Labor and Employment Law Commons^™

Discounting Credibility: Doubting The Stories Of Women Survivors Of Sexual Harassment, Deborah Epstein

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

For decades, federal and state laws have prohibited sexual harassment on the job; despite this fact, extraordinarily high rates of gender-based workplace harassment still permeate virtually every sector of the American workforce. Public awareness of the seriousness and scope of the problem increased astronomically in the wake of the #MeToo movement, as women began to publicly share countless stories of harassment and abuse. In 2015, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s Task Force on the Study of Harassment in the Workplace published an important study analyzing a wide range of factors contributing to this phenomenon. But the study devotes only limited …

When The Going Gets Weird, The Weird Turn Pro*: Management Best Practices In The Age Of Medicinal Marijuana, John I. Winn Jd, Llm

Roger Williams University Law Review

No abstract provided.

Mello V. Killeavy, 205 A.3d 454 (R.I. 2019), Kaitlyn Alger

Roger Williams University Law Review

No abstract provided.

Rhode Island American Federation Of Teachers/Retired Local 8037 V. Johnston School Committee, 212 A.3d 156 (R.I. 2019), Rachel Ricci

Roger Williams University Law Review

No abstract provided.

Disgorging Harvey Weinstein's Salary, Jessica K. Fink

Faculty Scholarship

Harvey Weinstein dramatically altered the way that people view sexual harassment in the workplace. While workplace sexual harassment is far from a new phenomenon – with many perpetrators of such harassment (including Weinstein himself) having gotten away with this misbehavior for decades – the exposure of Weinstein’s misdeeds opened the floodgates, leading countless women from a variety of work environments to share their own experiences with sexual harassment at work. As the #MeToo movement has continued to occupy the headlines, workplace harassment has begun to seem as ubiquitous as it is distressing.

This intensified spotlight on sexual harassment has exposed …

Payday, Yonathan A. Arbel

Articles

Legislation lags behind technology all too often. While trillions of dollars are exchanged in online transactions-safely, cheaply, and instantaneously-workers still must wait two weeks to a month to receive payments from their employers. In the modern economy, workers are effectively lending money to their employers, as they wait for earned wages to be paid.

The same worker who taps a credit card to pay for groceries in semiautomated checkout lines depends on dated payroll systems that only transfer payments on a "payday." Workers, especially those living paycheck-to-paycheck, are hard-pressed to meet their daily needs and turn to expensive, short-term credit …

Narrowly Tailoring The Covid-19 Response, Craig Konnoth

Publications

No abstract provided.

Discrimination, The Speech That Enables It, And The First Amendment, Helen Norton

Publications

Imagine that you’re interviewing for your dream job, only to be asked by the hiring committee whether you’re pregnant. Or HIV positive. Or Muslim. Does the First Amendment protect your interviewers’ inquiries from government regulation? This Article explores that question.

Antidiscrimination laws forbid employers, housing providers, insurers, lenders, and other gatekeepers from relying on certain characteristics in their decision-making. Many of these laws also regulate those actors’ speech by prohibiting them from inquiring about applicants’ protected class characteristics; these provisions seek to stop illegal discrimination before it occurs by preventing gatekeepers from eliciting information that would enable them to discriminate. …

Why Protect Unauthorized Workers? Imperfect Proxies, Unaccountable Employers, And Antidiscrimination Law's Failures, Angela D. Morrison

Faculty Scholarship

This article explores a gap in the scholarship regarding the unauthorized workplace. It describes and names the two main justifications on which advocates and courts have relied to extend federal antidiscrimination protections to unauthorized workers. First, the proxy justification insists that workplace protections must include unauthorized workers because their protection is necessary to protect U.S. citizen and authorized workers. Second, the deterrence/accountability justification states that workplace protections must include unauthorized workers because it will deter employers from future violations of antidiscrimination laws and hold them accountable for violations of immigration law. While these justifications have led to some protection for …

Into The Weeds Of The Newest Field In Employment Law: The Oklahoma Medical Marijuana Act, Brennan T. Barger

Oklahoma Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Disability Dilemma: Difficulties Involving Erisa Claims For Subjective-Proof Diseases, Courtney D. Keeling

Oklahoma Law Review

No abstract provided.

Just A Minute, Isn’T That De Minimis: California Should Not Burden Or Require National Employers To Compensate Employees For De Minimis Off-The-Clock Work Activities, Alan Persaud

FIU Law Review

No abstract provided.

