Labor and Employment Law Commons^™

Exploitation Or Fun?: The Lived Experience Of Teenage Employment In Suburban America, Yasemin Besen-Cassino

Department of Sociology Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

Objectivist scholars characterize typical teenage jobs as “exploitive”: highly routinized service sector jobs with low pay, no benefits, minimum skill requirements, and little time off. This view assumes exploitive characteristics are inherent in the jobs, ignoring the lived experience of the teenage workers. This article focuses on the lived work experience of particularly affluent, suburban teenagers who work in these jobs and explores the meaning they create during their everyday work experience. Based on a large ethnographic study conducted with the teenage workers at a national coffee franchise, this article unravels the ways in which objectivist views of these “bad …

Labor’S Fragile Freedom Of Association Post-9/11, Ruben J. Garcia

Scholarly Works

The fragility of civil liberties in the United States became evident after the terrible attacks of September 11, 2001 (9/11). Labor's freedom of association, which is the right to form unions, bargain collectively, and engage in concerted activities, is one of the civil liberties at risk in the post-9/11 period. This Article focuses specifically on post-9/11 limitations of labor's freedom of association conducted by the executive branch and the Congress, and the ways that the courts have adjudicated labor rights in the post-9/11 era. Domestic labor law and constitutional rights alone, however, will not stop the collision of security and …

Decentering The Firm: The Limited Liability Company And Low Wage Immigrant Women Workers, Miriam A. Cherry

All Faculty Scholarship

Congress is now considering radical changes to the immigration system. This article looks at the immigration issue as a labor and employment law question, and proposes a possible solution based on this approach.

I suggest that forming Limited Liability Companies (LLCs) will benefit low-wage immigrant women workers by transforming them into business owners. By using existing legal structures to their benefit, low-wage women workers can curtail at least a portion of the exploitation that they currently experience. Instead of being hired to perform a job, having the intermediary take a cut, and then pay them some amount out of that, …

Labor As Property: Guestworkers, International Trade, And The Democracy Deficit, Ruben J. Garcia

Scholarly Works

In the 1914 Clayton Act, Congress declared: "The labor of a human being is not a commodity or an article of commerce." The practical reason for this section of the Clayton Act was to exempt collusion in labor negotiations from antitrust liability. The law also gave effect to the rejection of the commodification of human labor. Since the passage of the Clayton Act, developments in law and society have chipped away at the law's symbolic anti-commodification message. This paper examines the commodification of labor in the international trade and guestworker debates. Historically, the concept of "comparative advantage" in international trade …

Labor Struggles, New Social Movements, And America's Favorite Pastime: New York Workers Take On New Era Cap Company, Victoria Carty

Sociology Faculty Articles and Research

Contemporary economic globalization, which is driven and regulated primarily by multinational corporations, has a direct impact on workers' lives. Trade agreements such as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) tend to be controlled by corporate interests in the wealthy, industrialized nations. Those countries set the agenda to protect the interests of foreign investors and facilitate the mobility of capital, but they do little to protect the interests of labor. In response, workers in both the global North and South have been forced to rely on their own individual efforts to protect themselves against unfair labor practices. This article presents …

Solving The Puzzle Of Mead And Christensen: What Would Justice Stevens Do?, Amy J. Wildermuth

Articles

One area in which I teach and have become increasingly interested over the last few years is administrative law. Although one might expect at a symposium honoring the jurisprudence of Justice Stevens that I might focus solely on his most famous administrative law opinion, Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc., and its two-step test that requires a court to defer to a reasonable agency interpretation if the statute is ambiguous, I have instead decided to take on the United States Supreme Court's more recent consideration of what to do with those actions agencies take that, unlike the bubble rule …

Acknowledging Informal Power Dynamics In The Workplace: A Proposal For Further Development Of The Vicarious Liability Doctrine In Hostile Environment Sexual Harassment Cases, Susan Carle

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

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