Labor and Employment Law Commons^™

Workplace Justice Without Unions, Hoyt N. Wheeler, Brian S. Klaas, Douglas M. Mahony

Upjohn Press

Wheeler, Klaas, and Mahony provide a thorough analysis of organizational justice systems by exploring nonunion systems of workplace justice and comparing them with the union system, American courts, and systems in 11 other countries.

Whistling In The Dark? Corporate Fraud, Whistleblowers, And The Implications Of The Sarbanes-Oxley Act For Employment Law, Miriam A. Cherry

Faculty Publications

Passed in 2002 in the wake of the accounting scandals that resulted in billions of dollars of lost value to shareholders, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act has as its major goal the prevention of corporate corruption. This Article analyzes the impact of section 806, the portion of the Sarbanes-Oxlcy Act that provides protections for employees who report securities fraud, and describes the effect that Sarbanes-Oxley has on existing employment law. In addition, this Article contributes to the debate over the general effectiveness of the .Sarbanes-Oxley Act, a topic of contention among both academics and press commentators. This Article argues that the Act …

The Voyage Of The Neptune Jade: The Perils And Promises Of Transnational Labor Solidarity, James B. Atleson

Journal Articles

No abstract provided.

The First Amendment And Public Sector Labor Relations, William A. Herbert

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Arbitration And Litigation Of Employment Claims: An Empirical Comparison, Theodore Eisenberg, Elizabeth Hill

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

The authors conducted empirical research comparing court case and arbitrated outcomes for employment disputes. In cases not involving civil rights claims, they found little evidence that arbitrated outcomes materially differed from trial outcomes where the claimant was a higher-paid employee. Moreover, they found no statistically significant differences between employee win rates or in the median or mean awards in arbitration and litigation. They also reported evidence indicating that arbitrated disputes conclude more quickly than litigated disputes.

Enforcing International Labor Standards: The Potential Of The Alien Tort Claims Act, Marisa A. Pagnattaro

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

Professor Pagnattaro argues that courts should allow claims under the Alien Tort Claims Act (ATCA) to enforce international labor rights for alien workers. She begins by reviewing the history of the ATCA and the developing jurisprudence in the international labor context, including recent and pending cases involving employee ATCA claims against U.S. multinational corporations. After outlining what is necessary to assert an ATCA claim, including what is required to satisfy jurisdictional requirements, to state a claim under the law of nations, and to hold employers liable for violations of the law of nations, she details international foundations which can be …

Labor Standards On Cypriot Ships: Myth And Reality, Iliana Christodoulou-Varotsi, Dmitri A. Pentsov

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

This Article offers a comprehensive comparative analysis of labor and social security standards on Cypriot and Greek ships. Potential cost savings for shipowners who register their ships in one country rather than the other may result from the absence of a given standard in the country of registration, or a lower or more flexible standard in that country than in the other. The authors conclude that the registration of ships in Cyprus does not provide overall advantages (in terms of "inferior" labor standards) over registration in Greece. Broadly speaking, shipowners may gain certain advantages by registering their ships in Cyprus …

Out With The Old And In With The New: The Second Circuit Shows It's Time For The Supreme Court To Finally Overrule Mcdonnell Douglas, Kerry S. Acocella

Cardozo Journal of Equal Rights & Social Justice

The note argues that the Desert Palace, Inc. v. Costa case represents a significant shift in employment discrimination law under Title VII, as it simplifies the process for plaintiffs to prove discrimination by allowing the use of circumstantial evidence in mixed-motive claims. The decision aligns with the 1991 Civil Rights Act and highlights the need to reassess the stricter standards of the McDonnell Douglas framework, which the author critiques as overly burdensome. The analysis also examines the implications of this shift through the lens of the Sanders v. NYC HRA case, advocating for the explicit overruling of McDonnell Douglas in …

The Potential For State Labor Law: The New York Greengrocer Code Of Conduct, Matthew T. Bodie

All Faculty Scholarship

While labor law academics bemoan the ossification of federal labor law, the potential for state labor law has just begun to be explored. This Article takes a closer look at the New York Greengrocer Code of Conduct, a unique approach to the problem of industry-wide employment law violations. The Code, negotiated by the New York Attorney General's Office in conjunction with groups representing workers and greengrocers, provides a set of minimum terms and conditions for grocers which to some extent go beyond statutory requirements. In return for agreeing to the Code, grocers can avoid liability for past state employment law …

When James Bond Enters The Workplace: Uses And Abuses Of Technology, William A. Herbert

Publications and Research

This paper, co-authored by H. David Kelly, was presented at the 2004 Annual Meeting of the American Bar Association. It analyzes the state of the law at the time in the public and private sectors regarding employers' use of intrusive technologies to monitor and control their workforce.

