Reforming Age Discrimination Law: Beyond Individual Enforcement

by Alysia Blackham

Overview

Age is a critical issue for labour market policy. Both younger and older workers experience significant challenges at work. Despite the introduction of age discrimination laws, ageism remains prevalent.
Reforming Age Discrimination Law offers a roadmap for the future development of age discrimination law in common law countries, to better address workplace ageism. Drawing on theoretical, doctrinal, and empirical legal scholarship, and comparative perspectives from the United Kingdom, Australia, and Canada, the book provides a socio-legal critique of existing age discrimination laws and their enforcement and proposes concrete suggestions for legal reform and change. Building on legal and interdisciplinary insights, it examines the challenges and limitations of existing legal frameworks and the individual enforcement model for addressing age discrimination in employment. It also maps the stages of claiming, negotiation, or alternative dispute resolution, and hearing and judgment, using mixed-method case studies of the enforcement of age discrimination law in the United Kingdom and Australia.

This volume puts forward a four-fold model of reform which aims to improve the individual enforcement model, strengthen positive equality duties, bolster the roles of statutory equality agencies, and enhance collective enforcement. It goes on to critically consider how these options might address the limits of existing laws, and the practical measures necessary to ensure their success and to move beyond the individual enforcement of age discrimination law.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780198859284
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	10/31/2022
Series:	Oxford Labour Law
Pages:	400
Product dimensions:	8.90(w) x 6.50(h) x 1.70(d)

About the Author

Dr Alysia Blackham is an Associate Professor at Melbourne Law School at the University of Melbourne. Alysia holds advanced degrees from the University of Melbourne, University of Sydney and Gonville, and Caius College at the University of Cambridge. She has held academic positions in Australia, Sweden, and the United Kingdom, including at Clare College, Cambridge, and as an Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Researcher. Prior to entering academia, Alysia worked as an employment law solicitor at Herbert Smith Freehills in Sydney, and advisor to the Senior Executive at the University of Technology, Sydney.

Table of Contents

1. The Enduring Challenge of Age DiscriminationPART 1: THE NORMATIVE FOUNDATION OF AGE DISCRIMINATION LAW AND ITS ENFORCEMENT2. Towards a Theory of Age Discrimination Law: The Normative Basis for Preventing Age Discrimination3. Models for Enforcing Age Discrimination LawPART 2: ENFORCING AGE DISCRIMINATION LAW: EMPIRICAL CASE STUDIES4. Claiming5. Negotiation and Alternative Dispute Resolution6. Hearing and JudgmentPART 3: BEYOND INDIVIDUAL ENFORCEMENT7. Positive Duties8. Agency Enforcement9. Collective Enforcement10. Conclusion: Reforming Age Discrimination Law

Editorial Reviews

"This is a comprehensive, rigorous and meticulously drawn socio-legal study of the legal response to age discrimination in the workplace, which offers important analysis of a significant current problem in Australian society. The study is very well researched, and built from and situated appropriately in a strong, relevant and credible literature base. It is novel through applying an extremely well designed and sophisticated methodology, involving mixed methods, including qualitative and quantitative methods, doctrinal analysis and the analysis ofcomparative and empirical data. This study makes a substantive contribution to the literature, offering a fresh and original analysis of empirical and comparative data alongside more conventional doctrinal and qualitative analyses." — 2022 Scholarly Monograph/Book Prize, Law and Society Association of Australia and New Zealand

"In Reforming Age Discrimination Law: Beyond Individual Enforcement Alysia Blackham seeks to find solutions to what has proven to be an intractable problem in anti-discrimination law for many years: the weak enforcement of age discrimination law cases. The book presents an account of the weaknesses of individual enforcement of non-discrimination principles on grounds of age while also modelling complementary solutions from collective enforcement." — Elaine Dewhurst, Modern Law Review

From the Publisher