An elucidating study of landmark sex-discrimination cases waged in the wake of Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
A Brooklyn-based senior staff attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union’s Women’s Rights Project, Thomas presents 10 cases that illustrate the early efforts by working women to find some equality and justice in the workplace, from being hired in jobs once the exclusive domain of men to protection from sexual harassment and from discrimination for pregnancy. A cadre of crusading attorneys and frustrated working women challenged the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the agency endowed by Title VII to enforce the statute—which included an amendment against sex discrimination almost as a risible afterthought—over many decades after the law’s 1964 enactment, paving the way for the advances of working women today. Each case took years and moved all the way up to the Supreme Court. In 1966, receptionist Ida Phillips was outraged at being refused employment at missile manufacturer Martin Marietta in Orlando, Florida, for having preschool-age children and sought help from the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund. Her case (Phillips v. Martin Marietta Corporation, 1971) would be the first time the court would consider the meaning of Title VII’s “because of sex” provision. In 1975, Brenda Mieth and Dianne Rawlinson challenged Montgomery, Alabama’s official restrictions against hiring women as state troopers and prison guards (Dothard v. Rawlinson, 1977), and Mechelle Vinson’s attempts to stop the hostile treatment by her supervisor at a Washington, D.C., bank became a groundbreaking case against sexual harassment in the workplace (Meritor Savings Bank, FSB v. Vinson, 1986). In the late 1980s, women workers at a Vermont car-battery manufacturer challenged the company’s official “fetal protection” policy, which essentially relegated women to lower-paying jobs (International Union, United Auto Workers v. Johnson Controls, 1991). Thomas takes the cases one by one, delivering an eye-opening reference for lay readers.
Although the author’s well-delineated examples will ring outrageous to modern-day ears, she reminds us how much there is still to be achieved.Pub Date: March 8, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-137-28005-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Dec. 10, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2015
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“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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SEEN & HEARD
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
13
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The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 6, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | UNITED STATES | HISTORY | CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES | ETHNICITY & RACE
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