• Selected
• Entire List

Abstract:
This essay - from a forthcoming symposium on "teaching from the left" in the NYU Review of Law & Social Change - offers an account of the successful union organizing campaign among custodial and landscaping workers at the University of Miami during the 2005-06 academic year, focusing in particular on the role played by faculty during the course of the campaign. It examines a fractious debate generated by faculty who held classes off campus in order to support the striking workers and the author's own decision to put the question of whether to honor the picket line to a vote of his students. It offers an analysis of the pattern of argument that emerged - with opponents of off-campus classes invoking the rhetoric of contract and supporters invoking the rhetoric of democracy - and of what that pattern may reveal about the nature of ideological conflict in contemporary campus culture.

union, university of miami, strike

Abstract:
The holy trinity of American work law - employment discrimination, labor law, and employment law - has governed the American workplace for over four decades and is also firmly entrenched in the curricula of most law schools. But the discrete lenses provided by the conventional trinity make it difficult to bring into focus two distinct but related dimensions of the accelerating integration of American work law. Thus, we are on the one hand experiencing an accelerating doctrinal integration of our field, as the settings in which nominally out of area law plays a significant governance role are rapidly proliferating. At the same time, we are increasingly confronting a functional integration of work law, a development evident in the cross-migration of employment discrimination law and labor law, as the institutions central to each field - discrimination litigation and labor unions respectively - have increasingly assumed functions traditionally played by the other. Functional integration is apparent as well in the increasingly robust role of employment law in both employment discrimination and labor law contexts.

Against the backdrop of these developments, our continued embrace of the conventional subject-matter division reflects and reinforces an increasingly false opposition between legal strategies that rely on workplace organizing and collective action (on the one hand) and those that rely on litigation and related institutional practices (on the other). More fundamentally, the conventional division reflects and reinforces an increasingly false opposition between the struggle for workplace democracy and the struggle for racial, gender, and other forms of justice in the workplace and beyond.

employment discrimination, labor law, employment law, legal education

Abstract:
This essay presents a thought experiment: What if care work (child care, elder care, etc.) were socialized and police and fire protection left to individuals and families? What if men had to take time off to put out fires and combat villains, while women were freed of many of the care work responsibilities they have traditionally shouldered? The essay provides a mythical account of what such a world might look like, with the device of role-reversal operating to reveal the imagined impact that unpaid work responsibilities might have on men and by inference the very real impact that caring responsibilities already have on women (and many men as well). The principal point is to explore the structural/social as opposed to individual/volitional dimension of current practices with regard to the provision of care work, and thus to render those practices more vulnerable to re-examination and political critique. In particular, it highlights the substantial economic subsidy currently provided by unpaid care work and the hidden distributional consequences of seemingly natural institutional practices and arrangements.

child care, elder care, police, fire, women, men, care work