President Biden taps Chicago labor law professor Martin Malin to chair federal labor panel

President Joe Biden on Monday tapped Martin Malin, a Chicago labor law professor, to be the chair of the Federal Labor Relations Authority’s Federal Service Impasses Panel.

The panel deals with disputes between unionized federal workers and the federal government agencies employing them.

Malin founded the Institute for Law and the Workplace at the Chicago-Kent College of Law, Illinois Institute of Technology. Malin, Professor Emeritus at Chicago-Kent/IIT, has focused his teaching and research on labor law, employment discrimination and other federal and state of Illinois workplace issues.

Former President Barack Obama picked Malin as a member of the Federal Service Impasses Panel in October 2009 and reappointed him to a five-year term in 2014. In May 2017, then-President Donald Trump removed Malin and other Obama appointees from the panel.

In a story about Malin and the Institute for Law and the Workplace in a school publication last year, he was praised for being part of an “unsung group of people” who “help hammer out contracts behind the scenes.”

“Malin has been called upon to arbitrate or mediate some of the largest labor and employment negotiations in the city for the past 40 years, including the 2015 and 2016 Chicago Board of Education and Chicago Teachers Union contract negotiations, for which one of Malin’s former students was the fact-finder. He was asked to be a fact-finder for the 2019 negotiations, which included contracts for Chicago Public Schools employees,” the story said.

The Federal Service Impasses Panel, explaining its job on its website, said if bargaining and mediation between the federal parties does not result in a deal, “then either party or the parties jointly may request the Panel’s assistance.”