Labor and Employment Law Commons^™

Bargaining For Integration, Shirley Lin

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) requires employers to restructure exclusionary environments upon the request of their employees with disabilities so that they may continue working. Under a virtually unexamined aspect of the mandate, however, the parties must negotiate in good faith over every accommodation request. This “interactive process,” while decentralized and potentially universal, occurs on a private, individualized basis.

Although the very existence of the mandate has been heavily debated, the scholarship has yet to acknowledge that the ADA is actually ambivalent to individuals’ relative power to effect organizational change through bargaining. This Article is the first to critique …

Menstruation Discrimination And The Problem Of Shadow Precedents, Deborah Widiss

Articles by Maurer Faculty

A burgeoning menstrual justice movement calls attention to menstruation-related discrimination in workplaces, schools, prisons, and many other aspects of life. In recent years, a few courts have suggested such discrimination could violate Title VII, the federal law that prohibits sex discrimination in employment. Their analysis focuses on the Pregnancy Discrimination Act (PDA), an amendment to Title VII passed to override a Supreme Court case that had held pregnancy discrimination was not sex discrimination.

This essay, written for a symposium at Columbia Law School, applies my earlier research on the statutory interpretation of Congressional overrides to highlight two potential challenges this …

Maximizing #Metoo: Intersectionality & The Movement, Jamillah Bowman Williams

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Although women of color experience high rates of harassment and assault, the #MeToo movement has largely left them on the margins in terms of (1) the online conversation, (2) the traditional social movement activity occurring offline, and (3) the consequential legal activity. This Article analyzes how race shapes experiences of harassment and how seemingly positive legal strides continue to fail women of color thirty years beyond Kimberlé Crenshaw’s initial framing of intersectionality theory. I discuss the weaknesses of the reform efforts and argue for more tailored strategies that take into account the ineffectiveness of our current Title VII framework and, …

The Soft-Shoe And Shuffle Of Law School Hiring Committee Practices, Carliss N. Chatman, Najarian R. Peters

Scholarly Articles

It is in the spirit of Ida B. Wells that we seek to turn the light upon the systemic racism of hiring practices. We believe these practices are indicators of the systemic failures on campuses and in workplaces that prevent them from being antiracist. We seek to use this Essay as a “tool for exposing, analyzing, and challenging the majoritarian stories of racial privilege.”

Our specifc intention is to recognize the largely performative nature of claiming to be committed to an idea while substantively and concretely ensuring the opposite. This Essay is written with specific experiences, patterns, and practices in …

Moore’S Law, Unemployment, And Homelessness: Why An Increasingly Automated Marketplace Demands Guaranteed Income Programs For Americans, Golden Gate University School Of Law

GGU Law Review Blog

Although the rate of people experiencing homelessness was increasing even before 2020, the Covid-19 pandemic contributed to a further rise in the nation’s unemployment rate. Studies have shown that a one-percent increase in the nation’s unemployment rate could bring an increase in homelessness of 0.065 per every 10,000 people. Unemployment during the pandemic rose to over fourteen percent, meaning that the pandemic will likely precipitate increased levels of homelessness in America. The influx of economic stimulus payments during the pandemic has refocused discussions on the extent to which guaranteed income programs could be used to provide some financial support to …

Intolerable Asymmetry And Uncertainty: Congress Should Right The Wrongs Of The Civil Rights Act Of 1991, William R. Corbett

Journal Articles

No abstract provided.

Veiling And Inverted Masking, Saleema Saleema Snow

Journal Articles

“Good morning, Your Honor, AA, here on behalf of the United States government.”1 AA recounted her proudest moment: appearing in federal district court as an attorney for the Department of Justice (DOJ) in a religious accommodation case under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.2 There she stood, an Ivy League graduate and the granddaughter of sharecroppers. She appeared before the court as an African-American Muslim woman in hijab representing the government to uphold the constitutional rights of another Muslim woman.3 The complainant, Safoorah Khan, was employed as a teacher in a small Illinois school district and had …

