Employment Law

A veteran labor and employment attorney offers a comprehensive and accessible resource for anyone interested in workplace law. Covey reveals what every business person needs to know about employment law and how to apply it.

With growing international competition, American firms have been faced with increasing pressures to produce better products, cut costs, and improve efficiency. As a result, American employers have changed many of their long-standing labor priorities. With this large reorganization of work forces and priorities, Americans are again faced with the significant question of what rights workers have--and should have--in the workplace.

The typical workplace is a hotbed of human relationships--of friendships, conflicts, feuds, alliances, partnerships, coexistence and cooperation. Here, problems are solved, progress is made, and rifts are mended because they need to be - because the work has to get done. And it has to get done among increasingly diverse groups of co-workers. At a time when communal ties in American society are increasingly frayed and segregation persists, the workplace is more than ever the site where Americans from different ethnic, religious, and racial backgrounds meet and forge serviceable and sometimes lasting bonds. What do these highly structured workplace relationships mean for a society still divided by gender and race? Structure and rules are, in fact, central to the answer. Workplace interactions are constrained by economic power and necessity, and often by legal regulation. They exist far from the civic ideal of free and equal citizens voluntarily associating for shared ends. Yet it is the very involuntariness of these interactions that helps to make the often-troubled project of racial integration comparatively successful at work. People can be forced to get along-not without friction, but often with surprising success. This highly original exploration of the paradoxical nature--and the paramount importance--of workplace bonds concludes with concrete suggestions for how law can further realize the democratic possibilities of working together. In linking workplace integration and connectedness beyond work, Estlund suggests a novel and promising strategy for addressing the most profound challenges facing American society.

This book, containing contributions by outstanding scholars and practitioners in the fields of communication, organizational psychology and management, law, personnel, and industrial and labor relations, addresses the issues involved in communicating employee responsiblities and rights. Equally important is achieving an understanding of the evolving workplace practices these rights mandate. Employer and employee understanding of these considerations offers enormous potential for avoiding situations that provoke and escalate conflicts in the contemporary workplace. At the heart of all of this is the need for clear, consistent, and effective communication in the modern organization.

This work discusses the individual contract of employment at a time of significant changes in the judicial case law. Revealing that labor courts and arbitrators still favor employers' rights to freely discharge employees, Brodie focuses on the themes that remain constant, including judicial restraint, employer rights, and just cause. All facets of creating, modifying, and ending the employment relationship are examined. Topics covered include forums for contract disputes, specific clauses subject to frequent dispute, and statutes and the employment at will doctrine.