Search Results

This chapter focuses on the rise of feminism in the 1960s and the downfall of single-sex protective laws. Protection's downfall rested not on the Equal Employment Opportunities Commission (EEOC), but rather on the courts—on women employees who sued for equal rights in federal courts under Title VII and the lawyers who represented them; on pressure from feminist organizations, notably the National Organization for Women (NOW), that supported the plaintiffs; on a series of court decisions that upset protective laws; and on a mounting consensus among judges in favor of equal rights. Also important was feminist resurgence, which swayed conviction; shifts in public opinion culminated in the passage in Congress of an ERA in 1972. Single-sex protective laws were thus the first casualties of the new feminism. Once central to the women's movement, they became obstacles on the path to equal rights.

Eric Fenrich studies the efforts of Black activists and NASA to increase minority educational access that would lead to greater participation in the space program. According to Fenrich, the concurrence of the civil rights movement and the American space program reveal the two primary methods by which the advocates in the modern era have sought to advance the interests of African Americans. First, a negative project: the removal of formal barriers to the exercise of rights, more specifically, ending discriminatory practices in Equal Employment Opportunity and education. Second, more positive efforts, such as equal employment opportunities or affirmative action, that place opportunities within the reach of historically disadvantaged people. Fenrich also examines the fallout over James C. Fletcher’s firing of Ruth Bates Harris.

Building on chapter one, this chapter examines the similarly gendered nature of women’s work on the higher (executive and administrative) grades in both organisations. It looks at the various types of rhetoric used to preserve women’s subordinate position and the campaigns by women public servants and their supporters (both inside and outside their institutions) to improve women’s opportunities. It provides an account of the debates around segregated versus aggregated grading structures and demonstrates the strength of many campaigners’ arguments that aggregation was the best means to try to bring about long-term equity between men’s and women’s opportunities. The chapter also provides, as far as records allow, a quantitative assessment of women’s likelihood, compared to men’s, of being appointed to a particular grade via the examination process.

Brian Odom surveys the implementation of Equal Employment Opportunity at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. Odom contends that Marshall’s strategy focused on recruiting qualified African American engineering students outside Alabama and developing a partnership with the Association of Huntsville Area Contractors (AHAC) locally. By serving as both a catalyst for technical educational programs in the Huntsville community and clearinghouse for job opportunities and racial dialogue, AHAC facilitated a modicum of progress toward minority gains. During the civil rights movement, local activists such as Dr. Sonnie Hereford III and aerospace executives, including Brown Engineering Company’s Milton K. Cummings, brokered “backroom” agreements meant to improve Alabama’s “image” problem.

This chapter discusses critical legislation that impacts professionals within human service organization. Information is provided about various laws that affect the workplace (e.g., The Family Leave Act, The Equal Opportunity Act, The Americans with Disabilities Act, and the Age Discrimination Act). Case examples are presented to familiarize managerial supervisors with the issues and approaches to be considered in meeting legal mandates.

This chapter discusses violence against women in the context of broader pro-Beijing and pro-democracy movements. In Hong Kong, the significance of the political transition is apparent in the development of oppositional politics, characterized by movements enabling the collective contestation of economic and political power relations, organizing to articulate oppositional and competing frames of democracy, human rights, and feminism, and maintaining freedoms of speech, assembly, and the press. The Hong Kong Women's Coalition on Equal Opportunities is the most prominent coalition of rights-based, grassroots-oriented women's groups, albeit diverse feminist organizational forms, rhetoric, and strategies. In contrast, the Hong Kong Federation of Women unites and propagates patriotic and nationalist passions among women's groups. Both coalitions have common concerns about local women's issues but they rely on different economic, political, and social networks and employ opposing rhetoric and strategies. Given the hierarchical, corporatist dimensions of the Hong Kong government and its complex interactions with the Beijing government, feminist engagement with state institutions and processes is always combined with efforts to maintain broader transformatory struggle and movement-oriented activism.

Christina Roberts explores the perception that NASA performed poorly in hiring women during the long civil rights era, arguing that that argument is based on low recruitment numbers by comparison with many other federal agencies. Others blame NASA’s poor recruitment efforts on an entrenched white male corporate culture that resisted hiring women and minorities into the early 1970s. While not denying NASA difficulties in the area, Roberts argues that what is missing from the historiography is a discussion of gender including NASA’s actual public outreach efforts for equal employment opportunity for women scientists and engineers. Roberts contends that during the late 1950s to mid-1960s NASA sought to transmit a message that women such as Nancy Grace Roman were welcome to apply and would attain professional science and engineering careers at NASA.

