Message from the Chair

• Jurisdiction: California,United States
• Citation: Vol. 28 No. 2
• Publication year: 2014
• Author: By Carol Koenig
• topic: Labor Law,Employment Law

Message From the Chair

By Carol Koenig

Carol Koenig is a non-equity partner at Wylie, McBride, Platten & Renner. Her primary area of practice is labor law, representing both private and public sector unions and their members throughout the state in all aspects of labor law and relations. Ms. Koenig is the author of the Fair Labor Standards Act chapter in the Section's treatise, California Public Sector Employment Law. She spends much of her limited spare time raising funds for non-profit organizations by participating in endurance events such as triathlons, bike rides, and running events.

As I was thinking about the Message for this issue of the Law Review, numerous topics drifted through my brain. Unfortunately, those ideas were not interesting enough, were not sufficiently related to employment law, were not timely, or were too political.

A few topics kept creeping back, no matter how hard I tried to push them away. My deadline for submission is about seven weeks before publication. That means mid-January for this particular Message—which may explain why the topics that kept coming to mind were the 50th Anniversary of President Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty; Martin Luther King's dreams of a country where little children do not grow up poor; a story I read recently about the more than 50,000 Iraq and Afghanistan veterans who are homeless (and jobless); and the push by some in Congress to raise the federal minimum wage. My brain kept telling me to ignore these topics, as they were too controversial. But, my heart disagreed. I think it was that battle between the heart and brain that kept an interesting, nonpolitical topic from surfacing.

I was struggling with this "topic" dilemma while walking back to my hotel room from the State Bar offices in San Francisco recently. I had been in the "drafting" stage for a few weeks. I had started and stopped several times—and was beginning to feel like an old car engine that starts, runs for a bit, then sputters and stalls. You can keep starting it, but you are not going to get anywhere very fast. And, if you do finally get wherever you were going, you are going to be very late.

I had been at the State Bar offices for the opening session of one of our section's annual programs, The Nuts and Bolts of an Employment Practice. I was impressed both by the attendance and by our panel of attorney speakers. The State Bar's conference room was overflowing with current and aspiring employment lawyers, eager to learn more about the...