Employee Responsibilities and Rights Journal

Gravett, Sandie; Anderson, Stella

doi: 10.1007/s10672-020-09350-2pmid: N/A

This study examines dispute resolution processes available to higher education faculty in a nonunion context who are attempting to resolve adverse employment conditions. It assesses the efficacy of those processes for producing outcomes of value both to individual faculty members and to a university. Key areas of interest include faculty knowledge about and levels of confidence in campus systems for dispute resolution, how campuses prepare for and conduct hearings, and the potential for dispute resolution processes to enact organizational justice and produce institutional learning. A survey of faculty affiliated with the 16 constituent higher education institutions of The University of North Carolina and interviews conducted with faculty having direct experience with campus hearings provided data to examine these issues. The data indicates that for dispute resolutions processes to function effectively, there must be greater support of persons engaged in the processes, additional training for administrators, advisors and hearing panel members, and increased transparency in reaching and reporting the outcomes of these processes.

Harvey, Valérie; Tremblay, Diane-Gabrielle

doi: 10.1007/s10672-020-09353-zpmid: N/A

Women in IT are a minority and the situation is not improving. Data from Statistics Canada from 1991 to 2011 show the engineering sectors do not count very many women. Thus, it is observed that while Canada has policies on gender equity and women should be considered as having the right to work in any sector, the reality is quite different, as is indicated in Statistics Canada data. We observe a low presence of women in the IT sector, a well-paid sector that should be of interest, and women continue to be employed in traditionally female, often low-paid, occupations. We thus wanted to understand how women in IT deal with their minority status in this sector. What are the main obstacles minority women in the IT sector face in their day-to-day lives? How do they deal with these? Do they use ‘queen bee’ responses to be promoted? What is it in the IT sector that motivates their work? These are all questions that have interested us and the results help us to better understand the causes of women’s low representation in the IT sector. Our research is based on a qualitative approach, with interviews of women in the IT sector in Québec (Canada).

Devinatz, Victor G.

doi: 10.1007/s10672-020-09356-wpmid: N/A

Braun, Jerome

doi: 10.1007/s10672-020-09357-9pmid: N/A

John R. Commons’ Legal Foundations of Capitalism (1924) is relevant for American labor law because it represented in some ways the pinnacle of the Progressive Movement at the beginning of the twentieth century. Commons believed that markets were not automatically self-correcting so that workers would not necessarily be treated fairly. This view explains why he was a founder of institutional economics, as opposed to a supporter of neoclassical economics. Commons also discussed the limitations of the American legal system in favoring big business rather than labor unions. In this essay, I discuss Commons’ criticisms, supplemented by contemporary scholars’ work. In modern society, procedures are often understood better than the goals that they are meant to facilitate. This means that many writers in the Law and Economics field are no longer comfortable in conceptualizing how quantitative measures of value can be usefully combined with qualitative measures of value, resulting in justice. The ideas of John R. Commons as a founder of institutional economics are discussed as a remedy for this.