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'

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rural, underdeveloped locales should not be expected to compensate employees at the same rate as those who work in metropolitan areas. Wages must take into account cost of living differentials. Differences in pay frequently emerge in terms of seniority. In an auto assembly plant, for example, the new hire would not be paid the same rate as the experienced worker, even if both employees perform the same function. Market factors also come into play in determining compensation levels. At universities, faculty from the scientific disciplines are often paid at higher rates than humanities professors, despite the fact that each faculty member might carry identical teaching loads. The demand for scientific faculty is higher, which justifies the wage differential. In federal legislation that addresses the issue of equal pay "wage differences are allowed only if they are attributable to seniority, performance, or qualifications." A related issue to that of equal pay for equal work is that of comparable worth. The theory of equal pay for comparable work contends that individuals should receive equal pay dependent on the performance of tasks that are equally important to society. Thus, scientific faculty would be paid at the sa

Category: Government - E