This panel will address the concept of solidarity in the law of equal employment opportunity. The relationship between equality and social cohesion is behind the new “post-racial” or “post-civil-rights” paradigm, and will be significant to the employment discrimination doctrine that evolves after Ricci v. DeStefano. Our aim is to generate an interdisciplinary conversation about the following set of questions: What is the relationship of solidarity to different understandings of equality? Why and how is solidarity important in the workplace? Does the enforcement of civil rights by racial minorities and women lead to balkanization in the workplace? To the extent that US employment discrimination law is thought to catalyze the promotion of diversity, does it foster bonds between individuals from different backgrounds in a pluralistic society? In what ways can we understand antidiscrimination law as promoting/forging solidarity in the workplace? Under what circumstances will antidiscrimination law threaten cohesion/solidarity?
This debate should generate questions about what we might mean by solidarity. For instance, does solidarity presuppose existing distributions and baselines or provide critical tools for describing and challenging them? What are the social, economic, and cultural forces that lead the redistributive function of employment discrimination law to be understood as a zero-sum game in the United States? In what ways have anticlassification/individualist or antisubordination/group status approaches to employment equality been concerned all along with questions of solidarity? Or, would a focus on solidarity change the logic of employment discrimination law? What tools does this inquiry into solidarity in the workplace give us for understanding current Title VII and Equal Protection doctrine, or for imagining changing doctrine?
Business Meeting at Program Conclusion.