Law Commons^™

Compensating Differentials For Gender-Specific Job Injury Risks, Joni Hersch

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Women have largely been excluded from analyses of compensating differentials for job risk since they are predominantly employed in safer, white-collar occupations. New data reveal that their injury experience is considerable. One-third of the total injury and illness cases with days away from work accrue to female workers. Adjusted for employment, women are 71 percent as likely as men to experience an injury or illness. As one would predict on theoretical grounds, these risks generate compensating differentials. Based on gender-specific injury incidence rates for both industry and occupation, I find strong evidence of compensating wage differentials for the job risk …

Realigning Corporate Governance: Shareholder Activism By Labor Unions, Randall Thomas, Stewart J. Schwab

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

This paper investigates the increased shareholder activism by labor unions and their pension funds, who are now the most aggressive institutional shareholders. Sometimes unions propose traditional corporate-governance measures through procedures familiar to shareholders. Only the union sponsor is novel. But recently unions have pushed innovative methods to get corporations to listen to shareholder complaints. These methods include mandatory amendment of corporate by-laws by shareholders and floor proposals submitted for a shareholder vote at the annual meeting. Unions as shareholders have conflicting roles. We distinguish union-shareholder initiatives designed to further unions' traditional organizing and collective bargaining goals from those that enhance …

Gender Sex Agency And Discrimination: A Reply To Professor Abrams, Katherine M. Franke

Faculty Scholarship

According to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, sexual harassment is the fastest-growing area of employment discrimination. In fact, the annual number of sexual harassment complaints filed with the EEOC has more than doubled in the last six years. No one, or at least no one who has given this problem her serious attention, can deny that workplace sexual harassment is a grave problem and that it significantly impedes women's entrance into many sectors of the wage labor market.

Notwithstanding these impressive numbers, sexual harassment legal doctrine remains remarkably undertheorized – particularly by the Supreme Court. For these and other reasons, …

Ombudsman Offices In The Federal Government - An Emerging Trend, Jeffrey Lubbers

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

No abstract provided.

Affirmative Action Awash In Confusion: Backward-Looking-Future-Oriented Justifications For Race-Conscious Measures, Ann C. Mcginley

Scholarly Works

The Third Circuit Court of Appeals, sitting en banc, decided Taxman v. Board of Education of the Township of Piscataway, in August 1996. Eight judges agreed that he Board of Education of Piscataway Township, New Jersey violated Title VII of the Civil Rights Act by using race, in accordance with its affirmative action policy, to break a tie between two teachers in the Business Department at Piscataway High School when determining which teacher to lay off. A strong dissent by Chief Judge Sloviter was joined by two other Court of Appeals judges. The majority decision is remarkable in its breadth, …

On The Interface Between Labor And Employment Law, Joseph R. Grodin

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Collective Bargaining Over Asset Restructuring, Edward B. Rock, Michael L. Wachter

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Mandatory Arbitration Of Employee Discrimination Claims: Unmitigated Evil Or Blessing In Disguise?, Theodore J. St. Antoine

Articles

One of the hottest current issues in employment law is the use of mandatory arbitration to resolve workplace disputes. Typically, an employer will make it a condition of employment that employees must agree to arbitrate any claims arising out of the job, including claims based on statutory rights against discrimination, instead of going to court. On the face of it, this is a brazen affront to public policy. Citizens are being deprived of the forum provided them by law. And indeed numerous scholars and public and private bodies have condemned the use of mandatory arbitration. Yet the insight of that …

Political Power Of Nuisance Law: Labor Picketing And The Courts In Modern England, 1871-Present, The , Rachel Vorspan

Faculty Scholarship

This inquiry, a comprehensive historical study of the impact of nuisance law on labor picketing in England, comprises six sections. Part I introduces general principles of labor law and nuisance law in the nineteenth century, particularly the legislative scheme of "collective laissezfaire" that emerged after 1871 and remained relatively intact until 1980. Part II examines the use of nuisance doctrines against picketers in the first phase of confrontational picketing from 1889 to 1906, when the appearance of militant unions representing unskilled workers stimulated inventive judicial responses in both private and public nuisance. Part III investigates the much heralded judicial and …

Adea Claimant Can Retain Severance Payments And Sue Former Employer, Susan J. Becker

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

Former employees can maintain claims under the Age Discrimination in Employment Act (ADEA) without first repaying the consideration received for an invalid release of claims. The Supreme Court's pronouncement, Oubre v. Entergy Operations, Inc., 1988 U.S. Lexis 646 (Jan. 26, 1998), may change the way many employers negotiate and execute severance packages and settlements with terminated employees.

Global Labor Rights And The Alien Tort Claims Act, Sarah H. Cleveland

Faculty Scholarship

Are labor rights human rights? Are some worker rights so fundamental that must be respected by all nations, and all corporations, under all circumstances? If so, who has the authority to define such rights, and how should they be enforced? What is the effect on the global economy of enforcing international worker rights? These are some of the questions confronted by the authors of Human Rights, Labor Rights, and International Trade, a compilation of essays by an international group of scholars, labor rights activists, and corporate executives addressing contemporary topics in the dialectic among labor, trade, and human rights.

Migration As International Trade: The Economic Gains From The Liberalized Movement Of Labor, Howard F. Chang

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Race, Gender, And The Law In The Twenty-First Century Workplace: Some Preliminary Observations, Susan P. Sturm

Faculty Scholarship

This article seeks to move beyond the debate between informal and formal legal regulation. Both approaches reflect essential but limited components of a legal regulatory regime. Neither approach adequately responds to the simultaneous challenges of changing organizational structure, racial and gender dynamics, and market-driven demands for flexibility and adaptiveness. The next step requires that we take account of the critiques of formality and informality. This requires embracing the challenge of developing new forms of legal regulation that treat organizational decision makers and incentive structures explicitly as part of the legal regulatory regime. In this view, law consists of a set …

Survey Of Recent Developments In Third Circuit Law, Bonenberger V. Plymouth Township, 132 F.3d 20 (3d Cir. 1997), Nicole Huberfeld

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

This brief comment examines the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit decision in Bonenberger v. Plymouth Township, 132 F.3d 20 (3d Cir. 1997).

How The Wagner Act Came To Be: A Prospectus, Theodore J. St. Antoine

Articles

The Wagner Act of 1935, the original National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), has been called "perhaps the most radical piece of legislation ever enacted by the United States Congress."' But Supreme Court interpretations supposedly frustrated the utopian aspirations for a radical restructuring of the workplace." Similarly, according to another commentator, unnecessary language in one of the Court's earliest NLRA cases "drastically undercut the new act's protection of the critical right to strike."'

Who's Responsible? Employer Liability For Supervisors' Hostile-Environment Sexual Harassment: An Analysis Of Faragher V. City Of Boca Raton, Barbara J. Fick

Journal Articles

This article previews the Supreme Court case Faragher v. City of Boca Raton, 524 U.S. 775 (1998). The author expected the Court to address the issue of under what circumstances an employer is liabile under title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 for a supervisor's sexual harassement that creates a hostile work environment.

Careers And Contingency, Gillian Lester

Faculty Scholarship

Disagreement among legal scholars over the phenomenon of "contingent employment" – work having limited hours, duration, or security – has led to disparate prescriptions for legal reform. For some, the best solution would be to either leave the market alone, or eliminate existing regulations that drive employers to create contingent jobs. Others believe current regulations do not go far enough and advocate reforms ranging from expanding mandatory benefits and protections to facilitating collective bargaining among contingent workers in order to restore such benefits as long-term security, training, and career advancement. The debate about law reform has centered partly on disputes …