Dignity and Discrimination: Employment Civil Rights in the Workplace and in Courts

Employment civil rights and the litigation associated with enforcing them are a complex interplay of public and private employers, regulatory agencies, and federal courts. When an employee loses a job or their position in an employing organization, the financial effects are very real. If the employee makes a claim of discriminatory treatment using the employer’s human resources complaint processes or with the EEOC or state equivalent, they often face workplace retaliation and even termination. Using interviews conducted with parties to employment civil rights lawsuits, this article argues that the regime of employment civil rights in the United States can be conceived as perpetuating dignity takings (and occasionally dignity restorations) because (1) the state sanctions/permits/gives deference to management in ways that allow discrimination and loss of earnings and (2) does it in a way that allows and perpetuates dehumanizing infantilization which demonstrates that plaintiffs face dehumanizing stereotyped treatment in the workplace and in courts

Immigration On-The-Air: A Scan of Broadcast News and Commentary Programming

Presents findings from a media analysis of coverage of immigration issues in broadcast news and talk radio by ideology and region. Examines the topics covered, the language used to describe immigrants, the people quoted, prominence as news, and visuals

Embodying labor, then and now

In her introduction to the new edition of Women on the Line, first published in 1982, Miriam Glucksmann notes that it had been written well before the body and embodiment had become an explicit focus of studies of work and employment. However, rereading Women on the Line reminds us that ethnographers have long paid attention to the embodied aspects of work, although few of them have written about them as eloquently as Glucksmann. In the original volume she was able to articulate how it felt to experience herself in relation to her environment, a phenomenological perspective made possible by her adoption of an autoethnographic writing style (a strategy linked to her rejection both of a narrowly academic approach and, in consequence, of the disembodied authorial voice that tended to go with it). Perhaps another reason why Glucksmann was able to write about her working on the line with such sensitivity to the embodiment of the experience is that she was new to assembly line work, so the embodied routines of factory life had not yet been submerged below the level of conscious articulation. It is useful therefore to summarize what she had to say and to think about how we can build on it

On Organizational Configurations

[Excerpt] To manage organizations in ways that will make our society manageable, we need to spark innovations in management. Consider the organization in which you work. What configuration does it have and what does that tell you? What might you do to enhance the strengths and minimize the weaknesses of its structure

NDTV: After suicides, scrutiny of China’s grim factories

This document is part of a digital collection provided by the Martin P. Catherwood Library, ILR School, Cornell University, pertaining to the effects of globalization on the workplace worldwide. Special emphasis is placed on labor rights, working conditions, labor market changes, and union organizing.CLW_2010_Report_China_ndtv_after_suicides.pdf: 28 downloads, before Oct. 1, 2020

A Needs-Based Partial Theory of Human Injustice: Oppression, Dehumanization, Exploitation, and Systematic Inequality in Opportunities to Address Human Needs

The article presents an original needs-based partial theory of human injustice and shows its relationship to existing theories of human need and human liberation. The theory is based on an original typology of three social structural sources of human injustice, a partial theorization of the mechanisms of human injustice, and a needs-based theorization of the nature of human injustice, as experienced by individuals. The article makes a sociological contribution to normative social theory by clarifying the relationship of human injustice to human needs, human rights, and human liberation. The theory contends that human injustice is produced when oppression, mechanistic dehumanization, and exploitation create systematic inequality in opportunities to address human needs, leading to wrongful need deprivation and the resulting serious harm. In one longer sentence, this needs-based partial theory of the sources, mechanisms, and nature of human injustice contends that three distinct social systemic sources—oppression, mechanistic dehumanization, and exploitation—produce unique and/or overlapping social mechanisms, which create systematic inequality in opportunities to address universal human needs in culturally specific ways, thus producing the nature of the human injustice theorized here: wrongfully unmet needs and serious harm

Is Mateship a Virtue?

This essay seeks to examine the concept of mateship from the perspectives of consequentialist and virtue ethics. It is suggested that mateship is a prominent concept in the way Australians think of themselves. However it is also suggested that mateship is linked to solidarity and commitment in time of war. It is suggested that what we should recognize mateship is one of the factors that facilitates and perpetuates war. It is suggested that mateship is also questionable as a character virtue, given what mateship entails. It is suggested that ultimately we need to examine more closely the consequences of the solidarity that we define as mateship, and we need to query more closely what we regard as virtues