Time To Panic! The Need For State Laws Mandating Panic Buttons And Anti-Sexual Harassment Policies To Protect Vulnerable Employees In The Hotel Industry, Kristy D'Angelo-Corker

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Severe Or Pervasive Should Not Mean Impossible And Unattainable: Why The "Severe Or Pervasive" Standard For A Claim Of Sexual Harassment And Discrimination Should Be Replaced With A Less Stringent And More Current Standard, Kristy D'Angelo-Corker

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Hiding Sexual Harassment: Myths And Realities, Pat K. Chew

Articles

Hiding Sexual Harassment: Myths and Realities

Nevada Law Journal, Vol. 21, p. 1223, 2021

Sexual harassment and gender disparities in the workplace continue, but we are not paying enough attention. The heralded me-too movement and the publicized downfalls of Harvey Weinstein, Bill Cosby, and other former luminaries might give the impression that the lid is blown off the indignities of harassment in the workplace and that American society’s collective disdain and abhorrence of harassment has quickly put an end to these incivilities. But these headline cases are just the tip of the sexual harassment iceberg; they may even give us …

Race, Dignity, And Commerce, Lu-In Wang

Articles

This Essay was written at the invitation of the Journal of Law and Commerce to contribute a piece on racism and commerce—an invitation that was welcome and well timed. It arrived as renewed attention was focused on racialized policing following the killing of George Floyd and in the midst of the worsening pandemic that highlighted unrelenting racial, social, and economic inequities in our society.

The connections between racism and commerce are potentially numerous, but the relationship between discriminatory policing and commerce might not be apparent. This Essay links them through the concept of dignity. Legal scholar John Felipe Acevedo has …

Challenges For Black Workers After 2020: Antiracism In The Gig Economy?, Michael C. Duff

All Faculty Scholarship

Black workers’ fortunes in the coming decades are tied to the expansion of the Gig economy, the impact of which is to destroy employee status. Because much antiracism law and policy has been transmitted to society through the medium of employment law, the disappearance of employee status should be of concern to all foes of racism. This short essay argues that Section 1981 of the Civil Rights Act of 1866 should be expanded to cover all forms of racist workplace conduct. Regulatory arbitrage will continue to challenge the definition of employment for the foreseeable future. It is fitting that one …

Bostock Was Bogus: Textualism, Pluralism, And Title Vii, Mitchell N. Berman, Guha Krishnamurthi

All Faculty Scholarship

In Bostock v. Clayton County, one of the blockbuster cases from its 2019 Term, the Supreme Court held that federal antidiscrimination law prohibits employment discrimination on grounds of sexual orientation and gender identity. Unsurprisingly, the result won wide acclaim in the mainstream legal and popular media. Results aside, however, the reaction to Justice Neil Gorsuch’s majority opinion, which purported to ground the outcome in a textualist approach to statutory interpretation, was more mixed. The great majority of commentators, both liberal and conservative, praised Gorsuch for what they deemed a careful and sophisticated—even “magnificent” and “exemplary”—application of textualist principles, while …

Compensation, Commodification, And Disablement: How Law Has Dehumanized Laboring Bodies And Excluded Nonlaboring Humans, Karen M. Tani

All Faculty Scholarship

This essay reviews Nate Holdren's Injury Impoverished: Workplace Accidents, Capitalism, and Law in the Progressive Era (Cambridge University Press, 2020), which explores the changes in legal imagination that accompanied the rise of workers' compensation programs. The essay foregrounds Holdren’s insights about disability. Injury Impoverished illustrates the meaning and material consequences that the law has given to work-related impairments over time and documents the naturalization of disability-based exclusion from the formal labor market. In the present day, with so many social benefits tied to employment, this exclusion is particularly troubling.

