Labor and Employment Law Commons^™

Construction Partnering: Can These Protocols Build A Stronger Labor-Management Community?, Jim Stott, Juan Carlos Gonzalez

Pepperdine Dispute Resolution Law Journal

In an expansive marketplace where large organizations in the construction, manufacturing, service and union industries are facing increased global competition, collaborative labor relations are essential to maximizing efficiency and productivity. It is for this reason that developing collaboration between labor and management is highly researched and consulted by academics and professionals throughout the world. Although various models of collaboration have been developed, none have been found to clearly overcome that insidious conflict and paradigm of "Labor vs. Management." The purpose of this paper is to provide academics and consultants (mediators/facilitators) an additional perspective for designing, developing and implementing the best …

Managing Workplace Grief--Vision And Necessity , Jan Jung-Min Sunoo, Brenda Paik Sunoo

Pepperdine Dispute Resolution Law Journal

In the course of offering workplace expertise, the FMCS has also presented its workshop "Managing Grief in the Workplace." The trainings have been given at local, regional, national and international labor relations and mediation conferences, and in college settings. We have found great receptivity to this cutting edge topic. Support in this area can greatly help unions and companies work through the conflicting expectations of a bereaved employee's job performance. Workshops in "Managing Grief in the Workplace" can initiate needed discussions and helping the partners to set up compassionate and realistic bereavement policies in the workplace. Finally, many participants expressed …

Essential Collaborative Technology Tools For The 21st Century: Fmcs Tags System , Michael J. Wolf, Jon Numair, Jack Yoedt

Pepperdine Dispute Resolution Law Journal

Mediators employed by the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service ("FMCS") utilize a powerful set of technology tools that helps groups more effectively solve problems, make decisions and implement those decisions more successfully. FMCS mediators use these tools to help customers conduct collective bargaining negotiations, strategic planning sessions, grievance meetings, internal elections, large conferences, as well as remote meetings and online surveys via the Internet. Known as the FMCS TAGS System, this network of Internet servers, mobile computers, electronic conferencing facilities, customized software and external partners has demonstrated significant achievements during its first two years of operation. FMCS customers report that …

Eliminating The Mandatory Trade-Off: Should Employees Have The Right To Choose Arbitration ?, Michael Peabody

Pepperdine Dispute Resolution Law Journal

As more employers include mandatory arbitration provisions in their employment contracts, policy-makers are becoming concerned that employees are being forced to trade their civil and statutory rights for their jobs. The California Legislature is considering legislation designed to combat this tendency and to provide legal protection for employees who might otherwise be forced to waive the right for redress of grievances, legal protections against discrimination, and other rights. Although the legislation was designed to protect the constitutional rights of employees, there are legal considerations and policy concerns that challenge the viability of this type of legislation. The primary question is …

Making It Work At Work: Mediation's Impact On Employee/Employer Relationships And Mediator Neutrality , Allison Balc

Pepperdine Dispute Resolution Law Journal

This Comment discusses the ADR process of mediation in the employment setting, specifically addressing its benefits and effects on the employer/employee relationship and the potential for a non-neutral mediator who is paid by, or has some previous tie to, one of the parties. Section IA examines judicial and legislative views of ADR and mediation. IB discusses mediation's effectiveness in the workplace. Section II discusses the mediation process in an employment dispute. Section III discusses the effects of mediation on the employer and employee, empirical studies, the neutrality of mediators, and potential remedies. Section IV discusses neutrality in the mediation process. …

Sarbanes-Oxley's Whistleblower Provisions: Ten Years Later, Richard Moberly

Nebraska College of Law: Faculty Publications

Whistleblower advocates and academics greeted the enactment of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act's whistleblower provisions in 2002 with great acclaim. The Act appeared to provide the strongest encouragement and broadest protections then available for private-sector whistleblowers. It influenced whistleblower law by unleashing a decade of expansive legal protection and formal encouragement for whistleblowers, perhaps indicating societal acceptance of whistleblowers as part of a broader law enforcement strategy. Despite these successes, however, Sarbanes-Oxley's greatest lesson derives from its two most prominent failings. First, over the last decade, the Act did not sufficiently protect whistleblowers who suffered retaliation. Second, despite the massive increase in …

Two Parts Of The Landscape Of Family In America: Maintaining Both Spousal And Domestic Partner Employee Benefits For Both Same-Sex And Different-Sex Couples, Nancy Polikoff

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

No abstract provided.

