More and more the modern workplace faces challenges of diversity and employability. There is an increasingly insistent need to match workforce diversity, or workers' own characteristics and choices, with employers' organizational and business requirements. In this context, the notion of reasonable accommodation inevitably arises. Concepts such as 'adaptability' and 'employability' not only require workers to adapt to new labour market circumstances but are also directed towards employers' duties to accommodate work and the workplace to the worker's situation. This book is the first study to analyse, at a global scale, how employment discrimination law gives shape to an accommodated workplace in three main areas of interest: age, disability, and religion/belief. Sixteen prominent labour and employment law scholars offer in-depth perspectives from Belgium, the Netherlands, France, Sweden, Russia, Israel, Canada, the United States, South Africa, and Australia. Each report fully integrates relevant legislation, case law, and legal doctrine and follows the same structure to allow easy comparisons across jurisdictions. Attention is also given to the roles of European Union law and the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. Issues and topics covered include the following: - the scope of 'accommodation'; - 'reasonable' defined; - recognized business requirements that may override the duty to accommodate; - when employers' neutrality policies to avoid accusations of discrimination may constitute indirect discrimination; - use of integration or re-integration strategies to accommodate disabled/incapable workers; - use of 'exit gateways' that enable employers to avoid liability in cases of disability discrimination; - when employers must take into account workers' family lives; and - when an obligation to reclassify a worker exists. These articles were originally presented as papers at the 2015 meeting of the International Association of Labour Law Journals hosted by the Institute for Labour Law of the University of Leuven. Ultimately the book makes clear that reasonable accommodation cannot be narrowed down to a formal anti-discrimination perspective but requires an integrative logic that can grow in a broader labour law context. As a compelling analysis of whether the idea of reasonable accommodation is winning ground in labour law in today's world, this book will prove of immeasurable value to labour and employment lawyers and judges, as well as to corporate counsel and academics in the field.

Mirroring a worldwide phenomenon in industrialized nations, the U.S. is experiencing a change in its demographic structure known as population aging. Concern about the aging population tends to focus on the adequacy of Medicare and Social Security, retirement of older Americans, and the need to identify policies, programs, and strategies that address the health and safety needs of older workers. Older workers differ from their younger counterparts in a variety of physical, psychological, and social factors. Evaluating the extent, causes, and effects of these factors and improving the research and data systems necessary to address the health and safety needs of older workers may significantly impact both their ability to remain in the workforce and their well being in retirement. Health and Safety Needs of Older Workers provides an image of what is currently known about the health and safety needs of older workers and the research needed to encourage social polices that guarantee older workers a meaningful share of the nation's work opportunities.

The term ‘work-life balance’ refers to the relationship between paid work in all of its various forms and personal life, which includes family but is not limited to it. In addition, gender permeates every aspect of this relationship. This volume brings together a wide range of perspectives from a number of different disciplines, presenting research ndings and their implications for policy at all levels (national, sectoral, enterprise, workplace). Collectively, the contributors seek to close the gap between research and policy with the intent of building a better work-life balance regime for workers across a variety of personal circumstances, needs, and preferences. Among the issues and topics covered are the following: – differences and similarities between men and women and particularly between mothers and fathers in their work choices; – ‘third shift’ work (work at home at night or during weekends); – effect of the extent to which employers perceive management of this process to be a ‘burden’; – employers’ exploitation of the psychological interconnection between masculinity and breadwinning; – organisational culture that is more available for supervisors than for rank and le workers; – weak enforcement mechanisms and token penalties for non-compliance by employers; – trade unions as the best hope for precarious workers to improve work-life balance; – crowd-work (on-demand performance of tasks by persons selected remotely through online platforms from a large pool of potential and generic workers); – an example of how to use work-life balance insights to evaluate the law; – collective self-scheduling; – employers’ duty to accommodate; and – nancial hardship as a serious threat to work-life balance. As it has been shown clearly that work-life con ict is associated with negative health outcomes, exacerbates gender inequalities, and many other concerns, this unusually rich collection of essays will resonate particularly with concerned lawyers and legal academics who ask what work-life balance literature has to offer and how law should respond.

Places notions of disability at the center of higher education and argues that inclusiveness allows for a better education for everyone

Spread out over many years and many different publications, the late author and activist Marta Russell wrote a number of groundbreaking and insightful essays on the nature of disability and oppression under capitalism. In this volume, Russell’s various essays are brought together in one place in order to provide a useful and expansive resource to those interested in better understanding the ways in which the modern phenomenon of disability is shaped by capitalist economic and social relations. The essays range in analysis from the theoretical to the topical, including but not limited to: the emergence of disability as a “human category” rooted in the rise of industrial capitalism and the transformation of the conditions of work, family, and society corresponding thereto; a critique of the shortcomings of a purely “civil rights approach” to addressing the persistence of disability oppression in the economic sphere, with a particular focus on the legacy of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990; an examination of the changing position of disabled people within the overall system of capitalist production utilizing the Marxist economic concepts of the reserve army of the unemployed, the labor theory of value, and the exploitation of wage-labor; the effects of neoliberal capitalist policies on the living conditions and social position of disabled people as it pertains to welfare, income assistance, health care, and other social security programs; imperialism and war as a factor in the further oppression and immiseration of disabled people within the United States and globally; and the need to build unity against the divisive tendencies which hide the common economic interest shared between disabled people and the often highly-exploited direct care workers who provide services to the former.