Discrimination Laundering: The Rise of Organizational Innocence and the Crisis of Equal Opportunity Law

by Tristin K. Green

Overview

While discrimination in the workplace is often perceived to be undertaken at the hands of individual or 'rogue' employees acting against the better interest of their employers, the truth is often the opposite: organizations are inciting discrimination through the work environments that they create. Worse, the law increasingly ignores this reality and exacerbates the problem. In this groundbreaking book, Tristin K. Green describes the process of discrimination laundering, showing how judges are changing the law to protect employers, and why. By bringing organizations back into the discussion of discrimination, with real-world stories and extensive social-science research, Green shows how organizational and legal efforts to minimize discrimination - usually by policing individuals over broader organizational change - are taking us in the wrong direction, and how the law could do better, by creating incentives for organizational efforts that are likely to minimize discrimination, instead of inciting it.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781107142008
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	11/14/2016
Pages:	210
Product dimensions:	6.18(w) x 9.29(h) x 0.63(d)

About the Author

Tristin K. Green is a Professor of Law at the University of San Francisco and a member of the Law and Society Association. She has written extensively in the field of employment discrimination law, seeking to better understand how discrimination operates and how to better structure the law to incentivize meaningful change. She has co-authored an article with Alexandra Kalev, a sociologist, on the relational nature of discrimination, and co-authored a casebook edition with Herma Hill Kay entitled Sex-Based Discrimination (2011).

Table of Contents

1. The threads of organizational innocence; Part I. Discrimination Laundering: 2. Individual discrimination: the emerging law of complaint and response; 3. Systemic discrimination: erasing the aggregate and entrenching a law of complaint and response; 4. Class, culture, and limiting the purview of Title VII; Part II. What's Wrong with Discrimination Laundering: 5. The laundered workplace; 6. How organizations discriminate - and what they can do to stop; Part III. Reversing Discrimination Laundering: 7. Reversing discrimination laundering.

Editorial Reviews

"Tristin Green brilliantly illuminates the origins and effects of disturbing new trends in employment discrimination law that serve to protect high-level officials and their organizations - while leaving those who experience discrimination and lose opportunities more vulnerable. Green is an excellent guide, combining both a readable writing style with technical expertise."
John Skrentny, University of California, San Diego

"Tristin Green, one of the nation's leading employment discrimination scholars, has written a book that will change the way we understand the processes of workplace inequality and what should be done to prevent ongoing biases and discrimination. With compelling storytelling and sophisticated analysis, Discrimination Laundering provocatively shows that, perversely, the law increasingly shields organizations from responsibility for patterned institutional discrimination. Green skillfully weaves together developments in law, legal scholarship, and social science in a way that deepens and furthers the debate about workplace equality. The book is important, imaginative, and a must-read for anyone who cares about next generation anti-discrimination policies."
Orly Lobel, University of San Diego

From the Publisher