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Racism Pays: How Racial Exploitation Gets Innovation Off The Ground, Daria Roithmayr Apr 2023

Racism Pays: How Racial Exploitation Gets Innovation Off The Ground, Daria Roithmayr

Michigan Journal of Race and Law

Recent work on the history of capitalism documents the key role that racial exploitation played in the launch of the global cotton economy and the construction of the transcontinental railroad. But racial exploitation is not a thing of the past. Drawing on three case studies, this Paper argues that some of our most celebrated innovations in the digital economy have gotten off the ground by racially exploiting workers of color, paying them less than the marginal revenue product of their labor for their essential contributions. Innovators like Apple and Uber have been able to racially exploit workers of color because …


Aligned: Sex Workers’ Lessons For The Gig Economy, Yvette Butler Jan 2021

Aligned: Sex Workers’ Lessons For The Gig Economy, Yvette Butler

Michigan Journal of Race and Law

Society’s perception of a type of work and the people who engage in money-generating activities has an impact on whether and how the law protects (or does not protect) the people who perform those activities. Work can be legitimized or delegitimized. Workers are protected or left out to dry depending upon their particular “hustle.” This Article argues that gig workers and sex workers face similar challenges within the legal system and that these groups can and should collaborate to their collective advantage when seeking reforms. Gig workers have been gaining legitimacy while sex workers still primarily operate in the shadow …


"When They Enter, We All Enter": Opening The Door To Intersectional Discrimination Claims Based On Race And Disability, Alice Abrokwa Jan 2018

"When They Enter, We All Enter": Opening The Door To Intersectional Discrimination Claims Based On Race And Disability, Alice Abrokwa

Michigan Journal of Race and Law

This Article explores the intersection of race and disability in the context of employment discrimination, arguing that people of color with disabilities can and should obtain more robust relief for their harms by asserting intersectional discrimination claims. Professor Kimberlé Crenshaw first articulated the intersectionality framework by explaining that Black women can experience a form of discrimination distinct from that experienced by White women or Black men, that is, they may face discrimination as Black women due to the intersection of their race and gender. Likewise, people of color with disabilities can experience discrimination distinct from that felt by people of …


Breastfeeding On A Nickel And A Dime: Why The Affordable Care Act's Nursing Mothers Amendment Won't Help Low-Wage Workers, Nancy Ehrenreich, Jamie Siebrese Oct 2014

Breastfeeding On A Nickel And A Dime: Why The Affordable Care Act's Nursing Mothers Amendment Won't Help Low-Wage Workers, Nancy Ehrenreich, Jamie Siebrese

Michigan Journal of Race and Law

As part of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 (also known as “Obamacare”), Congress passed a new law requiring employers to provide accommodation to working mothers who want to express breast milk while at work. This accommodation requirement is a step forward from the preceding legal regime, under which federal courts consistently found that “lactation discrimination” did not constitute sex discrimination. But this Article predicts that the new law will nevertheless fall short of guaranteeing all women the ability to work while breastfeeding. The generality of the Act’s brief provisions, along with the broad discretion it assigns …


Coercive Assimilationism: The Perils Of Muslim Women's Identity Performance In The Workplace, Sahar F. Aziz Oct 2014

Coercive Assimilationism: The Perils Of Muslim Women's Identity Performance In The Workplace, Sahar F. Aziz

Michigan Journal of Race and Law

Should employees have the legal right to “be themselves” at work? Most Americans would answer in the negative because work is a privilege, not an entitlement. But what if being oneself entails behaviors, mannerisms, and values integrally linked to the employee’s gender, race, or religion? And what if the basis for the employer’s workplace rules and professionalism standards rely on negative racial, ethnic or gender stereotypes that disparately impact some employees over others? Currently, Title VII fails to take into account such forms of second-generation discrimination, thereby limiting statutory protections to phenotypical or morphological bases. Drawing on social psychology and …


Have A Job To Get A Job: Disparate Treatment And Disparate Impact Of The 'Currently Employed' Requirement, Jennifer Jolly-Ryan Sep 2012

Have A Job To Get A Job: Disparate Treatment And Disparate Impact Of The 'Currently Employed' Requirement, Jennifer Jolly-Ryan

Michigan Journal of Race and Law

Countless people struggle to find a job in a competitive job market despite possessing solid qualifications. Although the news media reports that job numbers are improving, the problems of unemployment particularly loom for people of color, older workers, and people with disabilities. These groups are often unemployed longer than other job seekers. These groups also suffer the disparate impact of job advertisements that require "current employment" as a prerequisite for hiring. The harsh reality is that the longer a job seeker is unemployed, the closer a job seeker becomes to becoming permanently unemployed. Job advertisements that require "current employment" exacerbate …


Some Women's Work: Domestic Work, Class, Race, Heteropatriarchy, And The Limits Of Legal Reform, Terri Nilliasca Apr 2011

Some Women's Work: Domestic Work, Class, Race, Heteropatriarchy, And The Limits Of Legal Reform, Terri Nilliasca

Michigan Journal of Race and Law

This Note employs Critical Race, feminist, Marxist, and queer theory to analyze the underlying reasons for the exclusion of domestic workers from legal and regulatory systems. The Note begins with a discussion of the role of legal and regulatory systems in upholding and replicating White supremacy within the employer and domestic worker relationship. The Note then goes on to argue that the White, feminist movement's emphasis on access to wage labor further subjugated Black and immigrant domestic workers. Finally, I end with an in-depth legal analysis of New York's Domestic Worker Bill of Rights, the nation's first state law to …


