Kramer: Employment Discrimination Harms Families

Zachary Kramer (Arkansas-Little Rock) has just posted on SSRN his article (forthcoming California L. Rev.) After Work.   Here's the abstract:

Employment discrimination scholarship tends to assume that the harms of employment discrimination are not borne beyond the walls of the workplace. This is a mistake. In this paper, I argue that employment discrimination harms employees' families. The centerpiece of my argument is a novel framework for conceptualizing the family harms of employment discrimination, which I call exporting. Exporting refers to the ways in which employees take their work out of the workplace and into their private lives (and vice versa). By approaching the work/family relationship from the perspective of exporting, I am able to develop an account of how employees take the effects of discrimination home with them after work. In addition, I show that existing employment discrimination doctrine—in particular the remedial provisions of Title VII—can and should capture family harms.

The "family harms"  Kramer describes include "disruption harm" (when an employee's experience at work disrupts her ability to interact with her family, such as when an employee is too stressed or distracted to play with her children or interact with her spouse) and "exclusion harm" (when an employee's work experience is so damaging that it leads him to exclude his family from work, such as when an employee refuses to bring his children to work or to work-related social functions for fear of exposing the children to discrimination).  These family harms are over & above the economic harms to the family caused by employment discrimination.

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