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Employment Rights

Ambiguity often shrouds the definitions of rights, and workers rights are no exception. In practice, rights are what courts, legislators, presidents, and governors say they are. For this reason, the issue of rights has always been subject to considerable debate, with equally compelling pros and cons on both sides.

Although rights are difficult to define, in general, they are claims against society recognized by governments and guaranteed by constitutions and laws. Rights accrue to the individual automatically: "An individual comes to possess rights because of membership in the group or category for whom such rights are defined; nothing further, such as a promise or performance on the part of the individual, is needed to establish access to or eligibility for the right."

Because worker rights in the United States were traditionally based on English common law, the concept of individual rights is a relatively recent phenomenon. Granted, as a result of the labor movement of the 1920s and 1930s, federal legislation recognized the rights of workers to unionize and engage in collective bargaining; however, these rights only benefitted a limited class of employees. Not until the civil rights legislation of the 1960s were employees empowered individually to enforce their rights against discriminatory employment practices: "The civil rights movement and the legislation it generated helped establish a mandate of fairness in the workplace that essentially ended employers' unrestricted authority over personnel decisions in the nonunion setting." Attorneys's creative applications of the concept of fairness and equity have extended the limits of civil rights legislation in numerous cases. Prior to the labor and civil rights movements, employment relations were based on the common law doctrine of employment-at-will, a relationship that employers could generally terminate without fear of repercussion.

Considerable debate cente...

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Employment Rights. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 09:54, March 29, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1682761.html