Social Networking And The Employment Relationship: Is Your Boss Creeping Up On You?, Michael Keliher

LLM Theses

There are currently over 900 million Facebook users worldwide (and counting). With increased use of social networking comes new concerns for personal privacy and control of social networking information. More and more, Facebook activity trickles its way into offline contexts, perhaps none more so than the employment context. A new trend in the hiring process is social networking background checks, where some employers go so far as to request a candidate's Facebook password. Not only this, but the frequency of Facebook activity resulting in employment law disputes is increasing, and has even been found to constitute sufficient grounds for discipline …

Changing Workforce Demographics And The Future Of The Protected Class Approach, Nancy Levit

Faculty Works

The composition and identity characteristics of the American workforce are changing. The population in this country is rising, aging, and becoming much more racially and ethnically diverse. Appearance norms are shifting too. These changes have enormous implications for constitutional and employment discrimination law. In both equal protection and employment discrimination cases, recovery usually depends on membership in a constitutionally or statutorily protected category. Yet the statutory approach to anti-discrimination law has stagnated. Part of the difficulty of the protected class approach is that it is based on something of a paradox — the paradox of exceptionalism. Class-based protection requires individuals …

Tribal Rituals Of The Mdl: A Comment On Williams, Lee, And Borden, Repeat Players In Multidistrict Litigation, Myriam E. Gilles

Articles

No abstract provided.

Made In The U.S.A.: Corporate Responsibility And Collective Identity In The American Automotive Industry, Benjamin Levin

Scholarship@WashULaw

This Article seeks to challenge the corporate-constructed image of American business and American industry. By focusing on the automotive industry and particularly on the tenuous relationship between the rhetoric of automotive industry advertising and the realities of doctrinal corporate law, I hope to examine the ways that we as social actors, legal actors, and (perhaps above all) consumers understand what it means for a corporation or a corporation’s product to be American. In a global economy where labor, profits, and environmental effects are spread across national borders, what does it mean for a corporation to present the impression of national …

Decent Work, Older Workers, And Vulnerability In The Economic Recession: A Comparative Study Of Australia, The United Kingdom, And The United States, Susan Bisom-Rapp, Andrew Frazer, Malcolm Sargeant

Faculty Scholarship

In countries with aging populations, the global recession presents unique challenges for older workers, and compels an assessment of how they are faring. To this end, the International Labour Organization's concept of decent work provides a useful metric or yardstick. Decent work, a multifaceted conception, assists in revealing the interdependence of measures needed to secure human dignity across the course of working lives. With this in mind, in three English-speaking, common law countries (Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States), this Article considers several decent work principles applicable to older workers and provides evaluations in light of them. Relevant …

Respecting Working Mothers With Infant Children: The Need For Increased Federal Intervention To Develop, Protect, And Support A Breastfeeding Culture In The United States, Heather M. Kolinsky

Faculty Scholarship

The author argues that the benefits of breastfeeding are overwhelming and that more needs to be done to ensure that all women have a viable option to continue breastfeeding upon returning to work, particularly the working poor and minorities. Those least likely to breastfeed are more likely to be part of an at risk population in terms of health. Most significantly, the lack of a cohesive policy in the workplace has had a disparate impact on the most vulnerable populations of breastfeeding mothers and their children. The lack of federal protection and a patchwork of protection in the states have …

Walking The Legal Tightrope: Solutions For Achieving A Balanced Life In Law, Leslie L. Cooney

Faculty Scholarship

For over twenty years, issues surrounding women and their status in the legal profession have been documented, analyzed, and reported. The American Bar Association (ABA) Commission on Women in its 1988 study concluded that a thorough reexamination of attitudes and structures within the legal profession was needed to remedy the underrepresentation of women in the positions of power within the profession-law firm partnerships and judicial appointments. Nearly a decade later, the ABA Commission on Women found that little progress had been made in female representation and concluded the mere passage of time alone would not render sufficient corrections. Although the …

Walking The Legal Tightrope: Solutions For Achieving A Balanced Life In Law, Leslie Larkin Cooney

Faculty Scholarship

Leslie Cooney, Walking the Legal Tightrope: Solutions for Achieving a Balanced Life in Law, 47 San Diego Law Review 421 (2010). For over twenty years, issues surrounding women and their status in the legal profession have been documented, analyzed, and reported. The American Bar Association (ABA) Commission on Women in its 1988 study concluded that a thorough reexamination of attitudes and structures within the legal profession was needed to remedy the underrepresentation of women in the positions of power within the profession-law firm partnerships and judicial appointments. Nearly a decade later, the ABA Commission on Women found that little …

In Search Of The Reasonable Woman: Anti-Discrimination Rhetoric In The United States, Francis J. Mootz Iii

Scholarly Works

This article emerged from my participation in a Symposium addressing global perspectives on the topic, "Anti-Discrimination Discourse and Practices," sponsored by The Jean Monnet Chair of European Law at Cagliari University, Sardinia. The article examines the rhetorical development of the "reasonable woman" standard of hostile work environment sexual harassment under Title VII. I argue that the rhetorical framing of the standard has unnecessarily limited its impact, perhaps to the point of undermining its potential to radically revise our understanding of gender discrimination. I suggest how the rhetorical power of the standard might be recovered.