Despite his frustration at being second in command, Johnson's vice presidency enabled him to develop his civil rights credentials. His role as chair of the President's Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity allowed him to work directly with civil rights leaders, and he developed closer relationships with Roy Wilkins of the NAACP, Whitney Young of the Urban League, and Martin Luther King Jr. of the Southern Christian Leadership Campaign (SCLC). During this period he increased his knowledge of the injustices suffered by African Americans, developed his understanding of the growing demands of an activist civil rights movement, and emerged as a strong supporter of immediate change. Civil rights crises in St. Augustine, Florida, and Birmingham, Alabama, convinced Johnson that the nation must end racial segregation, and by mid-1963 he took a firmer pro-civil rights stance than President John F. Kennedy.

This chapter explores the dynamics of job segregation by gender as well as the social and cultural construction of boundaries between “male” and “female” work in the retail sector. More specifically, it analyzes the role of employers and their hiring policies in shaping the sexual division of paid labor by focusing on the controversy stemming from the legal battle between Sears Roebuck & Co. and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). After discussing the political context of the EEOC's class-action sex-discrimination lawsuit against Sears, the chapter considers the historical evidence presented by both parties through the expert testimonies of two historians: Rosalind Rosenberg for Sears and Alice Kessler-Harris for the EEOC. It examines how women's history and the issue of difference figured in Sears's defense, along with the EEOC's argument that Sears's policies systematically excluded women from its most highly paid sales jobs.

This chapter reflects on issues arising from the practice of religion in the workplace and how to resolve them. Employers and employees will confront complex issues that typically occur in the struggle to protect the rights of those who wish to exercise their religious beliefs while also securing the rights of those who elect not to participate in workplace religious activities. Title VII and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) have been the primary avenues for resolving religious disputes in the workplace. This chapter considers whether Title VII and the EEOC offer the best ways of resolving religious disputes by focusing on the case of Home Depot, which failed to accommodate the Sabbath observance of one of its workers, Bradley Baker. It argues that dealing with religious matters in the workplace requires common sense, good business practices, and a continuing attitude of respect for all parties involved. It also contends that litigation is not the ideal way for an employer or an employee to cope with offensive or hostile work environment problems.

This chapter examines the gradual appointment of female police officers in Scotland from 1915 onwards, the political and social context that shaped these initiatives and the work of women as volunteer patrols and auxiliaries. The chapter highlights the gendered construction of women’s police work in the interwar period, as well as the development of expertise in rape and sexual abuse cases. The authors consider the persistence of the marriage bar in Scotland until 1968 (two decades after its removal in England and Wales), as well as the effects of the closure of Policewomen’s Departments with ‘integration’ in the 1970s. Ideas about gender difference remained crucial in the construction of police identities into the late-twentieth century. Until the bedding in of equal opportunities strategies in the 1990s, the authority associated with policing was assumed to be derived from physical strength and, concomitantly, the male body.

This chapter discusses Harris’s principle of justice in health care. Harris contends that his view is an equal opportunity principle of justice representing “the patient’s conception of benefit,” and is superior to “the provider’s or funder’s conception of benefit.” He argues that the latter position is “essentially a ‘public health’ conception,” as it “sees the business of health care as maintaining and improving public health or the health of the community.” This is a rather narrow construal of a public health conception; a more nuanced view can incorporate considerations of justice in a scheme for allocating scarce medical resources. The chapter discusses several competing principles of justice in addressing a situation of compelling need for policy makers in developing countries: setting priorities for choosing among HIV-infected individuals who are potential recipients of antiretroviral drugs (ARVs) at a regional or national level in resource-poor countries ravaged by AIDS.

The book concludes with an examination of the relocation of department stores to suburban shopping centers and the Sears, Roebuck, and Company affirmative action cases. Mass suburbanization, the rise of discount retailers such as Kmart and Wal-Mart, and urban decay transformed department stores. Black workers found that the gains they had made in downtown department stores had virtually disappeared as department stores followed their preferred clientele—the white middle class—to the suburbs. Here, stores were able to return to their former racial practices in spaces that were inaccessible via public transportation, deemed private property, and prohibited civil rights demonstrations. The Sears cases thus reveal the ways that the department store movement modified its tactics, approaches, and strategies. These cases also exposed the industry’s ongoing transformations, ones that revolutionized, or rather diminished, the status of retail work and department stores, and facilitated the reconsolidation of racial discrimination.

