This book explores the precarious margins of contemporary labour markets. Over the last few decades, there has been much discussion of a shift from full-time permanent jobs to higher levels of ...part-time and temporary employment and self-employment. Despite such attention, regulatory approaches have not adapted accordingly. Instead, in the absence of genuine alternatives, old regulatory models are applied to new labour market realities, leaving the most precarious forms of employment intact. The book places this disjuncture in historical context and focuses on its implications for those most likely to be at the margins, particularly women and migrant workers. Managing the Margins provides a rigorous analysis drawing on original qualitative and quantitative material. It innovates by analyzing the historical and contemporary interplay of employment norms, gender relations, and citizenship boundaries. Available in OSO: http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/oso/public/content/management//toc.html
How do the United States and France differ in laws and attitudes concerning discrimination at work? Franco-American scholar Marie Mercat-Bruns interviews prominent legal scholars to demonstrate how ...these two post-industrial democracies have adopted divergent strategies. Whereas employers in the United States and France rarely discriminate openly, deep systemic discrimination exists in both countries, each with a unique history of dealing with difference. Powerful and incisive, the book examines hot-button issues such as racial and religious bias, sexual harassment, gender discrimination, and equality for LGBT individuals, highlighting comparisons that will further discussions on social equality and fundamental human rights across borders. “Mercat-Bruns makes original use of comparative law to shed new light on the issue of discrimination at work. In addition to reviewing the literature, she enters into a rich dialogue with American experts about their core findings. This book makes a fascinating and useful contribution to one of today’s most pressing issues.” -ANTOINE GARAPON, Secretary General, Director of the Comparative Law Program, Institut des Hautes Etudes sur la Justice (IHEJ) “A very interesting and innovative approach to examining nondiscrimination law.” -LISA WADDINGTON, Professor of International and European Law, Maastricht University “A dialogue among America’s most prominent contemporary theorists of discrimination, Discrimination at Work comprises a series of pluralistic, audacious, and critically considered reflections on discrimination in the workplace.” -ANTOINE LYON-CAEN, President of the International Institute for Comparative Studies (IIPEC), Professor Emeritus of French Labor Law, Paris West University Nanterre La Défense MARIE MERCAT-BRUNS is Affiliated Professor at Sciences Po Law School and Associate Professor in Labor and Employment Law at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers in Paris. She is a member of the Research Institute LISE CNRS (Codirector of the program Gender, Categories and Policy) and also of the scientific committee of PRESAGE (Sciences Po/OFCE Research and Academic Program on Gender Thinking).
Globalisation, the shift from manufacturing to services as a source of employment, and the spread of information-based systems and technologies have given birth to a new economy, which emphasises ...flexibility in the labour market and in employment relations. These changes have led to the erosion of the standard (industrial) employment relationship and an increase in precarious work - work which is poorly paid and insecure. Women perform a disproportionate amount of precarious work. This collection of original essays by leading scholars on labour law and women's work explores the relationship between precarious work and gender, and evaluates the extent to which the growth and spread of precarious work challenges traditional norms of labour law and conventional forms of legal regulation.The book provides a comparative perspective by furnishing case studies from Australia, Canada, the Netherlands, Quebec, Sweden, the UK, and the US, as well as the international and supranational context through essays that focus on the IMF, the ILO, and the EU. Common themes and concepts thread throughout the essays, which grapple with the legal and public policy challenges posed by women's precarious work.
In 1964, as part of its landmark Civil Rights Act, Congress outlawed workplace discrimination on the basis of such personal attributes as sex, race, and religion. This provision, known as Title VII, ...laid a new legal foundation for women's rights at work. Though President Kennedy and other lawmakers expressed high hopes for Title VII, early attempts to enforce it were inconsistent. In the absence of a consensus definition of sex equality in the law or society, Title VII's practical meaning was far from certain.
The first history to foreground Title VII's sex provision,Equality on Trialexamines how the law's initial promise inspired a generation of Americans to dispatch expansive notions of sex equality. Imagining new solidarities and building a broad class politics, these workers and activists engaged Title VII to generate a pivotal battle over the terms of democracy and the role of the state in all labor relationships. But the law's ambiguity also allowed for narrow conceptions of sex equality to take hold. Conservatives found ways to bend Title VII's possible meanings to their benefit, discovering that a narrow definition of sex equality allowed businesses to comply with the law without transforming basic workplace structures or ceding power to workers. These contests to fix the meaning of sex equality ultimately laid the legal and cultural foundation for the neoliberal work regimes that enabled some women to break the glass ceiling as employers lowered the floor for everyone else.