Precarious Pathways: Evaluating The Provincial Nominee Programs In Canada, Jamie Baxter

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

Temporary foreign workers in Canada experience substandard employment relationships, are explicitly denied many formal rights and are practically excluded from most employment protections. Led by a growing emphasis on workers’ temporary status as a root cause of their employment-related vulnerabilities, some advocates, as well as elected officials, are now calling on governments to improve opportunities for workers to attain permanent residency in Canada, primarily for those in lower-skilled occupations. The central aim of this paper is to evaluate whether Provincial Nominee Programs are likely to address the real insecurities faced by vulnerable lower-skilled temporary foreign workers. Given that there are …

What's Left Of Solidarity? Reflections On Law, Race, And Labor History, Martha R. Mahoney

Buffalo Law Review

No abstract provided.

Flexible Work Arrangements: Improving Job Quality And Workforce Stability For Low-Wage Workers And Their Employers, Jessica Glenn, Liz Watson

Published Reports

In 2009, workers and their families across the country felt the impact of serious economic downturn, with unemployment reaching a 26-year high. While recent news suggests things may be improving, we cannot forget that for many low-wage and hourly workers -- who now represent over a quarter of the U.S. workforce -- the recession only exacerbated their ongoing struggle to hold down quality jobs while caring for their families.

Low-wage workers face many of the same challenges that the rest of us face in reconciling our work, family and personal lives, but for many of these workers, it's simply a …

Changing Federal Statutory Proposals To Address Domestic Violence At Work: Creating A Societal Response By Making Businesses A Part Of The Solution, Marcy L. Karin

Journal Articles

Over five million acts of domestic violence are committed every year.1 The prevalence of these acts makes domestic violence “the leading cause of injury to women.”2 Detrimental wherever they occur, these acts are not limited to the privacy of one’s home. Instead, domestic violence regularly and repeatedly spills over to the “public” workplace.For example, Francescia La Rose’s former boyfriend called her supervisor and threatened to come to the office to kill La Rose if she was not fired. Her employer responded by warning La Rose to keep her personal problems out of the workplace. The next day, the ex-boyfriend walked …

Making Good On Good Intentions: The Critical Role Of Motivation In Reducing Implicit Workplace Discrimination, Katharine T. Bartlett

Faculty Scholarship

Discrimination in today’s workplace is largely implicit, making it ambiguous and often very difficult to prove. Employment discrimination scholars have proposed reforms of Title VII to make implicit discrimination easier to establish in court and to expand the kinds of situations to which liability attaches. The reform proposals reflect a broad consensus that strong legal norms are crucial to addressing the problem. Yet it is mistaken to assume that strengthening plaintiffs’ hands in implicit discrimination cases will necessarily achieve the long-term goal of reducing its occurrence. This Article brings together several strands of social science research showing that (1) implicit …

Human Dignity And American Employment Law, David C. Yamada

University of Richmond Law Review

No abstract provided.

Short Notes On Teaching About The Micro-Politics Of Class, With Examples From Torts And Employment Law Casebooks, Susan Carle, Michelle Lapointe

Buffalo Law Review

No abstract provided.

Michelle Obama: The "Darker Side" Of Presidential Spousal Involvement And Activism, Gregory S. Parks, Quinetta M. Roberson, Phd

Cornell Law Faculty Working Papers

Pundits and commentators have attempted to make sense of the role that race and gender have played in the 2008 presidential campaign. Whereas researchers are drawing on varying bodies of scholarship (legal, cognitive and social psychology, and political science) to illuminate the role that Senator Obama’s race and Senator Clinton’s gender has/had on their campaign, Michelle Obama has been left out of the discussion. As Senator Clinton once noted, elections are like hiring decisions. As such, new frontiers in employment discrimination law place Michelle Obama in context within the current presidential campaign. First, racism and sexism are both alive and …

Whistling While You Work: Expanding Whistleblower Laws To Include Non-Workplace-Related Retaliation After Burlington Northern V. White, Robert Johnson

University of Richmond Law Review

This comment will not attempt to harmonize the different standards or predict a future course of interpretation. Instead, it will address the existing disparity as an opportunity to amend whistleblower laws to provide meaningful protection against alltypes of retaliation, not just those that affect the whistleblower's terms or conditions ofemployment. With this broad goal as a basis, this comment will specifically advocate amending all federal whistleblower statutes' retaliation provisions to conform to Title VII's retaliation provision. This would eliminate the requirement that the retaliation affect the terms or conditions of employment and incorporate the public policy rationale outlined in Burlington …

Lawyers With Disabilities: L'Handicape C'Est Nous, Anita Bernstein

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Monetizing Diaspora: Liquid Sovereigns, Fertile Workers, And The Interest-Convergence Around Remittance, Jose M. Gabilondo

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Baby Ka-Boom! Coming Developments In Erisa Litigation Due To Social, Demographic, And Financial Pressures From The Baby Boom Generation, 41 J. Marshall L. Rev. 1037 (2008), Craig C. Martin, Matthew J. Renaud, Douglas A. Sondgeroth

UIC Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Future Of Social Security: Principles To Guide Reform, 41 J. Marshall L. Rev. 1061 (2008), Kathryn L. Moore

UIC Law Review

No abstract provided.

The New York City Corporation Counsel: The Best Legal Job In America, Michael A. Cardozo

NYLS Law Review

No abstract provided.