{"title":"O My Sons and Daughters, How Do I Immiserate Thee: Let Me Count the Ways","authors":"K. Casebeer","doi":"10.2139/SSRN.1879994","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/SSRN.1879994","url":null,"abstract":"This article argues that Neo-liberal policies of both action and inaction support the most virulent form of globalized Finance Capitalism. It outlines how such promotion is structured to reinforce fifteen patterns of economic consequences that reduce the standard of living of the great majority of American families, especially those headed by and including workers. These consequential patterns do not usually result from a single government action, but rather from reinforcements of specific decisions with one another. As a result political and economic elites from the United States become indifferent or worse to working family welfare, constituting an abandonment of Americans as individuals, sacrificed to the promotion and rehabilitation of the financial sector and wealth inequality. In turn, the fifteen consequential patterns cascade toward recurring depressions by stagnating real aggregate demand for production.","PeriodicalId":309648,"journal":{"name":"Hofstra Labor and Employment Law Journal","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2011-07-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121762858","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Waging War on 'Unemployables'? Race, Low-Wage Work, and Minimum Wages: The New Evidence","authors":"H. Hutchison","doi":"10.2139/SSRN.1866365","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/SSRN.1866365","url":null,"abstract":"Capturing both popular and academic imaginations, recent literature contributions contest the standard treatment of minimum wage statutes as vehicles that enlarge the economic and social dislocation of vulnerable workers. A persistent strain of the current scholarship dedicated to progressive labor ideology implies that minimum wages or, alternatively, living wage statutes are necessary to preclude the degradation of low-wage workers. The publication of Simon Deakin and Frank Wilkinson’s recent article, Minimum Wage Legislation, constitutes yet another effort to destabilize the neoclassical consensus that emphasizes the adverse employment effects of wage regulation. Prescinding from orthodox economic analysis, Deakin and Wilkinson insist that there is a good efficiency-based case for minimum wage legislation. If the authors are correct, and if efficiency standing alone supports their normative viewpoint, then the contention that such legislation ought to be seen as a societal good might become tenable. Unfortunately, their claims are highly doubtful. Perceived through the lenses of American labor history, classical liberalism, Critical Race Theory and neoclassical economics, the authors’ allegations signify the capitulation of reasoned analysis to ideology. Rather than supporting the interest of the public or of vulnerable workers, their starkly conventional and progressive approach to labor law reform recalls John Stuart Mill’s embrace of Social Darwinism and consequent exclusion of inferior classes of workers. The authors’ approach also verifies Mill’s observation that modern liberal democracy - operating consistently with the goals of exclusion - is insufficient to protect disfavored groups and individuals from the coercive power authorized by a majority or its hierarchs. Since Deakin and Wilkinson’s credulous claims are in harmony with more than a century of progressive policies, and since the normative and prudential case for raising or retaining the minimum wage remains weak, marginalized members of society have much to fear from their analysis.","PeriodicalId":309648,"journal":{"name":"Hofstra Labor and Employment Law Journal","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2011-06-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114743975","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Negotiating the People's Capital Revisited","authors":"S. Estreicher","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.1837437","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1837437","url":null,"abstract":"Editor's Note: What follows is the second part of an unofficial transcript of an off-the-record conversation among three of the labor movement's leading strategists. (The first installment appeared under the title “Strategy for Labor,” 22 J. Labor Research 569 (Summer 2001), and has been updated as “Strategy for Labor Revisited,” available www.ssrn.com). This second meeting was also convened by C, or \"cooperationist,\" who had been for over ten years the president of a local union, part of a major industrial union, representing 3,000 employees who had been hired to staff a new manufacturing plant in a Southern town (\"Newplant\"). Newplant had been widely touted as a breakthrough in U.S. labor-management relations because it was consciously designed to promote greater participation of production and maintenance workers in business decisions and a “partnership” role role for union officials alongside traditional management officials. In bitterly contested local elections last year, C was voted out of office and now serves in a staff capacity at the AFL-CI0. A, or \"adversarialist,\" perhaps surprisingly a longstanding friend of C, is the research director of another industrial union. A was very active in the Students for A Democratic Society in the 1960s, and after graduating from Oberlin College began his career as a labor organizer, working for a succession of unions that had been active in the McGovern-Kucinich wing of the Democratic Party. S, or \"stay the course,\" is the highly respected chief of staff for a national union representing government workers. Section headings and parenthetical references are supplied by the editor and do not appear in the original transcript.","PeriodicalId":309648,"journal":{"name":"Hofstra Labor and Employment Law Journal","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2011-05-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127499618","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Express Yourself: Striking a Balance between Silence and Active, Purposive Opposition Under Title VII’s Antiretaliation Provision","authors":"Matthew Green","doi":"10.2139/SSRN.1661258","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/SSRN.1661258","url":null,"abstract":"This article examines where to draw the line for opposition to be actionable under the anti-retaliation provision of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The article examines the issue by using Crawford v. Metropolitan Government of Nashville & Davidson County, 129 S.Ct. 846 (2009), as the backdrop to engage in a broader discussion on the topic. Scholars have not yet explored the extent to which Crawford allows courts, litigants and others to think in new ways