Synthesizing the histories of work, social movements, and civil rights in the postwar United States,Equality on Trialrecovers the range of protagonists whose struggles forged the contemporary meanings of feminism, fairness, and labor rights.
Australia is set to join the likes of several international jurisdictions by implementing its own statutory right to disconnect on 26 August 2024 for most employees (or 26 August 2025 for those ...working in small businesses). This article introduces Australia’s new right to disconnect. It explains where the right sits in the broader context of Australia’s employment law system. The right’s rapid legislative development is traced, along with its proposed operation under Australia’s key employment law statute, the Fair Work Act 2009 (Cth). The rationale for the right becoming part of Australian employment law is also explored.
This paper records the responses to the questionnaire that was circulated to academics for the purposes of compiling the ETUC publication, ‘New trade union strategies for new forms of employment’. In ...responding to the questions asked, this paper provides a broad description of how work relationships are organised in English law, including the various tests and criteria that are relevant to particular work relationship statuses which determine access to both individual and collective employment rights. This also involves discussing the relationship between newer intermediate work relationship statuses, and the traditional binary divide upon which English employment law is premised. The paper finally turns to assessing hypothetical scenarios against the tests for work relationship status in English law, as well as possible reform proposals that could help to increase coverage for workers.
This groundbreaking book examines the growing phenomenon of internships, and the policy issues that they raise, during a time when internships or traineeships have become an important way of ...transitioning from education into paid work.Featuring contributions from established and emerging scholars in a range of disciplines, the book presents important new research on the use, benefits and regulation of such arrangements. It considers how various countries around the world are meeting the challenge of ensuring decent work for interns, and what more needs to be done to realise that objective. Additionally, the case for new forms of regulation to minimise or prevent the exploitation of interns is explored, against the background of a possible new international labour standard.Presenting new data and analysis on whether internships can - and to what extent do - provide an effective bridge from education to employment, Internships, Employability and the Search for Decent Work Experience will be a key resource for policy-makers and academics in labour law, industrial relations, labour economics, human resource management and education.
Recent research indicates that labor market power has contributed to wage inequality and economic stagnation. Although the antitrust laws prohibit firms from restricting competition in labor markets ...as in product markets, the government does little to address the labor market problem, and private litigation has been rare and mostly unsuccessful. One reason is that the analytic methods for evaluating labor market power in antitrust contexts are far less sophisticated than the legal rules used to judge product market power. To remedy this asymmetry, we propose methods for judging the effects of mergers on labor markets. We also extend our approach to other forms of anticompetitive practices undertaken by employers against workers. We highlight some arguments and evidence indicating that market power may be even more important in labor markets than in product markets.
This book argues that traditional complaint-based antidiscrimination laws are inherently inadequate to respond to systemic discrimination in employment. It examines the mechanisms and characteristics ...of systemic discrimination and the shortcomings of complaint-based laws. Yet these characteristics can also inform employers and government authorities of the kinds of preventive action that help alleviate systemic discrimination at the workplace.
In its search for a rational government policy response to systemic discrimination, the book evaluates selected legal regimes which impose proactive obligations on employers to promote equality at the workplace. Proactive regimes are regulatory in nature, rather than adjudicatory. They induce employer compliance through technical assistance, dialogue and regulatory pressure, rather than court orders. By examining the key elements of these regimes the author explains why some proactive regimes function better than others, and why proactive regimes function better than complaint-based laws in addressing systemic discrimination.
Collective labour law is, for the most part, national law. It is often the result of social struggle and political compromise occurring in the national context. Unlike other fields of private law, it ...has not been the object of legal harmonisation, at either international or European levels. However, as national frontiers progressively open up for goods and services, collective labour law has become increasingly exposed to international and supranational law. This book contains the papers presented at an international conference held at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative and International Private Law in 2014. The authors look, from a comparative perspective, at current developments in the fields of collective bargaining and employee participation in several European countries and in China. They analyse the extent to which differences between the national legal systems still prevail and whether common features are about to emerge.
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