Inequality and the Workplace: Stetson Law Review Symposium on March 6th.

On Friday, March 6^th, the Stetson Law Review will host a daylong symposium titled:  Inequality, Opportunity, and the Law of the Workplace.  The symposium will explore the relationship between growing economic inequality and the regulation of labor and employment in the United States.  What are the driving forces responsible for widening income or wealth inequality?  Should labor or employment laws be used to counteract income or wealth inequality?  What types of inequality can or should employment laws address?  Can labor or employment laws be effective in reducing inequality, given structural impediments such as globalization and the corporate form’s division of capital from labor?  Panelists will also explore some underappreciated practical and legal limitations on improving the economic mobility of low wage workers, including garnishment laws and the First Amendment’s impact on unionization. 

Wilma Liebman, former Chair of the National Labor Relations Board, is the keynote speaker.  Featured speakers include Timothy Noah, Politico’s Labor and Employment Editor and author of The Great Divergence: America’s Growing Inequality Crisis and What We Can Do About It, and CATO Institute Senior Fellow Michael Tanner.  David Cay Johnston (Syracuse), a Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist and the editor of Divided: The Perils of Our Growing Inequality, will serve as the moderator for a series of panels, which will including Samuel Bagenstos (University of Michigan), Matthew Bodie (Saint Louis University), Charlotte Garden (Seattle University), Dr. Larry Mishel (President, Economic Policy Institute), Paul Sonn (General Counsel/Program Director, National Employment Law Project), Katherine Stone (UCLA), Steven Willborn (Nebraska), and Michael Zimmer (Loyola-Chicago).  Written articles and essays will be published in the Stetson Law Review.   

Kudos to the Law Review and my colleague Jason Bent for putting together such a stellar group.  The entire symposium is available for viewing via live webcast.  For registration or more information about the symposium, go here. 

Comments

[Derek Tokaz]

I've been re-reading Leo Katz's Why the Law is So Perverse, which discusses loopholes in depth, and it makes me wonder if perhaps universities have developed a clever loophole to avoid fair compensation for their adjunct professors.

Many schools will cap the number of classes an adjunct can teach at around 3 or 4 per year. The idea (presumably) is to keep them as part-time employees so they don't have to provide those pesky, expensive benefits. However, an adjunct teaching 3 classes at a university is in fact working full time. That professor is picking up another 3-4 (sometimes 7) classes at 1-2 other universities.

We couldn't have University A have Professor P teaching 3/3, and University B with Professor Q also teaching 3/3, and not give them benefits. (Probably also have to pay them more than $25k a year, too.) But, the University A can hire P to teach 1/2, and Q to teach 2/1, while University B pays P to teach 2/1 and Q to teach 1/2. Neither university pays out benefits (or a real salary) because neither university has a full time employee.

This looks to exactly fit Katz's definition of a loophole, which is indirectly accomplishing what the law does not allow one to directly accomplish. It'd be interesting to see what employment law solutions there would be to solve this. One possibility might be to require employers to pay a pro-rated benefit equivalent.

That would also fix the problem in other fields of employers cutting employee hours to just below the full time level to avoid benefits since there's no longer a huge added cost once you pass the full-time threshold.

[Bridget Crawford]

Does it strike anyone else as ironic that of the twelve speakers at a symposium on "inequality," only three speakers are female?

[Derek Tokaz]

And none of the speakers appear to be racial minorities. However, since the symposium is about income stratification, neither the race nor gender makeup of the panelists would be "ironic."

What is ironic is the apparent lack of income stratification among the group. I suspect that all of the speakers are in the top 20% of incomes, and the majority are in the top 10%. I doubt any of them are using TurboTax Basic this year.

[AnonProf]

Bridget, I understand and appreciate what you are trying to do here, but think you are being uncharitable.

I have organized a number of conferences and symposia, and sadly, it is difficult to get a diverse group. Most faculties are still predominately male, especially more experienced faculty members and especially in some subject areas.

Also, for the last symposia I helped organize, in the fall, we got immediate acceptances from all of the male speakers we contacted and immediate declines from about 75% of the female speakers we contacted (even though we were planned over 6 months in advance). We were left in a bit of a bind because the next best group of professors, based on expertise and publications, were almost all male. We ended up splitting the baby by inviting some additional male professors and some female professors for the open spots. But the second group of female professors we invited were clearly less qualified and even so we still had a symposia of about 75% male professors. If we had insisted on a 50/50 split, we would have been inviting female professors who had never written a single full-length article in the area.