A New York Times piece covers the impact of drug tests (and drugs) on the economy. In particular, it profiles various manufacturing companies in the Midwest, revealing the challenges they face filling jobs due to the proportion of applicants who fail drug tes... More »
Professor Bagenstos suggests that I am somehow in league with “skeptics” of the civil rights laws and am calling for a form of “second-class citizenship” in my previous post urging greater use of the “safe harbor” approach in achieving antidiscrimination objec... More »
For decades, skeptics of civil rights legislation have offered a perverse-effects argument. That argument starts from the well-founded premise that it is more difficult to enforce prohibitions on discrimination at the hiring stage than at the termination stag... More »
As a general matter, and looking only at hiring barriers, our employment discrimination laws have done a good job encouraging employers to take advantage of available talent from populations they might previously not have previously have drawn from. This encou... More »
According to the June jobs report released on Friday, the labor participation rate increased slightly from 62.7% in May to 62.8% in June. The labor participation rate, or the share of American civilians over the age of 16 who are working or looking for a job,... More »
Early last year, Alabama passed a preemption law preventing any city in the state from, among other things, setting their own minimum wage. The law was perceived to be targeting Birmingham, the only city in Alabama to have enacted a minimum wage ordinance tha... More »
This fall, the 11th Circuit upheld an employer policy banning dreadlocks in the workplace; the court ruled that dreadlocks are not an “immutable characteristic of black persons,” and as such, an employer’s decision to rescind an offer based on the employee’s h... More »
It’s a difficult time to be a Muslim in America. Since the tragic events of September 11, 2001, Muslim Americans have faced greater scrutiny, with recent global events triggering further anti-Muslim rhetoric in the United States and abroad. According to a 20... More »
Jonathan R. Harkavy, a lawyer, arbitrator and mediator, has taught labor and employment law at Wake Forest School of Law and corporate finance at Duke Law School and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Law. He has written and lectured wi... More »
This is the final post in a three-part series. This is the last in a series of three posts on the prominent perverse consequences argument against “Banning the Box.” The argument is that efforts to curtail employer exclusion of people with criminal records in... More »
This post is the second in a three-part series. This is the second in a series of three posts on the prominent perverse consequences argument that “Banning the Box” inadvertently exacerbates the racial inequality it purports to redress. The first post critici... More »
This post is the first in a three-part series. Nothing sells like a perverse consequences argument. The movement to “Ban the Box” has run into an objection familiar from debates over the minimum wage and affirmative action: this policy could exacerbate exactl... More »