Legislating a Family-Friendly Workplace: Should It Be Done in the United States?

This Article reviews both domestic and international efforts to legislate a more family-friendly workplace, with an eye toward measuring the impact of these various initiatives and predicting both their future success and the likelihood of more widespread adoption. In particular, the Article reviews federal, state, and international legislative efforts to mandate: paid parental leaves; paid sick days; and flexible work arrangements. The Article then attempts to measure the effectiveness of such legislatively required, family-friendly policies by suggesting ways to measure and to predict the impact of U.S. legislative efforts to reconcile the conflicting responsibilities of work and parenthood. The Article concludes by presenting economic, legal, and ethical reasons why family-friendly policies should be both voluntarily adopted and legislatively required

Legislating a Family-Friendly Workplace: Should It Be Done in the United States?

This Article reviews both domestic and international efforts to legislate a more family-friendly workplace, with an eye toward measuring the impact of these various initiatives and predicting both their future success and the likelihood of more widespread adoption. In particular, the Article reviews federal, state, and international legislative efforts to mandate: paid parental leaves; paid sick days; and flexible work arrangements. The Article then attempts to measure the effectiveness of such legislatively required, family-friendly policies by suggesting ways to measure and to predict the impact of U.S. legislative efforts to reconcile the conflicting responsibilities of work and parenthood. The Article concludes by presenting economic, legal, and ethical reasons why family-friendly policies should be both voluntarily adopted and legislatively required

Individual Liability under Title VII: What Did Congress Mean by “Employer”?

Inconsistency among the federal courts on the issue of individual liability results from a lack of consensus on the correct interpretation of Title VII, which outlaws various varieties of workplace discrimination, including sexual harassment. The disagreement among the courts centers on an allegedly ambiguous definition of “employer” as used in two critical sections of Title VII. Title VII, as popularly understood, sought to hold corporate America responsible for both institutional and individual acts of workplace discrimination. If Congress had wanted to impose personal liability on individual managers, it could easily have done so, especially since it amended Title VII in 1991 precisely for the purpose of clarifying its intentions and ensuring that these were met. The better focus, as Congress anticipated, is to encourage institutional employers to implement training programs in order to mount sufficient peer pressure to modify the workplace behavior of Title VII violators, to respond to complaints promptly, and, where investigation corroborates a complaint, to take swift steps to remedy a sexual harassment situation