Challenging Gender Discrimination In Closely Held Firms: The Hope And Hazards Of Corporate Oppression Doctrine, Meredith R. Miller

Scholarly Works

The #MeToo Movement has ushered sexual harassment out of the shadows and thrown a spotlight on the gender pay gap in the workplace. Harassment and unfair treatment have, however, been difficult to extinguish. This has been true for all workers, including partners – those women who are owners in their firms and claim that they have suffered harassment or unfair treatment based on gender. That is because a partner’s lawsuit for discrimination often will suffer an insurmountable hurdle: plaintiff’s status as a partner in the firm means that they may not be considered an “employee” under the relevant employment discrimination …

Pandemic Surveillance Discrimination, Christian Sundquist

Articles

The COVID-19 pandemic has laid bare the abiding tension between surveillance and privacy. Public health epidemiology has long utilized a variety of surveillance methods—such as contact tracing, quarantines, and mandatory reporting laws—to control the spread of disease during past epidemics and pandemics. Officials have typically justified the resulting intrusions on privacy as necessary for the greater public good by helping to stave off larger health crisis. The nature and scope of public health surveillance in the battle against COVID-19, however, has significantly changed with the advent of new technologies. Digital surveillance tools, often embedded in wearable technology, have greatly increased …

Artificial Intelligence And The Challenges Of Workplace Discrimination And Privacy, Pauline Kim, Matthew T. Bodie

Scholarship@WashULaw

Employers are increasingly relying on artificially intelligent (AI) systems to recruit, select, and manage their workforces, raising fears that these systems may subject workers to discriminatory, invasive, or otherwise unfair treatment. This article reviews those concerns and provides an overview of how current laws may apply, focusing on two particular problems: discrimination on the basis of protected characteristics like race, sex, or disability, and the invasion of workers’ privacy engendered by workplace AI systems. It discusses the ways in which relying on AI to make personnel decisions can produce discriminatory outcomes and how current law might apply. It then explores …

Ai And Inequality, Pauline Kim

Scholarship@WashULaw

This Chapter examines the social consequences of artificial intelligence (AI) when it is used to make predictions about people in contexts like employment, housing and criminal law enforcement. Observers have noted the potential for erroneous or arbitrary decisions about individuals; however, the growing use of predictive AI also threatens broader social harms. In particular, these technologies risk increasing inequality by reproducing or exacerbating the marginalization of historically disadvantaged groups, and by reinforcing power hierarchies that contribute to economic inequality. Using the employment context as the primary example, this Chapter explains how AI-powered tools that are used to recruit, hire and …

Proving Discrimination By The Text, Deborah Widiss

Articles by Maurer Faculty

Employment discrimination laws make the “simple but momentous” declaration that it is illegal to deny employment on the basis of race, sex, religion, or other key aspects of identity. But when employees who have been treated unfairly turn to the courts for relief, courts rarely assess whether their claims meet the statutory standard. Instead, they funnel the evidence through a convoluted body of judge-made law known as McDonnell Douglas burden shifting.

This Article lays bare fundamental inconsistencies between the statutes’ causal language, as definitively interpreted by the Supreme Court in recent cases, and the burden-shifting process. In Bostock v. Clayton …

Disclosing Discrimination, Stephanie Bornstein

UF Law Faculty Publications

In the United States, enforcement of laws prohibiting workplace discrimination rests almost entirely on the shoulders of employee victims, who must first file charges with a government agency and then pursue litigation themselves. While the law forbids retaliation against employees who complain, this does little to prevent it, in part because employees are also responsible for initiating any claims of retaliation they experience as a result of their original discrimination claims. The burden on employees to complain—and their justified fear of retaliation if they do so—results in underenforcement of the law and a failure to spot and redress underlying structural …

Beyond Sex-Plus: Acknowledging Black Women In Employment Law And Policy, Jamillah Bowman Williams

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

It has been more than 30 years since Kimberlé Crenshaw published her pathbreaking article critiquing the inadequacy of antidiscrimination law in addressing claims at the intersection of race and sex discrimination. This Article focuses on the challenges Black women continue to face when bringing intersectional claims, despite experiencing high rates of discrimination and harassment. The new status quo has not resolved the problems that she documented, and has introduced a set of second generation intersectionality issues. Most significantly, many courts now recognize that Black women experience discrimination differently than do white women or Black men. Yet, despite the professionally and …