“I Do Not Feel I Am A Piece Of Property To Be Bought And Sold Irrespective Of My Wishes:” Athlete Activism And The Sociocultural Impact Of Curt Flood’S Lawsuit Against Major League Baseball, Luka Green

Pomona Senior Theses

In January 1970, St. Louis Cardinals outfielder Curt Flood filed a suit against MLB Commissioner Bowie Kuhn, protesting the Reserve Clause in Major League Baseball that did not allow players the right to negotiate contract terms with any team but their current one. In doing so, he cemented his status as a divisive figure in baseball, the media, and with the general public. One of the primary reasons for such an extreme reaction was Flood’s rhetoric surrounding the case, as he repeatedly invoked slavery and other forms of peonage when describing the working conditions of professional baseball players. This sparked …

The New Principle-Practice Gap: The Disconnect Between Diversity Beliefs And Actions In The Workplace, Jamillah Bowman Williams, Jonathan Cox

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Following increased calls for racial justice, many organizations have pledged to play their part in dismantling systemic racism. One common step leaders take is to invest in diversity and inclusion programs. Yet, despite organizations’ bold claims to value diversity and the investment of billions of dollars on related efforts, workplace discrimination continues to be a major factor in the lives of people of color. Additionally, existing research highlights a principle-policy gap, wherein people--particularly White Americans--espouse support for the principles of diversity, yet their support wanes for policies that address inequalities. In this survey study, we explore attitudes about organizational diversity …

Freedom To Strike? What Freedom To Strike? Back-To-Work Legislation And The Freedom To Strike In Historical And Legal Perspective, Eric Tucker

Articles & Book Chapters

Defenders of labour rights rightly criticize the enactment of back-to-work (BTW) legislation ending otherwise lawful strikes as egregious interference with the freedom to strike, a freedom that in 2015 the Supreme Court of Canada (SCC) held is constitutionally protected. Yet, often overlooked in discussions of the freedom to strike and the propensity of neoliberal governments to limit that freedom through exceptional measures is the baseline of restrictions built into the DNA of Canada’s version of the Wagner Act Model (WAM) of collective bargaining. The first goal of this essay, therefore, is to locate BTW measures in the longer history and …

Broader-Based And Sectoral Bargaining Proposals In Collective Bargaining Law Reform: A Historical Review, Sara Slinn

All Papers

Labour legislation regulating Canada’s private sector has incorporated forms of broader-based or sectoral certification and bargaining (BBB) in varying degrees for decades, particularly in British Columbia and Quebec. However, BBB had not been the subject of significant post-war labour law reform discussion until the 1990s. This decade saw a wave of interest in introducing BBB arise across several jurisdictions. Originating in Ontario in the late 1980s, it spread to British Columbia as a key part of labour law reform discussions in the early and late 1990s and became a minor issue in the federal labour law reform review process later …

Gig Workers As Essential Workers: How To Correct The Gig Economy Beyond The Covid-19 Pandemic, Miriam A. Cherry, Ana Santos Rutschman

Faculty Publications

(Excerpt)

During the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, estimates suggest that approximately forty percent of U.S. workers shifted to working remotely from home. But for many gig workers, who performed grocery shopping for Instacart, delivered food and restaurant meals for DoorDash, or who picked up and delivered packages for Shipt, they were working in person and busier than ever. In fact, many of these gig jobs were considered "essential work," and the rules of state lockdowns across the country classified gig workers as "essential workers."

Paid by the task, and managed by algorithms that can automatically deactivate …

A Global System Of Work, A Global System Of Regulation?: Crowdwork And Conflicts Of Law, Miriam A. Cherry

Faculty Publications

(Excerpt)

The on-demand economy has truly gone global. Consider online platform TaskRabbit, a U.S.-based site for odd jobs. A high number of TaskRabbit’s users were seeking help with the construction of furniture they purchased at IKEA, and skilled carpenters started using the platform to find customers. Corporate management at Swedish company IKEA noticed the trend, and as a result acquired TaskRabbit in 2017. As a result, a Swedish company now owns a platform labor service in the United States and Britain, with plans to expand the TaskRabbit platform to twenty-seven more countries where IKEA currently owns brick and mortar stores. …

Arbitration Of Worker Contracts: New Prime's Proper Statutory Interpretation Of The 1925 Federal Arbitration Act, Margaret L. Moses

Cardozo Journal of Conflict Resolution

This article will discuss how, in a future case, if the Court applied the reasoning of its unanimous opinion in New Prime-that the language of the statute should be interpreted consistent with the meaning it had to the Congress that adopted it-no worker would be covered by the FAA. Part I will consider the scope of the Commerce Clause, and the expansion in the Court's understanding of Congress' power under the Clause that occurred post-1925. In Part II, the article will deal with the purpose of the FAA as understood at the time of its adoption, as well as …

Should Employers Have The Ability To Enforce Non-Compete Agreements Without Also Offering A Written Employment Contract?, Rowan Reid

Kentucky Law Journal

No abstract provided.