Labor and Employment Law Commons^™

Public Actors In Private Markets: Toward A Developmental Finance State, Robert C. Hockett, Saule T. Omarova

Robert C. Hockett

The recent financial crisis brought into sharp relief fundamental questions about the social function and purpose of the financial system, including its relation to the “real” economy. This Article argues that, to answer these questions, we must recapture a distinctively American view of the proper relations among state, financial market, and development. This programmatic vision – captured in what we call a “developmental finance state” – is based on three key propositions: (1) that economic and social development is not an “end-state” but a continuing national policy priority; (2) that the modalities of finance are the most potent means of fueling continuous ...

The End Of At-Will Employment? The “”Color-Blind” Standard Of Intent To Discriminate, Michael J. Zimmer

Michael J Zimmer

The End of At-Will Employment? The “”Color-Blind” Standard of Intent to Discriminate

Abstract

In Ricci v. DeStefano, the New Haven firefighters case, the Supreme Court decided as a matter of law that New Haven had committed intentional disparate treatment discrimination against some of the white testtakers when it did not use the results of a promotion test because its use would have resulted in an adverse effect on black and Latino testtakers. A careful reading of Ricci establishes how it has a significant potential impact on all disparate treatment cases. Because liability was established simply on the fact that New ...

Angry Employees: Revisiting Insubordination In Title Vii Cases, Susan D. Carle

Susan D. Carle

In too many Title VII cases, employees find themselves thrown out of court because they reacted angrily to reasonable perceptions of employer discrimination. In the race context, supervisors repeatedly call employees the n-word and use other racial epithets, order African American employees to perform work others in the same job classification do not have to do, and impose discipline white employees do not face for the comparable conduct. In the gender context, courts throw out plaintiffs’ cases even where supervisors engage in egregious sexual harassment. Employees who react angrily to such demeaning treatment—by cursing, shouting, refusing an order or ...

Inside The Caucus: An Empirical Analysis Of Mediation From Within, Daniel M. Klerman, Lisa Klerman

University of Southern California Legal Studies Working Paper Series

This article provides a rare glimpse into the worlds of mediation and settlement negotiation. Because they are almost always private, there has been almost no empirical analysis of the dynamics of settlement or mediation. This article analyzes a unique data set derived from a mediator’s contemporaneous notes of more than four hundred mediations. Nearly all the cases involved employment disputes, such as claims of discrimination or wrongful termination. Among the most interesting facts uncovered by this analysis are the following. Mediation can be extremely effective in facilitating settlement. The mediator studied here achieved a settlement rate of over 94 ...

El Juez Del Nuevo Derecho Procesal Laboral, Ramiro De Valdivia Cano

Ramiro De Valdivia Cano

EL JUEZ DEL NUEVO DERECHO PROCESAL LABORAL

Pension De-Risking, Paul M. Secunda, Brendan S. Maher

Paul M. Secunda

The United States is facing a retirement crisis, in significant part because defined benefit pension plans have been replaced by defined contribution retirement plans that, whatever their theoretical merit, have left significant numbers of workers unprepared for retirement. A troubling example of the continuing movement away from defined benefit plans is a new phenomenon euphemistically called “pension de-risking.”

Recent years have been marked by high-profile companies engaging in various actions designed to reduce the company’s exposure to pension funding risk (hence the term “pension de-risking”). Some de-risking strategies convert a federally-guaranteed pension into a more risky private annuity. Other ...

The Very Specialized United States Generalized System Of Preferences: An Examination Of Renewal Changes And Analysis Of Their Legal Effect, Gregory C. Dorris

Georgia Journal of International & Comparative Law

No abstract provided.

Land Ho! Two Words An Injured Longshore Or Harbor Worker Never Wants To Hear, Adam Hare

Catholic University Law Review

In 1927, the United States Congress passed the Longshoremen’s and Harbor Workers’ Compensation Act (LHWCA) to provide workers’ compensation coverage to maritime workers injured outside the purview of state workers’ compensation laws. Rigid judicial interpretation of the original Act, however, led to inequitable outcomes in the maritime industry. Workers neither on land nor on the water when injured could not claim workers’ compensation benefits under state or federal laws. The 1972 amendments to the LHWCA sought to cure this inequity. The amended Act included a situs requirement. This Comment analyzes the most important judicial interpretations of the situs requirement ...

Blue Skies For Black Lung Benefits Act Survivors? Courts' Interpretations Of § 932(L) Following The Enactment Of The Patient Protection And Affordable Care Act, Maureen Hughes

Catholic University Law Review

This Note summarizes the amendments made to the Black Lung Benefits Act (BLBA) following its passage in 1969 through the enactment of the 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA). The Note also addresses the split among the circuits over the meaning of the revised language in 30 U.S.C. § 932(l) (2012), and explains the reasoning of the Third, Fourth, Sixth, and Eleventh Circuits regarding the effect of the PPACA on BLBA benefit eligibility for miners’ dependent survivors. Further, this Note explains the significance of, and necessity in, resolving the confusion over § 932(l), and provides an ...

A Case For Canadian Pay Equity Reform, Sydney Kruth

Western Journal of Legal Studies

Pay equity must be separated from collective bargaining. An examination of the history of fair pay in unionized workplaces—and the current legal remedies available for pay discrimination—prove that the current strategies to remedy the significant gender pay gap are unsuccessful. Two significant issues hinder pay equity. Pay equity is still subject to collective bargaining in unionized workplaces. The Public Sector Equitable Compensation Act (PSECA) has undermined pay equity. The PSECA embodies the dangers of subjecting pay equity issues to collective bargaining. Canada is taking a regressive approach that disregards the importance of pay equity, despite the known benefits ...