Worker Ownership In Enron's Wake - Revisiting A Community Development Tactic, Peter R. Pitegoff

Faculty Publications

Worker ownership of business enterprise has long been touted as a vehicle for community economic development. Employee stock ownership plans in leveraged buy-outs, ESOPs and broad-based stock options in going concerns, and worker cooperatives in selected sectors - the experience has varied widely in goals, method, and outcome.

This Article reflects on the continued utility of worker ownership as a component of community development and calls attention to contrasts with conventional corporate governance and goals. Rather than an end in itself or just another way of doing business, worker ownership can be a vital element of a broader job creation, …

The "Inexorable Zero", Bert I. Huang

Faculty Scholarship

[F]ine tuning of the statistics could not have obscured the glaring absence of minority [long-distance] drivers .... [T]he company's inability to rebut the inference of discrimination came not from a misuse of statistics but from "the inexorable zero."

The Supreme Court first uttered the phrase "inexorable zero" a quarter-century ago in International Brotherhood of Teamsters v. United States, a landmark Title VII case. Ever since, this enigmatic name for a rule of inference has echoed across legal argument about segregation, discrimination, and affirmative action. Justice O'Connor, for instance, cited the "inexorable zero" in a major sex discrimination decision upholding an …

Book Review Of Gender On Trial: Sexual Stereotypes And Work/Life Balance In The Legal Workplace, Nicole Buonocore Porter

Faculty Publications

Holly English's book, Gender on Trial: Sexual Stereotypes and Work/Life Balance in the Legal Workplace, offers a very interesting, albeit mostly anecdotal, look at the many real or perceived sexual stereotypes in the legal workplace. Her book is the result of interviews with 180 lawyers (fifty of them men) over a two-year period in all regions of the country. Her main purpose of the book was to "explore the fact that persistent gender stereotypes present a continuing obstacle that obstructs the availability of broad opinions and choices for men and women lawyers." Through eight substantive chapters, she seeks to explore …

Workplace Mediation: The First-Phase, Private Caucus In Individual Discrimination Disputes, Emily M. Calhoun

Publications

No abstract provided.

Women Choosing Diverse Workplaces: A Rational Preference With Disturbing Implications For Both Occupational Segregation And Economic Analysis Of Law, Scott A. Moss

Publications

Despite women's dramatic labor market gains, there remains a striking degree of occupational segregation by gender. Analysts typically blame discrimination or women's work/family priorities. This Article offers a different explanation.

It is hard for women choosing jobs or occupations to know where they will face discrimination, particularly since recent judicial decisions eliminated certain employer signals that once differentiated fair and discriminatory firms. One way women can effectuate a preference for nondiscriminatory workplaces is by choosing gender-diverse workplaces. Nondiverse workplaces often are not female-friendly, and discrimination may be the reason they are nondiverse. In economic terms, women rationally use level of …

A Different Kind Of Labor Law: Vagrancy Law And The Regulation Of Harvest Labor, 1913-1924, Ahmed A. White

Publications

No abstract provided.

Mutiny, Shipboard Strikes, And The Supreme Court's Subversion Of New Deal Labor Law, Ahmed A. White

Publications

No abstract provided.

Same Struggle, Different Difference: Ada Accommodations As Antidiscrimination, Michael Ashley Stein

Faculty Publications

The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) was heralded as an "emancipation proclamation" for people with disabilities, one that would achieve their equality primarily through its reasonable accommodation requirements. Nevertheless, both legal commentators and Supreme Court Justices assert that the ADA's employment mandates distinguish the ADA from earlier antidiscrimination measures, most notably Title VII, because providing accommodations results in something more than equality for the disabled. The Article challenges this prevalent belief by arguing that ADA-mandated accommodations are consistent with other antidiscrimination measures in that each remedies exclusion from employment opportunity by questioning the inherency of established workplace norms, and by …

Review Of Jennifer Klein, For All These Rights: Business, Labor And The Shaping Of America’S Public-Private Welfare State, Frank W. Munger

Other Publications

No abstract provided.

How American Workers Lost The Right To Strike, And Other Tales, James Gray Pope

Michigan Law Review

To paraphrase a veteran labor scholar, if you want to know where the corpses are buried in labor law, look for the "of course" statements in court opinions. By "of course" statements, he meant propositions that are announced as if they were self-evident, requiring no justification. Each year, thousands of law students read such statements in labor law casebooks. And each year, they duly ask themselves - prodded sometimes by the casebook's notes - how these conclusions could be justified in legal terms. But often there seems to be no answer, and the mystery continues. This Essay recounts the origins …

Transnational Labor Mobilizing In Two Mexican Maquiladoras: The Struggle For Democratic Globalization, Victoria Carty

