Legal Protection for the Individual Employee

This book is intended for courses on the individual rights of workers in the employment relationship, independent of courses on the law governing collective bargaining or employment discrimination. It can be used for one three credit survey course on employment law, or for two related courses on employment law and employee benefits, each of two credits. The book covers the full range of employment law subjects from pre-employment screening, individual employment contracts, the employment at-will doctrine, exceptions to the employment at?will doctrine, obligations of employees, monitoring and control of employees, the regulation of pay and hours of work (FLSA), the regulation of occupational safety and health (OSHA), state and federal regulation of workers compensation, unemployment compensation, and the regulation of employee benefits (ERISA). The book has been substantially updated from the last issue to facilitate teaching and to include such topics as: the Genetic Information Non-discrimination Act (GINA), employee privacy issues in the new information technology, the proposed restatement of employment law, and recent enactments in unemployment compensation and health care. Where appropriate, the book presents interdisciplinary discussions of employment law problems from historical, sociological and economic perspectives. Efforts were also made to include relevant empirical evidence on important employment law questions. A recurring theme in the book, especially in the introductory chapter and the chapters on individual employment contracts, is the historical tension in the United States between legal ideologies of free labor, i.e., of the law as conducing toward freedom in the contracting which is indifferent to outcome or of the law as conducing toward outcomes that conduce toward equality and fairness.