Employing Disability: Deconstructing Insufficient Protections For "Non-Mainstream" Disabilities, Maia Abbas

Western Journal of Legal Studies

This paper surveys leading and recent case law on disability with a specific focus on “non-mainstream” disabilities. Such disabilities are categorized according to the difficulty with which they can be medically diagnosed, their transient nature, and their fluctuations in severity. Jurisprudence on the duty to accommodate has been developed through what law professor Judith Mosoff classifies as “mainstream” disabilities. That is, disabilities that are better understood by employers and medical professionals, and to which the duty to accommodate more easily applies. In contrast, “non-mainstream” disabilities challenge the conventional understanding of the duty to accommodate. Standard accommodation practices do not necessarily ...

Illusory Protection: The Fifth Circuit’S Misguided Interpretation Of Title Vii’S Anti-Retaliation Provision In Hernandez V. Yellow Transportation, Inc., William C. Matthews

Florida Law Review

After Burlington Northern & Santa Fe Railway Co. v. White resolved the issue of what constitutes an “adverse action” under the Title VII anti-retaliation statute, the scope of employer liability was substantially broadened. The Supreme Court’s decision reinforced the broad intent behind the anti-retaliation statute and acknowledged the statute’s remedial purpose. The Fifth Circuit, however, has been reluctant to expand employer liability as evidenced through its interpretation of the “adverse action” prong relating to coworker harassment. More specifically, the Fifth Circuit’s “In Furtherance” standard, which is used to judge whether an employer is liable for coworker harassment in ...

Fact Sheet #71: Shortchanging The Unpaid Academic Intern, Patricia L. Reid

Florida Law Review

On the eve of the Fair Labor Standards Act’s seventy-fifth anniversary, unpaid academic internships threaten to outpace government regulation and undermine opportunities for gainful employment. Although coveted by students eager to fill a line on their résumé, unpaid academic internships are a subspecies of unpaid internships that might soon face extinction. While the advent of unpaid internship litigation decreases the likelihood that employers will plead ignorance of the law when they defend against disgruntled unpaid interns, recent litigation does little to clear up a half-century of contradictory case law. The only certainty that surrounds the legal status of unpaid ...

Mutual Marginalization: Individuals With Disabilities And Workers With Caregiving Responsibilities, Nicole Buonocore Porter

Florida Law Review

This Article explores the marginalization of two groups of employees—individuals with disabilities and workers with caregiving responsibilities. One might argue that these two groups have little in common. However, while these groups are not perfectly aligned, they do have much in common in the workplace. First, these employees are unable to consistently meet their employers’ expectations of an “ideal worker.” Thus, they often must seek adjustments or modifications in the workplace to accommodate for their failure to conform to the ideal-worker norm. The need for accommodation causes both groups of employees to suffer from “special-treatment stigma,” which manifests itself ...

The Tort Label, Sandra F. Sperino

Florida Law Review

Courts and commentators often label federal discrimination statutes as torts. The tort label leads to reasoning that is superficial and not transparent about its motivations and goals. Courts do not engage in nuanced discussions about the kind of reasoning they are using or the values they are prioritizing in reaching the result. Importantly, the tort label gives the appearance that the courts are engaging in a form of traditional analysis that is noncontroversial. This Article argues that multiple claims courts make about the employment discrimination statutes related to the tort label are so baseless that they do not even reach ...

The Forgotten Role Of Consent In Defamation And Employment Reference Cases, Alex B. Long

Florida Law Review

As has been well documented, the fear of defamation suits and related claims lead many employers to refuse to provide meaningful employment references. However, an employer who provides a negative reference concerning an employee enjoys a privilege in an ensuing defamation action if the employee has consented to the release of information concerning the employee’s job performance. Thus, many attorneys now advise prospective employers to have applicants sign consent agreements, permitting the prospective employer to conduct an investigation into the applicant’s work history and releasing from liability anyone who provides information about the employee’s work history. The ...

Just Cause Discipline For Social Networking In The New Gilded Age: Will The Law Look The Other Way?, William A. Herbert, Alicia Mcnally

William A. Herbert

We live and work in an era with the moniker of the New Gilded Age to describe the growth in societal income inequality. The designation is not limited to evidence of the growing gap in wealth distribution, but also the sharp rise in employment without security, including contingent and part-time work. This article examines the state of workplace procedural protections against discipline as they relate to employee use of social media in the New Gilded Age. In our times, reactions to the rapid distribution of troublesome electronic communications through social networking tend to eclipse patience for enforceable workplace procedures. The ...

The Issue Class, Joseph A. Seiner

Boston College Law Review

In 2011, in Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. v. Dukes, the Supreme Court refused to certify a proposed class of one and a half million female workers who had alleged that the nation’s largest private employer had discriminated against them on the basis of their sex. The academic response to the case has been highly critical of the Court’s decision. This Article does not weigh in on the debate of whether the Court missed the mark. Instead, this Article addresses a more fundamental question that has gone completely unexplored: what is the best tool currently available for workers to pursue ...

English Labor Law - The 1984 Trade Union Immunities Act And Its Effect On Unions' Legal Status, Bret J. Pangborn

Georgia Journal of International & Comparative Law

No abstract provided.

The Worker Dislocation Dilemma In The United States And Great Britain: Contrasting Legal Approaches, Peter E. Millspaugh

Georgia Journal of International & Comparative Law

No abstract provided.