Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
- Institution
- Keyword
-
- Discrimination (2)
- Employment (2)
- Income inequality (2)
- Agency costs (1)
- Automation (1)
-
- Bostock v. Clayton County (1)
- COVID (1)
- Causation (1)
- Childcare (1)
- Civil Rights Act of 1964 (1)
- Common ownership (1)
- Competitive governance equilibrium (1)
- Compliance (1)
- Contracts (1)
- Corporate governance (1)
- DEI (1)
- Defined benefit (1)
- Disaster (1)
- Discrmination (1)
- Diversity Equity Inclusion (1)
- Duke Law Journal (1)
- EEO (1)
- ERISA (1)
- ESG (1)
- Employer liablity (1)
- Equal Employment Opportunity (1)
- Executive compensation (1)
- Executive incentives (1)
- FLSA liability (1)
- Fiduciary duty (1)
Articles 1 - 12 of 12
Full-Text Articles in Law
The Role Of Law And Myth In Creating A Workplace That 'Looks Like America', Susan Bisom-Rapp
The Role Of Law And Myth In Creating A Workplace That 'Looks Like America', Susan Bisom-Rapp
Faculty Scholarship
Equal employment opportunity (EEO) law has played a poor role in incentivizing effective diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) and harassment prevention programming. In litigation and investigation, too many judges and regulators credit employers for maintaining policies and programs rather than requiring employers to embrace efforts that work. Likewise, many employers and consultants fail to consider the organizational effects created by DEI and harassment programming. Willful ignorance prevents the admission that some policies and programming harm those most in need of protection.
This approach has resulted in two problems. One is a doctrinal dilemma because important presumptions embedded in antidiscrimination law …
Workplace Anonymity, Jayne S. Ressler
Sidelined Again: How The Government Abandoned Working Women Amidst A Global Pandemic, Jessica K. Fink
Sidelined Again: How The Government Abandoned Working Women Amidst A Global Pandemic, Jessica K. Fink
Faculty Scholarship
Among the weaknesses within American society exposed by the COVID pandemic, almost none has emerged more starkly than the government’s failure to provide meaningful and affordable childcare to working families—and, in particular, to working women. As the pandemic unfolded in the spring of 2020, state and local governments shuttered schools and daycare facilities and directed nannies and other babysitters to “stay at home.” Women quickly found themselves filling this domestic void, providing the overwhelming majority of childcare, educational support for their children, and management of household duties, often to the detriment of their careers. As of March 2021, more than …
Taking Courthouse Discrimination Seriously: The Role Of Judges As Ethical Leaders, Susan Saab Fortney
Taking Courthouse Discrimination Seriously: The Role Of Judges As Ethical Leaders, Susan Saab Fortney
Faculty Scholarship
Sexual misconduct allegations against Alex Kozinski, a once powerful judge in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit, spotlighted concerns related to sexual harassment in the judiciary. Following news reports related to the alleged misconduct, Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr. charged a working group with examining safeguards to deal with inappropriate conduct in the judicial workplace. Based on recommendations made in the Report of the Federal Judiciary Workplace Conduct Working Group, the Judicial Conference approved a number of reforms and improvements related to workplace conduct in the federal judiciary. The reforms included revising the Code of …
The Economic (In) Significance Of Executive Pay Esg Incentives, David I. Walker
The Economic (In) Significance Of Executive Pay Esg Incentives, David I. Walker
Faculty Scholarship
The hottest topic in corporate governance circles today involves company commitments to and pursuit of ESG (environmental, social, and governance) initiatives in addition to the traditional pursuit of profits. One facet of this debate has to do with how to motivate executives to pursue ESG goals. Increasingly, companies tie executive pay to ESG performance, although even strong ESG advocates debate the advisability of doing so. This Article joins the fray by closely examining ESG-based CEO pay arrangements at a subset of companies with leadership positions on the Business Roundtable, an industry trade group that embraced ESG in a 2019 statement …
The Remainder Effect: How Automation Complements Labor Quality, James Bessen, Erich Denk, Chen Meng
The Remainder Effect: How Automation Complements Labor Quality, James Bessen, Erich Denk, Chen Meng
Faculty Scholarship
This paper argues that automation both complements and replaces workers. Extending the Acemoglu-Restrepo model of automation to consider labor quality, we obtain a Remainder Effect: while automation displaces labor on some tasks, it raises the returns to skill on remaining tasks across skill groups. This effect increases between-firm pay inequality while labor displacement affects within-firm inequality. Using job ad data, we find firm adoption of information technologies leads to both greater demand for diverse skills and higher pay across skill groups. This accounts for most of the sorting of skills to high paying firms that is central to rising inequality.
