Documents Barmes, Lizzie 5 results

"This article explores the implications for anti-discrimination law of management theorising about diversity. In the first main section we take an empirical study of diversity management in investment banks in the UK as the starting point for an exploration of the legal issues that flow from adoption by employers of diversity ideas. We expose certain tensions between the diversity model and the legal framework and make practical suggestions for reconciling the two approaches. We also set out attractive features of the diversity perspective for achieving equality at work and demonstrate that the law seems to be moving closer to this position. The second half of the essay is concerned with highlighting the main issues of principle that should be addressed if the law is helpfully to adapt to the diversity trend in management thinking."

"This article identifies disjunction between, on the one hand, recognition by the common law of the contract of employment of implied duties of trust, confidence and care, and, on the other hand, the liability and remedial rules that surround these obligations. The analysis suggests a need for legislative intervention, which it is argued should entail innovation in remedial design, the better to translate the standards set into changes in workplace conduct."

"In an empirical study of the interaction between law, adjudication, and conflicts about behaviour in the workplace, Lizzie Barmes analyses how labour and equality rights operate in practice in the UK. Arguing that individual employment rights have a Janus-faced quality, simultaneously challenging and sustaining existing distributions of power between management and employees, she calls for legal intervention at work to focus on resolving tensions between collective and individual concerns across the range of workplaces, and to stimulate the expression and reconciliation of different viewpoints in the implementation and enforcement of individual legal entitlements.

Based on extensive primary research, the volume surveys and analyses experiences and attitudes towards negative behaviour in the workplace, and explains relevant employment and equality law as it has developed from 1995 to the present day, covering the major case law and legislative developments over this time. This book provides qualitative analysis of authoritative UK judgments about behavioural conflict at work from 1995 to 2010, as well as of interviews with senior managers and senior lawyers, allowing the reader first-hand insight into the influence of law and legal process on problems and conflict at work."

"This article draws on qualitative analysis of a small interview study and of oral evidence to the Women and Equalities Select Committee (WESC) of the UK Parliament, to explore and contextualize the use in the United Kingdom of NDAs in settlements to silence allegations and experiences of sexual harassment and workplace misconduct. This demonstrates the central place of NDAs in the failure of individualist individualized workplace protections effectively to combat this behaviour. Several factors emerge as potentially significant to the ubiquity and substantive content of NDAs in settlements: the influence of modern, technologically inflected routinization and sheer paperwork within organizations and lawyering; interactions between the law in practice and long-standing economic, social and cultural means of subordination, including of women and racialized groups. Illustrations comprise, first, employers' systemic dominance, mediated by lawyers, being enacted and reinforced through frequent imposition of NDAs, including to protect serial wrongdoers, and, secondly, that the shame and career risk attached to people who experience and complain of ill treatment (not alleged wrongdoers) mean claimants themselves often need the protection of NDAs in settlements. Still, suggestions in the evidence of some organizations altering their use of NDAs provides an invaluable opportunity for future research to illuminate the drivers and long-term consequence of this legalized silencing and of what ought to be done about it. Organizational variety also shows that employers are already in a position differently to reconcile the innate tensions the data exposed between individual, employer, and societal interests in whether mistreatment at work is silenced or exposed. This leads to my final argument that, whatever legal reform occurs, employers and their lawyers ought already to take the obvious first step towards changing the culture, of shifting their default position away from routinely using law to silence complaints about sexual harassment and workplace misconduct. If employers are not even willing to take this small initial step, and their lawyers to back them up, this will raise serious questions about current public commitments finally to tackle workplace wrongdoing, and grave doubts that anything much is going to change in this dimension of working life."