This chapter examines how the law protects employees from acts of employer retaliation when they are engaged in exercising the rights granted them by Title VII. Employers have a tendency to react negatively to charges of employment discrimination—whether religious, race, sex, national origin, age, or disability. Charges alleging retaliation in violation of Title VII precepts, filed annually with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, steadily increased between 1997 and 2009. Title VII makes it unlawful for an employer to retaliate against a worker who charges it with a discriminatory policy or practice or who participates in a legal or administrative proceeding relating to the company's employment policies or practices. This chapter provides an overview of Title VII proscriptions against retaliation as well as the major components of retaliation. It also considers court cases that center on issues that normally arise in religious discrimination cases when workers also charge their employers with retaliatory conduct.

This chapter examines out-of-the-ordinary circumstances in which accommodation arises as an issue. It first considers the case of Kimberly Cloutier, who sued Costco over dress code before turning to Charan Singh Kalsi's religious discrimination lawsuit against the New York City Transit Authority. It then discusses two other court cases involving George Daniels and Robert Roesser, along with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission's guidelines on accommodation. It also assesses the relevant provisions of the National Labor Relations Act regarding the payment of union dues by workers holding religious convictions that oppose union activities. It suggests that a solution for workers with religious convictions that oppose labor unions is to pay to charitable institutions what other workers pay to their union as dues.

Women are thought to be not knowledgeable about pensions and therefore they do not join schemes of pay large sums out of their wages into personal pensions. If women understood pensions better, this argument goes that everything would be fine. This view was epitomised in the Department of Work and Pensions's (DWP) 2002 Pensions Green Paper, which had a concluding section on women and pensions, tacked on rather as an afterthought. This chapter is based on a review carried out in 2004 for the Equal Opportunities Commission (EOC). The project served as a background to the DWP Green Paper. The chapter first considers what women and men know about pensions — state, occupational and private. Particular concern is directed on whether pension provisions affect the decision of those women with children to work or return to work and whether women think that they are covered by state pensions when they are absent from the labour market. The chapter also considers levels of planning for retirement and the question of who takes responsibility for budgeting, saving and pensions planning in the household. It also considers what persuades women in their choice of savings, what barriers they find to making such savings, and whether women are able or wiling to continue pension contributions while absent from the labour market. It also examines how people are confident in the arrangements they make with pensions, pensions provided by the government, by the providers of private pensions and by their employers. In addition, the chapter also considers the age until which women would like to work, when they expect to retire, and whether they are aware or not of the changes in the state pension age. Views on the recent improvements in the financial return for deferring state pension are also explored along with the women's attitudes towards state pensions.

This chapter examines acts of religious discrimination at various stages of the employment relationship. A worker who intends to pursue a religious discrimination claim against his or her employer may turn to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). When a worker files a charge, the EEOC investigates the allegations of discrimination. That investigation typically leads either to a “for cause” finding (there is reason to believe that the worker was subjected to discriminatory conduct) or a “no cause” finding (there is no reason to believe that the employer engaged in discriminatory conduct). This chapter discusses religious discrimination claims asserted during the employment relationship, focusing on the following areas: hiring and promotions; dress codes, general attire, and personal appearance; work assignments; discipline; wages and benefits; transfers; and layoffs. It also considers a number of court cases that illustrate the problems typically encountered by workers as they pursue their religious discrimination claims before the EEOC and the courts.

This chapter considers what have been assumed to be irreconcilable conflicts between different types of health care systems—specifically, between the values of individual choice and responsibility on the one hand, and the values of equity and efficiency on the other. To begin the argument, it first describes the economic phenomenon of “market failure” that inevitably plagues voluntary health insurance markets. It then presents a moral argument for intervening in the market by mandating universal, similar-premium insurance. It makes its case by using an Anti-Free-Riding Principle (AFRP) and two additional principles needed to round out the argument for mandated, universal insurance for basic care: Equal Opportunity for Welfare (EOW), an understanding of distributive justice that reduces the tension between liberty and equity, and Just Sharing, a secondary principle following from EOW that addresses the expense of insurance. EOW also points to rejecting Medical Egalitarianism, the view that everyone should receive equal care for equal medical need.

The enormous disparities in health across national boundaries strikes most people who are aware of them as grossly immoral. Why should a child born in one country be unlikely to live to 40, while a child born in another country should expect to live into her 80s? Yet it is not easy to explain why an egalitarian should be especially concerned about health inequalities. So-called “luck” egalitarianism, which holds that all inequalities for which individuals are not responsible are unjust, suffers from philosophical defects and has trouble describing a feasible and attractive notion of health equality. Relational egalitarianism, which insists on equality of respect and status rather than directly on equality in distribution provides no reason to single out the distribution of health as of special moral importance. Moreover, inequalities between different countries raise different questions from a relational egalitarian perspective than inequalities within a single country. Although there is an egalitarian case to be made against global health inequalities, it is complex and controversial, unlike the powerful and direct condemnation of these inequalities provided by simple benevolence.