Federal Employer Sanctions As Immigration Federalism, Darcy M. Pottle Sep 2010

Federal Employer Sanctions As Immigration Federalism, Darcy M. Pottle

Michigan Journal of Race and Law

For low-skilled workers in much of the world, U.S. admission policies make illegal immigration the most viable means of entering the country. Low average schooling, which disqualifies many potential immigrants from employment-based visas, and long queues affecting family preference immigration from high-traffic countries, make the admission criteria outlined in the U.S. Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) prohibitive for most would-be immigrants to the United States. Perhaps due to this failure of immediate legal avenues, many immigrants enter the country illegally. Though many eventually gain legal status, in the meantime they live and work in the United States without documentation. "Illegal …


The Legal Arizona Workers Act And Preemption Doctrine, Sandra J. Durkin Jan 2010

The Legal Arizona Workers Act And Preemption Doctrine, Sandra J. Durkin

Michigan Journal of Race and Law

in recent years, a spate of states passed laws regulating the employment of undocumented immigrants. This Note argues that laws that impose civil sanctions on employers that hire undocumented immigrants are preempted by both federal immigration law and federal labor law. The Note focuses specifically on the Legal Arizona Workers Act because it went into effect in 2008 and has amassed more than two years' worth of data on its enforcement, and because it is touted as the harshest state anti-immigration measure to date. This Note examines the law's impacts and argues that practitioners nationwide should challenge the Legal Arizona …


Employee Free Choice Or Employee Forged Choice? Race In The Mirror Of Exclusionary Hierarchy, Harry G. Hutchinson Jan 2010

Employee Free Choice Or Employee Forged Choice? Race In The Mirror Of Exclusionary Hierarchy, Harry G. Hutchinson

Michigan Journal of Race and Law

The Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) is arguably the most transformative piece of labor legislation to come before Congress since the enactment of the National Labor Relations Act of 1935 (NLRA). One of the newest attempts to transform labor relations is the EFCA. The first to disappear under the EFCA would be a system of union democracy whereby unions could only obtain the rights of exclusive representation for firms if they could prevail in a secret-ballot election. Second, the EFCA would eliminate tile necessity of a freely negotiated collective bargaining agreement between management and labor and instead substitute compulsory arbitration. …


Education And Labor Relations: Asian Americans And Blacks As Pawns In The Furtherance Of White Hegemony, Xiaofeng Stephanie Da Jan 2007

Education And Labor Relations: Asian Americans And Blacks As Pawns In The Furtherance Of White Hegemony, Xiaofeng Stephanie Da

Michigan Journal of Race and Law

Asian Americans and Blacks have been, and continue to be, racialized relative to each other in our society. Asian Americans and Blacks have come to occupy marginalized positions as the polarized ends on the economic spectrums of education and labor relations, with an expanding "Whiteness" as the filler in the middle as Whites manipulate the differing interests of both subordinated groups to align with White (the dominant group's) interests. Although Whites purport to champion the interests of one subordinate group over the other, in reality the racialization of Asian Americans and Blacks in our country is rooted in the preservation …


From Race To Class Struggle: Re-Problematizing Critical Race Theory, E San Juan Jr. Jan 2005

From Race To Class Struggle: Re-Problematizing Critical Race Theory, E San Juan Jr.

Michigan Journal of Race and Law

The misconstrual of "class" as a theoretical and analytic concept for defining group or individual identity has led, especially during the Cold War period, to its confusion with status, life-style, and other ideological contingencies. This has vitiated the innovative attempt of CRT to link racism and class oppression. We need to reinstate the Marxist category of class derived from the social division of labor that generates antagonistic class relations. Class conflict becomes the key to grasping the totality of social relations of production, as well as the metabolic process of social reproduction in which racism finds its effectivity. This will …


The New Cultural Diversity And Title Vii, Steven A. Ramirez Jan 2000

The New Cultural Diversity And Title Vii, Steven A. Ramirez

Michigan Journal of Race and Law

This Article will show that the most progressive diversity initiatives taking hold in the business community are facially neutral in their approach, merit-driven, and fundamentally culture-conscious (as opposed to race-conscious). These initiatives do not allow for any racial preference or gender preference and draw any such bias not from the inherent values of diversity but from the largely segregated pre-existing corporate tradition: hiring culturally aware minorities unleashes value because they bring insights previously unavailable to segregated businesses. In other words, White males can be and are hired in the name of cultural diversity when they bring cultural insights to the …


"Reverse Discrimination" And Higher Education Faculty, Joyce A. Hughes Jan 1998

"Reverse Discrimination" And Higher Education Faculty, Joyce A. Hughes

Michigan Journal of Race and Law

In this Article, the author critiques the use of "reverse discrimination" claims by White plaintiffs to challenge the hiring of Blacks in institutions of higher education. The author argues that "reverse discrimination" is a myth since no such claim is possible when one White candidate is selected over another; assumptions of inferiority are implicit where such a claim is made when a Black candiate is selected over a White candidate. In other words, allowing such a claim, even if ultimately unsuccessful, implies a presumption of superiority on the part of the White candidate. For this reason, the author argues that …