I reveal exactly what I have been up to. Well, here it is. After retiring from PepsiCo at the end of 2024, I started up a small consulting firm I called Conlin Consulting. I know, very creative name. That firm had a pretty decent year simply through word of mouth and I was happy to partner up with my good friend and colleague, John Kavanagh. At the end of this past year, two other former team members also left PepsiCo and when I heard the news I made a couple of calls.

After some initial “What if’s” we got serious and began making some plans to launch a similar consulting firm but rebranded with even more expertise. This week we officially launched ManGar Solutions, a premier Labor and Employee Relations Consulting firm. ManGar? Well, that’s a play on their last names that we used to joke about when we all worked together. I am thrilled to have teamed up with Michelle Mantooth and Kirstin Casgar, two of the brightest minds when it comes to employee relations and employee treatment.

We are live on LinkedIn and our website is also live. You can access that here:

ManGar Solutions

So that’s what took me a bit offline last week as we had a number of items to finalize and clean up. Conlin Consulting will continue to exist for current clients but will essentially partner with ManGar Solutions and going forward, clients will have access to all four of us which makes me extremely proud. Thanks for indulging me a bit.

What I am Following:

LA Teachers — April 14 or Else

Three unions representing nearly 68,000 Los Angeles teachers and staff could be headed for a strike on April 14 if LAUSD can’t get a deal done. United Teachers Los Angeles has been working without a contract for nine months. SEIU Local 99 and the Associated Administrators of Los Angeles could be walking out with them. Key sticking points include a 16% pay raise, mental health investment, and special education funding. The district says it’s already spending more than it takes in. Three unions striking simultaneously is rare. That’s worth paying some attention.

https://www.cbsnews.com/losangeles/news/lausd-teachers-strike-negotiations-deadline/

JBS Meatpacking — Back to Work, But Not Done

After three weeks on the picket line, the largest meatpacking strike in over 40 years which occurred at JBS USA agreed to return to the negotiating table with UFCW Local 7 in Greeley, Colorado. Workers headed back to the plant April 7, but don’t mistake that for a complete resolution. The union’s core complaints remain: wages that haven’t kept pace with inflation and healthcare costs that are crushing workers in what the union says are some of the most physically demanding jobs. Negotiations were set for April 9 and 10. Stay tuned.

https://collegian.com/articles/featured/2026/04/category-news-jbs-workers-extend-strike-into-third-week-over-pay-rising-costs/

WGA Gets a Deal — AI Is the Real Story

The Writers Guild of America reached a tentative four-year agreement with Hollywood studios, ending the anxiety left over from their 148-day strike in 2023. The deal includes health plan improvements and, here’s the part I am watching: explicit protections against AI training on WGA members’ work. As AI continues to reshape how work gets done across every industry, expect to see contract language around AI become standard in negotiations everywhere. The WGA just set a template. Maybe...

https://onlabor.org/april-7-2026/

Something To Make You Think:

This is a bit out there but for those of you who know me well, I have been “practicing” (their term not mine) Hot Yoga for roughly the past two years. If you are unfamiliar with Hot Yoga, it is 26 postures (I call them self-torture poses) done over 90 minutes (There are 60-minute classes and that is what I do except once...more on that) in a hot room with the temperature around 105 degrees perhaps trending towards 110 degrees. Why is this something to make you think? Because, if you know me, most of my exercise routine has involved 12 oz curls and napping. So, there you have it. Old dog, new trick.

I did try a 90-minute class about a month ago with my wife who has been doing Hot Yoga for nearly 10 years, and it was an unmitigated disaster. It was not at our usual place. The instructor appeared to be hung over, and she had the room at 120 degrees. This was a 90-minute session, and the participants were dropping like flies. It was way too hot. I was hanging in there (though becoming disoriented and I think I started speaking in tongues) until I saw my wife start to opt out of poses. That was it. I was pretty much down for the count. When the class ended a much younger much more fit guy said to me “That was brutal.” I felt better from a mental standpoint. It was a morning class, and I was crushed the rest of the day. I went to our regular place yesterday and survived though I now think I have PTYD (Post Traumatic Yoga Disorder).

Tip of The Week:

Recent research has found that regular hot yoga practice significantly reduces perceived stress and improves mindfulness in participants after just eight weeks. The heat isn’t just misery, it forces you to slow down, focus on breathing, and be present. Turns out the torture chamber has a purpose.

The takeaway: Discomfort, when controlled, is often where growth happens. In yoga and probably everywhere else. I’ll keep reminding myself...in English.

Rant of the week! A.K.A. This week’s “Otto” moment:

A two for one here this week. Both involve shopping center parking lots. Here in Florida, we do have some older people, but we also have plenty of middle aged and younger people as well. Quite a few seem to have more money than they know what to do with and many drive either very expensive cars or very big expensive cars. In what is becoming an all too familiar situation, they tend to not be able to park their giant, expensive cars within the parking lot lines. It is rare, but occasionally this appears to be deliberate so they avoid a door ding or whatever else they are worried about (I do think it could lead to some mischief from annoyed shoppers but not me!). In most situations they just don’t care, or they don’t know how to drive well but it is still annoying when they take up one space and part of another because they could not be bothered to align their car within the two lines. They must be in a hurry. To be fair, this happens more than it should here, but when we lived in Connecticut, it was a daily occurrence. The long and the short of it...please try to park within the lines and if your car is so precious, maybe take the golf cart.

Part two: The other day, I was pleased to find a few open spots on my grocery run only to realize that of the 6 wide open spots, 3 were blocked by...empty shopping carts! Really? I’m sorry but here they have places to put the carts away and they are all pretty close by. Yet, two of the three were in a full-on parking spot and the third appeared to have been left to its own accord and was resting against a parked car. I just don’t get it. It is totally inconsiderate and rude. Wait...I do get it...be better people!

Friday Fun:

It’s Masters weekend, and while most of us won’t be strolling Magnolia Lane, we can at least drink like we are. The Azalea is the official cocktail of the Masters Tournament…a fun, semi-straightforward concoction of vodka, lemonade, and grenadine served over ice, garnished with a maraschino cherry and fresh orange slice. Think boozy pink lemonade. Simple, refreshing, and very spring.

The official Augusta National recipe:

• Ice

• 1.25 oz vodka

• 5 oz lemonade

• 0.5 oz grenadine

• Cherry and lemon wheel garnish

Hosting a crowd? Combine 1¼ cups vodka, ½ cup grenadine, and 5 cups lemonade in a pitcher. Stir well, pour over ice, and garnish with lemon wheels. Makes 8 cocktails.

Cheers — and may whoever you’re rooting for this weekend find the fairway.

https://golf.com/lifestyle/augusta-national-unveils-azalea-masters-cocktail/

Thanks for visiting. JC

Labor Pain is published by Jay Conlin, Founder and Principal of ManGar Solutions, a premier Labor and Employee Relations consulting firm. If you have labor and/or employee relations questions, issues or concerns, please reach out to me at Jay@mangarsolutions.com for a free, confidential consult. You can also contact us through our website below.

ManGar Solutions

Unless I specifically indicate, I am not compensated for any endorsements I might provide in Labor Pain.