about the opposition clause of Title VII and similarly worded anti-discrimination statutes. This article takes on that task. The article calls for striking a balance between extremes. Crawford suggests in dicta that under its plain meaning, the term oppose may embrace opposition by “opinion,” and lower courts and commentators have pondered whether Crawford opens the door to silent opposition. The article rejects such a reading of Title VII after examining the language, context, structure and purposes of the statute. The article, however, also examines and rejects the active, purposive standard of opposition that Justice Alito advocated in his Crawford concurrence and that lower courts pre- and post-Crawford have adopted. The article demonstrates that the active, purposive standard is inconsistent with the plain language of the statute, ignores authority that has long sanctioned unintentional opposition, exacerbates existing gaps in protection that feminist scholars and others have recognized exist for victims of unlawful workplace harassment, and rests on irrelevant policy considerations. The article cogently argues that the statutory term “has opposed” contemplates an expression from which an employer may infer or interpret opposition and proscribes employers from discriminating on the basis of that expression. Such a definition embraces a swath of opposition from words, action and in proper circumstances even inaction. Crawford has opened doors to new ways of thinking about opposition under Title VII and similarly worded statutes, and this article begins that important discussion.","PeriodicalId":309648,"journal":{"name":"Hofstra Labor and Employment Law Journal","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2010-08-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131163863","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Contracting Mediation: The Impact of Different Statutory Regimes","authors":"E. Dannin","doi":"10.2139/SSRN.156888","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/SSRN.156888","url":null,"abstract":"The United States is commited to increasing institutionalized use of alternative dispute resolution (ADR), most often based on the claim that it is superior to and different from traditional litigation. Mediation in particular is supposed in the popular view to be user-friendly, nonadversarial, and conducive to optimal, wholistic resolutions. Litigation, in contrast, is supposed to be slow, costly to all, impersonal, formal, legalistic, and incapable of giving complete or satisfactory resolutions. This implicitly assumes that ADR and litigation are discrete processes, each with uniform and intrinsic natures. This, in turn suggests an assumption that they retain these qualities under all circumstances. In this popularized, Manichean, and romanticized view, ADR and, in particular mediation, possesses uniformly positive qualities and litigation uniformly negative ones. This paradigm has come to infuse our current system of justice, including the courts, the legislature, and even legal education. The pervasive acceptance of this viewpoint has serious consequences for how justice is to be administered in the United States for the foreseeable future. This article uses a case study in which a mediation procedure remained the same while the substantive law was changed. It examines whether, although the mediation procedures have remained the same, the experience of mediation has altered.","PeriodicalId":309648,"journal":{"name":"Hofstra Labor and Employment Law Journal","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1999-03-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130409862","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Struggle For Human Rights","authors":"Harry X. Wu","doi":"10.2307/j.ctt1pk85wb.15","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt1pk85wb.15","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":309648,"journal":{"name":"Hofstra Labor and Employment Law Journal","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1900-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126651343","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Employer Reputation at Work","authors":"S. Estreicher","doi":"10.2139/SSRN.1314257","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/SSRN.1314257","url":null,"abstract":"Employer reputational costs - that is, the loss in value of the firm's reputational assets if the firm reneges on its promises to workers, both express and implied, - has played an important role in the economic literature of employment contracts, but this factor has itself generated little sustained analysis. Reputation is often offered as a late-appearing deus ex machina explaining why opportunistic behavior by employers even in internal labor markets is likely to be relatively unimportant. This standard explanation for the enforceability of implicit labor contracts in internal labor markets is problematic for at least three reasons. It assumes a well-functioning market in information about past and projected firm behavior, for a loss in employer reputation can only occur if job applicants from the external labor market are able readily to distinguish between \"opportunistic\" behavior (where, say, a termination of employment reflects an employer's reneging on implied promises of deferred compensation or late-career immunity from close monitoring of performance) and legitimate behavior (where a discharge reflects an appropriate response to shirking on the job or unforeseen business conditions). Second, the reputational-loss account is a static one; it assumes that employers in the first period (when they make the implied promise of deferred compensation or late-career job security) are in the same product market position in the later period (when they are expected to perform these implied promises). If the employer in the later period has disappeared, operates in a different product market, or has a need for workers with a different skill mix than in the first period, it will become even more difficult for job applicants in the external labor market to evaluate whether the firm's past behavior is a good predictor of their probable job experience with that firm. Finally, the explanation also makes certain problematic assumptions about how workers process information. The deficiencies of the standard explanation require either a reconsideration of implied labor market theory, or if implied labor market arrangements remain economically desirable an identification and possible strengthening of institutions that might enhance the firm's reputational costs in breaking promises to workers.","PeriodicalId":309648,"journal":{"name":"Hofstra Labor and Employment Law Journal","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1900-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116119481","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}