Labor and Employment Law Commons^™

Assessing Internal Revenue Code Section 132 After Twenty Years, Wayne M. Gazur

Publications

In 1984, Congress enacted Internal Revenue Code section 132 to bring more certainty to the taxation of employee fringe benefits. This article examines the impact of the legislation from the standpoint of administrative pronouncements and taxpayer litigation. The article concludes that section 132 has produced little litigation, but primarily because it has played the role of increasing exclusions. It remains unclear whether section 132 has also contained the growth of new forms of nonstatutory fringe benefits.

Victimizing The Abused?: Is Termination The Solution When Domestic Violence Comes To Work?, Nicole Buonocore Porter

Faculty Publications

Domestic violence occurs in the workplace more frequently than one might presume. Workplace violence is the number one cause of death for women in the workplace in part because of domestic violence spillover, where an abuser harms his victim as well as any co-workers who try to intervene.

The conflict between domestic violence and the workplace is often exposed in its rawest state when a victim of domestic violence is considered to be a threat to the workplace by her employer.

The initial reaction of most people when hearing of [a] hypothetical [in which an employer fires a domestic violence …

Deconstructing The Maternal Wall: Strategies For Vindicating The Civil Rights Of "Carers" In The Workplace, Joan C. Williams, Elisabeth S. Westfall

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Judicial Rewriting Of The Indian Employment Preferences--A Case Comment: E.E.O.C. V. Peabody Western Coal Company, 400 F.3d 774 (9th Cir. 2005), Brendan O'Dell

American Indian Law Review

No abstract provided.

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 …

The Architecture Of Inclusion: Advancing Workplace Equity In Higher Education, Susan Sturm

Faculty Scholarship

The path to workplace'equality has become a difficult one to navigate. No one can safely rely upon the strategies developed in the 1960s and 1970s to integrate workplaces. Employers face legal and political challenges both for failing to diversify their workplaces and for diversity efforts to overcome that failure. Civil rights and women's rights advocates battle to hold on to the litigation victories of the past, even as they acknowledge judicial remedies' shrinking availability and limited efficacy in addressing many aspects of current-day equality. Anti-discrimination regulators contend with inadequate resources to carry out their traditional enforcement activities, as well as …

Are Workers Rights Human Rights And Would It Matter If They Were?, Richard Mcintyre

Human Rights & Human Welfare

A review of:

Slaves to Fashion: Poverty and Abuse in the New Sweatshops by J.S. Ross. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004. 396pp.

and

Can Labor Standards Improve Under Globalization? by Kimberly Ann Elliott and Richard B. Freeman. Washington: Institute for International Economics, 2003. 175pp.

That Pernicious Pop-Up, The Prima Facie Case, Michael Hayes

All Faculty Scholarship

This article first explains the role the prima facie case has played in discrimination cases, from its creation in McDonnell Douglas through the Supreme Court's decisions in Aikens and Reeves, up to the application of Reeves by lower courts in the past several years. Next, this article focuses on Reeve's identification of "strength of the prima facie case" as a factor to be considered on summary judgment, and discusses why it would be unwise and unworkable to interpret the words "prima facie case" in that factor as having the same meaning as the "prima facie case" proved in the first …

Speech Of Government Employees, Ann C. Hodges

Law Faculty Publications

For many years, government employment was considered a privilege rather than a right, and, as a result, the government could place restrictions on employee speech that would be unconstitutional if applied to citizens.

Let's Talk About Sex Baby: Lyle V. Warner Brothers Television Productions And The California Court Of Appeal's Creative Necessity Defense To Hostile Work Environment Sexual Harassment, Sarah Pahnke Reisert

American University Journal of Gender, Social Policy & the Law

No abstract provided.

The Regulation Of Labor And The Relevance Of Legal Origin, David E. Pozen

Faculty Scholarship

Arguably the most important social science research of the past decade has centered on comparative law and economics. In a celebrated series of articles, the economists Rafael La Porta, Florencio Lopez-de-Silanes, Andrei Shleifer, and intermittent collaborators have explored empirically how a country's legal origin – English common law, French civil law, Germanic code, Scandinavian law, or Soviet socialist law – affects its subsequent institutional and economic development. The common law emerges as the hero of this analysis: Compared with other countries and especially with civil law countries, common law bearers have, ceteris paribus, better legal protection of shareholders and …

Teaching Adr In The Labor Field In China, Theodore J. St. Antoine

Articles

My first visit to China, in 1994, was purely as a tourist, and came about almost by accident. In late September of that year I attended the XIV World Congress of the International Society for Labor Law and Social Security in Seoul, South Korea. In the second week of October I was scheduled to begin teaching a one-term course in American law as a visiting professor at Cambridge University in England. Despite my hazy notions of geography, I realized it made no sense to return to the United States for the intervening week. The obvious solution was to continue flying …

Employer Vicarious Liability For Voluntary Relationships Between Supervisors And Employees, Carrie E. Fischesser

Seattle University Law Review

It is somewhat radical to suggest that an employer should not be held vicariously liable for an employee's voluntary submission to sexual advances where the alleged harasser is a supervisor, and this approach is a marked departure from existing assumptions regarding sexual harassment. Most decisions and writings on the topic have imposed--under a traditional agency theory-- vicarious liability upon the employer for the sexually harassing conduct of its supervisors.4 Specifically, courts addressing this issue have held that “[t]here is no question that a ‘tangible employment action’ occurs when a supervisor abuses his authority to act on his employer's behalf by …

A Revised Tangible Employment Action Analysis: Just What Is An Undesirable Reassignment?, Christine Bradshaw

American University Journal of Gender, Social Policy & the Law

No abstract provided.