Cause For Concern Or Cause For Celebration?: Did Bostock V. Clayton County Establish A New Mixed Motive Theory For Title Vii Cases And Make It Easier For Plaintiffs To Prove Discrimination Claims?, Terrence Cain
Faculty Scholarship
Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 makes it unlawful for an employer to discriminate against an employee “because of” race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. This seems simple enough, but if an employer makes an adverse employment decision partly for an impermissible reason and partly for a permissible reason, i.e., if the employer acts with a mixed motive, has the employer acted “because of” the impermissible reason? According to Gross v. FBL Financial Services, Inc. and University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center v. Nassar, the answer is no. The Courts in Gross and Nassar held that …
Lowering The Stakes Of The Employment Contract, Aditi Bagchi
Lowering The Stakes Of The Employment Contract, Aditi Bagchi
Faculty Scholarship
Every country has to make hard choices about the distribution of entitlements. But employers control the entitlements that individual Americans enjoy to a far greater extent than those in other rich democracies. In this Essay, I argue that, in the absence of the political consensus necessary to deliver state solutions to political questions, employers here are assigned an exaggerated role in employees’ lives. Government incentives for and directives to employers have become a strategy of political deflection. The effect has been to raise the stakes of employment well beyond the scope of those terms and conditions that relate to attracting …
In The Zone: Work At The Intersection Of Trade And Migration, Jennifer Gordon
In The Zone: Work At The Intersection Of Trade And Migration, Jennifer Gordon
Faculty Scholarship
Trade and immigration are generally described as separate dimensions of globalization. This Article challenges that story by focusing on settings where states and private actors are bringing the two together to achieve disparate economic and policy goals. In one set of cases analyzed here, governments in the Global South are seeking to increase trade through the use of migrant labor, attracting transnational firms to export manufacturing zones by importing lower-cost workers from other countries. In the other, policymakers in the Global North are seeking to decrease immigration through the use of trade by investing in export processing zones in migrant …
Escaping The Allure Of Joint Employment: Using Fault-Based Principles To Impose Liability For The Denial Of Employee Statutory Rights, Michael C. Harper
Escaping The Allure Of Joint Employment: Using Fault-Based Principles To Impose Liability For The Denial Of Employee Statutory Rights, Michael C. Harper
Faculty Scholarship
Using joint employment alone to impose liability requires an extension of the strict imputed liability theory embodied in respondeat superior. Employers, including incorporated businesses, under the common law are strictly liable for harms to their employees, as they are for harm to third parties, because of actions of their agents or other employees taken within the scope of their employment. The liability is strict because it does not depend on a finding that the employer, the principal, was negligent or otherwise at fault. Expanding liability through joint employment, even if based on a demonstration of joint control of statutorily protected …
Should Labor Abandon Its Capital? A Reply To Critics, David H. Webber
Should Labor Abandon Its Capital? A Reply To Critics, David H. Webber
Faculty Scholarship
Several recent works have sharply criticized public pension funds and labor union funds (“labor’s capital”). These critiques come from both the left and right. Leftists criticize labor’s capital for undermining worker interests by funding financialization and the growth of Wall Street. Laissez-faire conservatives argue that pension underfunding threatens taxpayers. The left calls for pensions to be replaced by a larger social security system. The libertarian right calls for them to be smashed and scattered into individually-managed 401(k)s. I review this recent work, some of which is aimed at my book, The Rise of the Working-Class Shareholder: Labor’s Last Best Weapon, …
Agents Of Inequality: Common Ownership And The Decline Of The American Worker, Zohar Goshen, Doron Levit
Agents Of Inequality: Common Ownership And The Decline Of The American Worker, Zohar Goshen, Doron Levit
Faculty Scholarship
The last forty years have seen two major economic trends: wages have stalled despite rising productivity, and institutional investors have replaced retail shareholders as the predominant owners of the U.S. equity markets. A few powerful institutional investors — dubbed common owners — now hold large stakes in most U.S. corporations. And in no coincidence, when U.S. workers acquired this new set of bosses, their wages stopped growing while shareholder returns increased. This Article explains how common owners shift wealth from labor to capital, thereby exacerbating income inequality.
Powerful institutional investors pushing public corporations en masse to adopt strong corporate governance …