Vicki Schultz

Life's Work

This Essay develops a vision of social justice grounded in the redistribution and restructuring of paid work. Work is a site of deep self-formation offering rich opportunities for human flourishing or devastation. In the United States, paid work has been central to citizenship, community, and personal identity: It is largely through the work we do for a living that most of us develop into the men and women we see ourselves (and others see us) as being. Although family-wage thinking has blinded society to the fact that this is true for women, research shows that paid work is vital to women (as it is to men); women who work for a living are better off than other women on a variety of dimensions, despite the fact that women still experience sex discrimination at work. Currently, however, transformations in the structure of work are increasing insecurity and deepening inequality for all but those at the top; many once privileged workers now face conditions akin to those that women and disadvantaged men have long confronted. These trends present deep challenges, but they also provide us with the opportunity to reshape social life by democratizing work. Schultz argues that employment discrimination alone is not capable of generating the needed reforms. Instead, we must remake our laws and culture to create a world in which everyone has the right to participate meaningfully in life-sustaining work, with the social support necessary to do so. She elaborates on the concept of a lifes work to describe the central elements of a utopian vision in which women and men from all walks of life can work alongside each other as equals, pursuing common projects and forging connected lives. She calls upon feminists to forego a narrow identity politics in favor of joining with a broad array of other groups to fashion a social order in which work provides a foundation for egalitarian conceptions of citizenship and care. This approach demands that we consider seriously such measures as job creation programs, wage subsidies for workers, universal child care and health care programs, enhanced forms of employee representation, periodic sabbaticals and a reduced workweek for everyone.

Sexual Harassment: Legal Perspectives

After a remarkably swift development in law and popular consciousness, the concept of sexual harassment has become the subject of controversy and debate. Sexual harassment is a legal concept that originated in the United States in the 1970s, when feminists succeeded in establishing it as a form of sex discrimination prohibited by national employment discrimination laws. The law defines harassment in sexual terms: Harassment consists of powerful men directing unwanted sexual advances toward less powerful women. By the late 1980s and early 1990s, this sexual view of harassment had been consolidated in law, media representation, social science research, organizational practice, and everyday thought. Recently, however, this view has come under challenge in the US among civil libertarians, feminists, and gay/lesbian theorists, many of whom have voiced concerns that the emphasis on curbing sexual conduct may penalize less mainstream workers who are viewed as sexually deviant such as sexual minorities, people of color, and working class men and women. Some feminists have also warned that the focus on sexuality neglects equally pernicious, non-sexual forms of gender-based harassment and discrimination designed to exclude and marginalize women (and many men) from the work they want to pursue. At the same time, as feminists and policymakers around the globe have begun to regulate harassment, many have imported into their own legal traditions a version of the US model now being reexamined. It is to be hoped that such new international efforts will pay heed to recent debates about workplace harassment in the US, and that US reformers will seek to learn from broader traditions of worker empowerment upon which other nations draw.