Mediation Ideology: Navigating Space From Myth To Reality In Sexual Harassment Dispute Resolution, Susan K. Hippensteele

American University Journal of Gender, Social Policy & the Law

No abstract provided.

Offshore Outsourcing And Worker Rights, Theodore J. St. Antoine

Articles

For the workers in the Rust Belt of the United States, concentrated in Southern New England, Western New York State, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, and Illinois, it doesn't make much difference whether their jobs are outsourced or lost to North Carolina or Mexico or China. In any event the sources of income that have existed for generations are gone and the economic and psychic pains are much the same. Nonetheless, for purposes of national policy it plainly matters whether the work is moving to another part of the country or is leaving the United States entirely. I am going to …

Grutter At Work: A Title Vii Critique Of Constitutional Affirmative Action, Jessica Bulman-Pozen

Faculty Scholarship

This Note argues that Title VII doctrine both illuminates internal contradictions of Grutter v. Bollinger and provides a framework for reading the opinion. Grutter's diversity rationale is a broad endorsement of integration that hinges on the quantitative concept of critical mass, but the opinion's narrow-tailoring discussion instead points to a model of racial difference that champions subjective decisionmaking and threatens to jettison numerical accountability. Title VII doctrine supports a reading of Grutter that privileges a view of diversity as integration and therefore cautions against the opinion's conception of narrow tailoring. Grutter, in turn, can productively inform employment discrimination law. The …

Of Offers Not (Frequently) Made And (Rarely) Accepted: The Mystery Of Federal Rule 68, Harold S. Lewis Jr., Thomas A. Eaton

Scholarly Works

This Symposium brings together, from around the nation, eight civil rights and employment discrimination lawyers, four legal academics, and an eminent federal judge, all with deep experience and interest in the promise and pitfalls of Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 68. We gather to unravel a mystery. In an oversimplified nutshell, Rule 68, as construed, enables the defendants to say to the plaintiffs in employment discrimination and civil rights cases: "If you don't beat my offer at trial, you forfeit your right to any future statutory attorney fees." Rule 68 would, therefore, appear to give the defendants a significant incentive …

Understanding Change In International Organizations: Globalization And Innovation In The Ilo, Laurence R. Helfer

Faculty Scholarship

This Article uses an interdisciplinary approach to explain why the International Labor Organization (ILO) has been given surprisingly short shrift in recent debates over the role of IOs in addressing the many transborder collective action problems that globalization has fostered. I review the ILO's past and its present with two broad objectives in mind. First, I seek to correct a misperception among international lawyers and legal scholars that the ILO is a weak and ineffective institution. The organization's effectiveness in creating and monitoring international labor standards has fluctuated widely during its nearly ninety-year existence. Over the last decade, however, the …

The Players Have Lost That Argument: Doping, Drug Testing, And Collective Bargaining, Paul H. Haagen

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Antidiscrimination Law In The Administrative State, Julie C. Suk

Articles

The article argues that antidiscrimination law in the U.S. should shift its focus from corrective justice, which addresses individual wrongs, to distributive justice, which aims to eradicate systemic inequalities and promote equal opportunities. This shift would require enhancing the role of administrative agencies, such as the EEOC, to enforce antidiscrimination laws more effectively through proactive regulation and rulemaking. The article draws on the British model, where administrative agencies have stronger enforcement powers, to suggest reforms for the EEOC.

On The Applicability Of The Silica Mdl Proceeding To Asbestos Litigation, Lester Brickman

Articles

The article argues that the findings from the silica multidistrict litigation (MDL), presided over by U.S. District Court Judge Janis Jack, have significant implications for understanding the fraudulent practices in asbestos litigation. The author contends that both silica and asbestos litigations share a common "entrepreneurial model" where a small group of doctors and screening companies generate specious claims for financial gain, often without proper medical oversight. Judge Jack's findings in the silica MDL, which revealed widespread fraud and manipulation of medical diagnoses, corroborate the author's long-standing critique of asbestos litigation practices.

Collective And Individual Approaches To Protecting Employee Privacy: The Experience With Workplace Drug Testing, Pauline Kim

Scholarship@WashULaw

This contribution to a symposium on workplace privacy asks what difference it makes to think about workers' rights under a collective as opposed to an individual rights model in a particular context: that of protecting employee privacy. More specifically, it undertakes an examination of the range of disputes between employers and employees over workplace drug testing in the late 1980's and the 1990's, focusing on the differences between cases brought with union involvement and those brought by individual workers acting alone. In doing so, it asks how collective forms of disputing about drug testing differed from individual approaches, and whether …

Keynote Address: Want Gender Equality? Die Childless At Thirty, Joan C. Williams

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Caregivers In The Courtroom: The Growing Trend Of Family Responsibilities Discrimination, Joan C. Williams, Stephanie Bornstein

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Family Responsibilities Discrimination: What Plaintiffs' Attorneys, Management Attorneys And Employees Need To Know, Joan C. Williams, Cynthia Thomas Calvert

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.