Law Commons^™

Liability For Toxic Workplace Cultures, Dana Florczak

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

Title VII is meant to protect employees from discrimination and has historically been a crucial tool for creating social change in the workplace. But when considering modern-day workplace discrimination wrought by “toxic workplace cultures” defined herein, Title VII’s frameworks for confronting systemic discrimination prove outdated and ineffective. This Note proposes the codification of a new theory of discrimination under Title VII targeting toxic workplace cultures, with substantive and procedural elements working in tandem to better enable plaintiffs to collectively bring actions to hold employers accountable for fostering discriminatory environments. Part I defines toxic workplace cultures and walks through case studies …

Wrong Line: Proposing A New Test For Discrimination Under The National Labor Relations Act, Joshua D. Rosenberg Daneri, Paul A. Thomas

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

There has long been a consensus among scholars and union-side practitioners that the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) is under-enforced. As a result, employers often treat violations of the NLRA as a cost of doing business rather than a serious violation of a federal statute. Calls for reform have historically tended to propose legislative amendments to the NLRA to constrain employer conduct and impose greater consequences for discrimination violations. However, little attention has been given to improving the flawed legal test by which such discrimination is analyzed, Wright Line, 251 N.L.R.B. 1083 (1980), enforced 662 F.2d 899 (1st Cir. 1981), …

The Good-Faith Doubt Test And The Revival Of Joy Silk Bargaining Orders, Brandon R. Magner

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

The last fifty-two years have borne witness to the swift degradation and virtual irrelevance of the bargaining order. By the end of the twentieth century even pro-enforcement officials in the NLRB were acknowledging the difficulty of obtaining an enforceable bargaining order, and the remedy rarely appears these days in the agency’s published decisions.

This is not the product of the usual economic or political factors cited as reasons for the labor movement’s and its attendant regulating schema’s diminishment. Rather, the decline of the bargaining order can be explained almost entirely by the disappearance of the so-called Joy Silk doctrine from …