Labor and Employment Law Commons^™

Labor Strife And Peace, Desiree Leclercq

Scholarly Works

This Article examines a significant yet underexplored feature in the decline of worker power: The gradual erosion of protections under the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) for workplace protest by rank-and-file, nonunion workers. Rather than protect their protest as necessary to galvanize workplace solidarity and organizing, current labor doctrine offers employers various opportunities to fire them. Focusing on nonunion workers standing up to management, this Article offers three key insights into U.S. labor law. First, it draws on social movements to confirm strife’s vital but uneasy role in workplace solidarity. Second, it unearths the NLRA’s original intention to protect the …

Gender-Based Violence And Harassment At Sea, Desiree Leclercq

Scholarly Works

This Symposium contribution assesses the ability of international law to evolve to offer essential protections for workers in an increasingly globalized world. It focuses on protections for women seafarers, specifically around gender-based violence and harassment on board vessels. Even though it is the world’s oldest transnational sector, seafaring remains overwhelmingly male-dominated. Consequently, international law was not initially conceived with women seafarers in mind. Now that women have broken into the maritime profession, they count on international law to evolve in kind. Notwithstanding, they continue to face sexist, if not violent, workplaces, and report high incidents of gender-based violence and harassment …

The Legal Framework For The Protection Of Victims Of The Worst Forms Of Child Labour In Agriculture In Ghana: A Human Rights Based Approach, Ruby Akua Aglagoh

Theses: Doctorates and Masters

Child labour is prevalent in Ghana, especially in the agriculture industry where children engage in work that is harmful to their health, morals, and safety. Such harmful work has been defined by the ILO Convention No. 182 on the Worst Forms of Child Labour, 1999 as constituting the worst forms of child labour. These children have human rights stated in the laws of Ghana but have become victims of human rights violations because they cannot access the protections provided for under the international conventions and national laws of Ghana.

Using doctrinal legal research, this thesis reviews the legal framework of …

Limitations Of The “Four-Fifths Rule” And Statistical Parity Tests For Measuring Fairness, Pauline Kim, Manish Raghavan

Scholarship@WashULaw

To ensure the fairness of algorithmic decision systems, such as employment selection tools, computer scientists and practitioners often refer to the so-called “four-fifths rule” as a measure of a tool’s compliance with anti-discrimination law. This reliance is problematic because the “rule” is in fact not a legal rule for establishing discrimination, and it offers a crude test that will often be over- and under-inclusive in identifying practices that warrant further scrutiny. The “four-fifths rule” is one of a broader class of statistical tests, which we call Statistical Parity Tests (SPTs), that compare selection rates across demographic groups. While some SPTs …

Profit, Mission, And Protest At Work, Marion Crain

Scholarship@WashULaw

The classic understanding of capitalism maintains that the social responsibility of business is to increase its profits. But in the last decade, many firms have announced commitments to various social justice issues, folding them into corporate mission statements, codes of corporate social responsibility, and branding. Firms engaging in so-called “woke capitalism” signal their virtuous support for progressive social causes favored by both their consumer base and their idealistic young workers. This has become particularly important in a tight labor market: by targeting workers’ values, savvy firms increase recruiting yields, enhance productivity, and reduce training costs as retention rates rise, while …

Less Discriminatory Algorithms, Pauline Kim, Emily Black, John Logan Koepke, Solon Barocas, Mingwei Hsu

Scholarship@WashULaw

Entities that use algorithmic systems in traditional civil rights domains like housing, employment, and credit should have a duty to search for and implement less discriminatory algorithms (LDAs). Why? Work in computer science has established that, contrary to conventional wisdom, for a given prediction problem there are almost always multiple possible models with equivalent performance—a phenomenon termed model multiplicity. Critically for our purposes, different models of equivalent performance can produce different predictions for the same individual, and, in aggregate, exhibit different levels of impacts across demographic groups. As a result, when an algorithmic system displays a disparate impact, model multiplicity …

Redistributing Justice, Benjamin Levin, Kate Levine

Scholarship@WashULaw

This article surfaces an obstacle to decarceration hiding in plain sight: progressives’ continued support for the carceral system. Despite increasingly prevalent critiques of criminal law from progressives, there hardly is a consensus on the left in opposition to the carceral state. Many left-leaning academics and activists who may critique the criminal system writ large remain enthusiastic about criminal law in certain areas—often areas where defendants are imagined as powerful and victims as particularly vulnerable. In this article, we offer a novel theory for what animates the seemingly conflicted attitude among progressives toward criminal punishment—the hope that the criminal system can …