Law Commons^™

Colorism: A Darker Shade Of Pale, Taunya Lovell Banks

Faculty Scholarship

In this article, Professor Banks argues that colorism, skin tone discrimination against dark-skinned but not light-skinned blacks, constitutes a form of race-based discrimination. Skin tone discrimination coexists with more traditional forms of race discrimination that impact all blacks without regard to skin tone and phenotype, yet courts seem unwilling to recognize this point. Professor Banks uses employment discrimination cases to illustrate some courts' willingness to acknowledge subtler forms of race-based discrimination, like skin tone discrimination, for white ethnic and Latina/o plaintiffs, but not for black plaintiffs. The inability of courts to fashion coherent approaches to colorism claims involving black claimants …

The Right To Strike In Essential Services Under United States Labor Law, Marley S. Weiss

Faculty Scholarship

SUMMARY: I. Introduction. II. A Brief History of U.S. Collective Labor Relations Laws. III. The Structure of Labor-Management Relations in The U.S. IV. The Right to Strike. V. Private Sector “Essential Services” Provisions: LMRA National. VI. Conclusion.

Sexual Harassment And Racial Disparity: The Mutual Construction Of Gender And Race, Tanya K. Hernandez

Faculty Scholarship

For a number of years, commentators have proffered anecdotal evidence to suggest that women of color figure prominently as sexual harassment plaintiffs. Until recently, a systematic statistical analysis of women's experiences of sexual harassment by race was largely unavailable. For the first time, this Article comprehensively analyzes Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) sexual harassment charge statistics, by looking at data from the last seven years along with Lexis-Nexis and Westlaw electronic reports of sexual harassment complaints for the last twenty years. What immediately becomes apparent in this statistical analysis of sexual harassment charges in the United States is the overrepresentation …

The Changing Complexion Of Workplace Law: Labor And Employment Decisions Of The Supreme Court's 1999-2000 Term , James J. Brudney

Faculty Scholarship

At the dawn of a new century of Supreme Court workplace law, it seems especially appropriate to offer some perspective on the recent and relatively recent past. Before addressing the seven cases involving labor and employment issues decided by the Supreme Court in the Term just ended, I want briefly to describe (in what I hope are not mechanical terms) how the Court's interests in labor and employment law have evolved from the start of the Burger Era in 1969 to the current, mature stage of the Rehnquist Court.

New Plants As Natural Experiments In Economic Adjustment: Adjustment Costs, Learning-By-Doing And Lumpy Investment, James Bessen

Faculty Scholarship

A large sample of new plants is studied to reveal detailed adjustment behavior for capital, labor and productivity. Once production has begun, capital adjusts almost as quickly as labor. Overall, capital adjustment is lumpy while labor follows a learning-by-doing model rather than a convex adjustment cost model. Plants are quite heterogeneous, however: convex adjustment costs appear important at small plants, but large plants exhibit lumpy investment and substantial investment in learning-by-doing. A positive association between plant productivity growth and wages (and also the change in wages) corroborates the importance of learning-by-doing. Also, learning-by-doing appears to influence the behavior of large …

Ratcheting Labor Standards: Regulation For Continuous Improvement In The Global Workplace, Charles F. Sabel, Dara O'Rourke, Archon Fung

Faculty Scholarship

It is a brute fact of contemporary globalization – unmistakable as activists and journalists catalog scandal after scandal – that the very transformations making possible higher quality, cheaper products often lead to unacceptable conditions of work: brutal use of child labor, dangerous environments, punishingly long days, starvation wages, discrimination, suppression of expression and association. In all quarters, the question is not whether to address these conditions, but how.

That question, however, admits no easy answers. Globalization itself has freed capital from many of its former constraints – national workplace standards, collective bargaining, and supervisory state agencies and courts – designed …

Recent Supreme Court Employment Law Developments, Olatunde C.A. Johnson, Douglas D. Scherer

Faculty Scholarship

This article discusses recent employment law developments at the United States Supreme Court. Employment law cases took center stage during the October 1997 and 1998 Terms of the Supreme Court and important employment law cases were pending, or have been decided, during the October 1999 Term. This article briefly surveys the Court's employment law cases during the October 1997 Term, focusing more extensively on the Court's employment law cases during the October 1998 Term, and then discusses two very important employment law cases before the Court during the October 1999 Term, involving the constitutionality of the Age Discrimination in Employment …