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What role has litigation played in the struggle for equal pay between women and men? In Rights at Work, Michael W. McCann explains how wage discrimination battles have raised public legal consciousness and helped reform activists mobilize working women in the pay equity movement over the past two decades.

Rights at Work explores the political strategies in more than a dozen pay equity struggles since the late 1970s, including battles of state employees in Washington and Connecticut, as well as city employees in San Jose and Los Angeles. Relying on interviews with over 140 union and feminist activists, McCann shows that, even when the courts failed to correct wage discrimination, litigation and other forms of legal advocacy provided reformers with the legal discourse--the understanding of legal rights and their constraints--for defining and advancing their cause.

Rights at Work offers new insight into the relation between law and social change--the ways in which grass roots social movements work within legal rights traditions to promote progressive reform.

Tabla de contenidos provista por Syndetics

• Preface
• Acronyms
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Pay Equity as Public Policy
• 3 Law as a Catalyst
• 4 The Social Context of Legal Mobilization
• 5 Compelling Concessions: Law as a Club
• 6 Implementation in the Dimming Shadows of Law
• 7 Rights Consciousness and Social Change
• 8 Legal Mobilization and Political Struggle
• Appendixes
• References
• Index

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CHOICE Review

Employing a "cultural understanding of law," McCann reconceptualizes the critical theory of law. He proposes a legal mobilization framework as an alternative to neorealist and structuralist approaches and applies this "bottom-up" research strategy to the women's pay equity movement. Building on critical legal scholarship such as Stuart Scheingold's The Politics of Rights (CH, Apr'75), McCann gives a nuanced account of the role played by law as "contested terrain" in reform efforts. Although less academic prose and a fuller narrative of the struggle for comparable worth would have enhanced the book's appeal for undergraduates, serious readers will find fascinating data on this reform movement and a model of innovative empirical social science methodology. The book also provides a concise introduction to the theoretical literature on law and social change and a guide to the highly politicized debate over "rights talk," generally concluding that legal mobilization strategies have more to offer reform movements than previous critical scholarship contended. Recommended for law as well as for social science collections, upper-division undergraduate through faculty.

Notas de autor provistas por Syndetics

Michael W. McCann is chair and professor in the department of political science at the University of Wisconsin. He is the author of Taking Reform Seriously: Perspectives on Public Interest Liberalism .