Sociology Faculty Articles and Research

The struggle to improve workers' rights in Mexican maquiladoras and export processing zones elsewhere in the world is central to the politics of global economic integration. State-centered development is increasingly compromised by supranational institutions and trade agreements. Meanwhile, multinational corporations are relocating at an unprecedented rate to overseas locations. Export processing zones are notorious for poor working conditions and result in a "race to the bottom." The maquila sector in Mexico is a prime example of this phenomenon. This article uses two case studies to examine ways in which grassroots organizing has successfully resisted low wages and poor working conditions …

The Muddles Over Outsourcing, Jagdish N. Bhagwati, Arvind Panagariya, T.N. Srinivasan

Faculty Scholarship

In the early 1980s, “outsourcing” typically referred to the situation when firms expanded their purchases of manufactured physical inputs, like car companies that purchased window cranks and seat fabrics from outside the firm rather than making them inside. But in 2004, outsourcing took on a different meaning. It referred now to a specific segment of the growing international trade in services. This segment consists of arm’s-length, or what Bhagwati (1984) called “long-distance,” purchase of services abroad, principally, but not necessarily, via electronic mediums such as the telephone, fax and the Internet. Outsourcing can happen both though transactions by firms, like …

The Battle Over Citation Form Brings Notice To Lrw Faculty: Will Power Follow?, Julie M. Cheslik

Faculty Works

No abstract provided.

Global Economic Forces And Individual Labor Rights: An Uneasy Coexistence, Alice De Jonge

Human Rights & Human Welfare

A review of:

Workers’ Rights as Human Rights edited by James A. Gross. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003. 272pp.

and

International Labor Standards: Globalization, Trade, and Public Policy edited by Robert J. Flanagan and William B. Gould IV. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2003. 275pp.

Human Rights, Health, And Corporations, Gerald Montgomery

Human Rights & Human Welfare

Unfettered economic policies have had a notable effect on the state of human rights. With the increasing spread of transnational corporations (TNCs), non-governmental organizations (NGOs) play a major role in setting ethical and moral standards for with the quality of life in the developing states where TNCs do business. Many TNCs are trying frantically to implement strategies that would alleviate labor injustices and corrupt practices in order to meet the standards argued for by NGOs.

Summary Of State Ex Rel. Dep’T Of Transp. V. Pub. Employees’ Retirement Sys., 120 Nev. Adv. Rep. 4, Justen Ericksen

Nevada Supreme Court Summaries

Appeal from a district court order granting a petition for writ of mandamus in favor Public Employees’ Retirement System of Nevada (PERS) directing state agency to pay PERS for back employee and employer contributions to the retirement system plus interest on behalf of five archeologists whom the agency treated as independent contractors rather than employees.

Labor And Employment Law In Two Transitional Decades, Theodore J. St. Antoine

Articles

Labor law became labor and employment law during the past several decades. The connotation of "labor law" is the regulation of union-management relations and that was the focus from the 1930s through the 1950s. In turn, voluntary collective bargaining was supposed to be the method best suited for setting the terms and conditions of employment for the nation's work force. Since the 1960s, however, the trend has been toward more governmental intervention to ensure nondiscrimination, safety and health, pensions and other fringe benefits, and so on. "Employment law" is now the term for the direct federal or state regulation of …

Is The Work-Family Conflict Pathological Or Normal Under The Fmla? The Potential Of The Fmla To Cover Ordinary Work-Family Conflicts, Katharine B. Silbaugh

Faculty Scholarship

The Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) provides relief to workers, helping them in their struggle to meet the sometimes competing demands of work and family. There have been numerous attempts to expand legislation to cover more occasions where work and family obligations are in tension. This Essay will address one way that the courts may be expanding the Act’s application. It will investigate whether this modest interpretive expansion can be explained partially by society’s deeper understanding of the challenges of work-family balance over the ten years since the FMLA’s passage. Have we changed our general understanding of conflicts between …

The Changing World Of Employee Benefits, Maria O'Brien

Faculty Scholarship

When I graduated from law school in 1985, there were no courses offered in employee benefits law. Nor, as near as I can recall, was ERISA ever discussed in any of the labor and employment classes I took. There was no mention in the introductory labor law course or in other classes about employment discrimination, union organizing, and employment arbitration. Now, in contrast, many law schools include a course on employee benefits and ERISA, and students hoping to work in the labor and employment area frequently find that ERISA work is plentiful, and traditional NLRA work is not. This, of …

Affirmative Action In The Workplace: The Signficance Of Grutter?, Rebecca H. White

Scholarly Works

The Supreme Court's decision last term in Grutter v. Bollinger answered important questions about the affirmative use of race in the educational context. I have been asked by the editors of the Kentucky Law Journal to explore the impact the decision is like to have on affirmative action in a different context--employment. Simply put, to what extent does Grutter affect a public or private employer's ability to voluntarily adopt an affirmative action plan in order to diversify its workplace? The short answer, of course, is that the Grutter decision does not directly apply to the affirmative use of race or …