Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Singapore Will Soon Have Workplace Anti-Discrimination Laws: Here’S What You Need To Know, Benjamin Joshua Ong

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

Work is often a significant part of one’s life. Decisions by employers — including hiring decisions and choices on how to treat employees at work — can have life-changing effects on lives and livelihoods. Therefore, if there were reason to suspect that some employers make such decisions on the grounds of applicants’ or employees’ race, sex, or other personal characteristics without a valid reason, then we should be worried. If that were to become widespread, our society would suffer. Some people would face greater challenges than others at work, and therefore in life, merely because of who they are.

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 …

Violent Splits Or Healthy Divides? Coping With Injustice Through Faultlines, Katerina Bezrukova, Chester S. Spell, Jamie L. Perry

Jamie Perry

In 2 studies, we investigated how groups with strong divisions may, paradoxically, help members to cope with injustice. We tested our theoretical predictions using a survey methodology and data from 57 (Study 1) and 36 (Study 2) workgroups across different industries. Consistent with our hypotheses, we found that group faultlines weakened the positive relationship between perceived interpersonal injustice and psychological distress. Cooperative behaviors within subgroups mediated the interactive effect of faultlines and injustice with psychological distress.

Retaliation In An Eeo World,, Deborah L. Brake

Articles

This Article examines how the prevalence of internal policies and complaint procedures for addressing discrimination in the workplace are affecting legal protections from retaliation. Retaliation has been an unusually active field of law lately. The Supreme Court’s heightened interest in taking retaliation cases in recent years has highlighted the central importance of retaliation protections to the integrity of discrimination law. The Court’s string of plaintiff victories in retaliation cases has earned it the reputation as a pragmatic, pro-employee Court when it comes to retaliation law. However, this view does not account for the proliferation and influence of employer EEO policies …

Tortifying Retaliation: Protected Activity At The Intersection Of Fault, Duty, And Causation, Deborah L. Brake

Articles

In University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center v. Nassar, the Supreme Court broke its string of plaintiff victories in the eight retaliation cases it has decided since 2005. In its 2013 decision in that case, the Court rejected a mixed motive framework for Title VII’s retaliation provision, a part of the statute that Congress did not amend in 1991 when it adopted the motivating factor standard for proving discrimination under Title VII. For help construing what “because of” means in the retaliation claim, the Court looked to tort law, which it read as requiring plaintiffs to prove but-for causation …

Recruitment Discrimination Against Middle Eastern People In Western Australia : The Case Of Accountants, Tiny Pinkerton

Theses : Honours

The population of all Western countries are ageing and humanitarian efforts saw increasing numbers of people from Middle Eastern origin settle in Australia. Whilst older people are encouraged to remain in paid employment longer, it is not clear whether Middle Eastern people and the older population are as readily hired as are Anglo Australians and the younger population. Pairs of fictitious, unsolicited job applications were used to test for age and racial discrimination of Middle Eastern people in the Western Australian labour market. The study employed a 2 x 2 between subjects design with race (Anglo Australian and Middle Eastern) …

Disparate Impact Realism, Amy L. Wax

All Faculty Scholarship

In Ricci v. DeStefano, 129 S. Ct. 2658 (2009), the Supreme Court recently reaffirmed the doctrine, first articulated by the Court in Griggs v. Duke Power Company, 401 U.S. 424 (1971), that employers can be held liable under Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act for neutral personnel practices with a disparate impact on minority workers. The Griggs Court further held that employers can escape liability by showing that their staffing practices are job related or consistent with business necessity.

In the interim since Griggs, social scientists have generated evidence undermining two key assumptions behind that decision and its …

A Moral Contractual Approach To Labor Law Reform: A Template For Using Ethical Principles To Regulate Behavior Where Law Failed To Do So Effectively, Zev J. Eigen, David S. Sherwyn

Faculty Working Papers

If laws cease to work as they should or as intended, legislators and scholars propose new laws to replace or amend them. This paper posits an alternative—offering regulated parties the opportunity to contractually bind themselves to behave ethically. The perfect test-case for this proposal is labor law, because (1) labor law has not been amended for decades, (2) proposals to amend it have failed for political reasons, and are focused on union election win rates, and less on the election process itself, (3) it is an area of law already statutorily regulating parties' reciprocal contractual obligations, and (4) moral means …