Q: What is the focus of the panel on which you are speaking?
A: The panel is on “Variation in Access to Justice in Workplace Dispute Resolution”.
Q: How does your current work or research connect to this panel?
A: I am presenting a paper that develops a new theoretical model for thinking about individual employment rights dispute resolution. This comes out of a lot of ongoing research that I have done in this area.
Q: What is significant about this work; how is it relevant to today’s issues in the workplace?
A: This paper is really for an academic audience. What I am trying to do is shift the perspectives of the industrial relations field that has traditionally focused on unionized workplaces and collective bargaining to focus more on the issues arising in individual rights based employment relations. I am also trying to suggest an alternative to the more legally based approaches usually used to analyze these issues. I am also trying to raise the issue of inequality in thinking about workplace dispute resolution. This builds off the growing body of work on economic inequality, which has gotten a lot of attention recently particularly with Picketty’s new book on Capital in the 21st Century.
Q: How will attending LERA help move your work forward?
A: LERA is the leading academic conference in the labor and employment relations field so is a chance to speak to a wide range of academics in our field.