Search Results

The USA's re‐opening to large‐scale immigration after World War II, particularly in regard to the legislative reforms of 1986 and 1990, contrasts with Europe's exclusionary policies after the first oil crisis. Two factors help explain this development. First, the impact of the civil rights movement in undermining, in the case of anti‐discrimination, effective controls on illegal immigration and quotas on legal immigration; second, the adoption of a low profile for immigration throughout the 1980s, which allowed well‐organized minority groups to challenge policy devised for protection of the broader public interest.

This chapter explores how equality is pursued, comparing two approaches. In Europe, legal responses to inequality have tended to focus on anti-discrimination legislation. This approach attempts to bring about equality by giving individuals a right to challenge discrimination through litigation before courts or other adjudicatory bodies. In contrast, the promotion of social inclusion has been more typically linked with policy-based mechanisms, not amenable to judicial enforcement. A dichotomy thus arises between two pathways for advancing equality: antidiscrimination and social inclusion. The chapter begins by reviewing in more detail the characteristics, strengths, and pitfalls of each of these two approaches. It then seeks to explore whether these approaches might be brought together and, to this end, it examines the European Social Charter, which appears to marry some of the qualities of both approaches. It is an instrument of international law, yet it has a holistic outlook on social rights and their implementation in practice. In order to make a more concrete assessment of the Charter's potential to promote equality, two discrete case studies are considered, focusing on the social situation of Travellers in Ireland and Roma in Italy.

This chapter examines discrimination in the marketplace and, more specifically, the legitimacy and appropriate scope of anti-discrimination legislation. Following a brief survey of current legal norms, it relies on positive economic analysis to explain possible motivations for discrimination. It then examines the efforts made to justify anti-discrimination legislation on standard efficiency grounds. It argues that these efforts are unsuccessful. Rather, the appropriate way to adequately capture the issues pertaining to market discrimination is to directly take into account a deontological constraint against harming people by discriminating against them. The chapter analyzes the deontological constraint against discrimination, examines the relationships between this constraint and distributive bases for anti-discrimination legislation, and demonstrates how current legal norms are best understood as resting on moderate deontology and embodying threshold constraints.

This chapter discusses conversion arguments for and against anti-discrimination law in all of its guises. Specifically, it discusses Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which prohibits employment discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, national origin, and gender. Also covered in is the Age Discrimination in Employment Act and the Americans With Disabilities Act.

Broad EU anti-discrimination law has only recently developed, with the impetus given by the Treaty of Amsterdam. From an institutional point of view, it has had a major impact, resulting in the setting up of many national specialized bodies for the promotion of equal treatment and the reshaping of existent agencies. Beyond the large spectrum of equality bodies found across Europe, this chapter highlights general trends and presents some models that were shaped prior to any European requirement and that have influenced policy makers (equality bodies established in Great Britain, Sweden, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Ireland). It also underscores key challenges that these national institutions must address in order to improve effectively the implementation of equality norms and to achieve substantive equality.

This chapter places international and regional human rights instruments in their historical context before analysing the specific provisions or decisions which apply them to extreme speech. It concludes that these instruments provide weak protection for extreme speech because many of the instruments have their origins in the attempt to prevent fascism from rising again and because they are interpreted as part of the international campaign against discrimination. The chapter advocates the development of a more robust domestic defence of free speech based on the comparative example provided by the doctrine of the U.S. Supreme Court rather than on international norms.

The final truth about anti-discrimination law comes to the fore in what can be called its neoliberal predicament. It is manifest in attempts to defeat the normative deficiency without transcending the horizon of morality. Some such attempts identify themselves, self-confidently, as belonging to the ‘second generation’ of anti-discrimination scholarship. The respective approaches are based on the assumption that discrimination arises and exists as the result of the unconscious operation of biases against groups. They seek to entrust problem-solving not to general legislation but to various management strategies for the improvement of relations among employees. Nowhere is the market seen to be the source of the problem. Nowhere does organised labour enter the picture. The purity of the market economy remains unchallenged. The neoliberal predicament exposes the truth about anti-discrimination law. As a medium of social policy, it is powerless. Or, more adequately put, it represents social policy in the state of disempowerment.

This chapter suggests numerous large- and small-scale strategies for driving down the cost of home purchases and rentals for Latino/a U.S. residents, as well as the cost of credit for housing purchases. Admittedly short-term in design, these stop-gap proposals encompass tax credits, anti-discrimination measures and enforcement, and consumer education.

This chapter discusses the development of status equality law and policy — domestically, internationally, and in the European context. There are two main functional models to which anti-discrimination laws conform: an individual justice model, and a group justice model. More recently, however, two additional approaches are apparent: an attempt to secure the implementation of equality norms extraterritorially, and the introduction of ‘mainstreaming’. The chapter considers these important dimensions of equal status law and policy before setting out the different ways in which equality-based procurement linkages aim to advance one or more of these functional models.

This chapter discusses draft legislation on the prevention of discrimination in the private sector. It begins with a description of the current legal framework for addressing discrimination, in order to assess the necessity of the draft legislation. It then provides details of the draft legislation.

This chapter traces changes in immigrants' social rights first in the United States and then in the United Kingdom. The politics of inclusion and exclusion in the US have centered on the extension and contraction of immigrants' welfare rights. In Britain the universalism of the early postwar welfare state encompassed all residents, and the politics of inclusion have been less concerned with the extension of social rights to immigrants but rather with strengthening their social rights through anti-discrimination legislation. The contraction of immigrants' social rights, however, resulted in quite similar policy outputs — lengthy bans on utilizing means tested benefits — but the politics behind the policies was quite different. The concluding discussion summarizes the contrasts and similarities in the politics of exclusion in the two countries.

Creating equality of opportunity seems to be a viable strategy for resolving the conflict between the contending principles of competitiveness and solidarity. Both principles lie at the core of the European Union’s agenda. Anti-discrimination law appears to be a way of mediating between them. The relevant legislation protects people who happen to bear certain characteristics—most of which are socially salient, for example, sex, race, religion, ethnicity—from disadvantage that arises from actions by private persons or the state in the context of the provision of goods and opportunities. Characteristically, the protection is limited to certain critical goods, such as jobs, salaries, housing or access to education. The European Union has been the driving force in the development of anti-discrimination legislation in the legal systems of its Member States.

Anti-discrimination policy represents that field of European Union social policy which has been steadily successful since its inception. Its success continues even in the course of the current reorientation of social policy towards the use of more ‘soft’ as opposed to ‘hard’ legal means. The new, ‘soft’ social policy is associated with the rise of employment policy. Anti-discrimination law is now to be seen as interconnected with the European employment strategy. As a result, anti-discrimination policy has been increasingly intermingled with management strategies. At the macrolevel, this affects the complementarity between legislation and the pursuit of ‘action programs’ or ‘mutual learning processes’, the instigation of which has been encouraged in the European Union. At the microlevel, this intermingling is manifest in how scholars imagine anti-discrimination strategies to be reinforced at the workplace level through strategies of practical training and the administered improvement of attitudes.