Wisconsin Set to Pass Enhanced Employment Discrimination Law

WISCTV.com is reporting that the State of Wisconsin is close to passing a bill that would permit compensatory and punitive damages for violations of the Wisconsin’s state employment discrimination law:

A bill designed to stiffen penalties for employer discrimination passed the state Assembly on Wednesday, [April 29th].

The bill requires companies that discriminate against their workers to pay compensatory and punitive damages. This is a step above the current law, which lets the state order companies to rehire workers and pay back pay, along with attorney fees. This bill applies to employers who discriminate based on race, gender and other factors.

Democratic supporters say this bill punishes discrimination, while Republican critics say it will increase lawsuits and hurt businesses.The bill now goes to Gov. Jim Doyle for his signature as both the state Senate and Assembly have both approved it.

Actually, this amendment to the Wisconsin law is consistent with what happened to federal Title VII law after passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1991 (CRA of 1991). 

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You’ve Got @greement–Email Negotiation Advice

This past semester, my students participated in an email negotiation with students from Hastings and Boalt law schools which turned out to be quite interesting for them and for me reading their journals afterwards.  It is always lovely to write an article — it’s even nicer to see that what you write might actually be happening in reality as well!  In a chapter entitled You’ve Got Agreement: Negoti@ting via Email in the recently published book Rethinking Negotiation Teaching,  Noam Ebner and others (including me) review some of the advantages and disadvantages to email negotiation, many of which were experienced by my students.

The difference in the type of media meant that students really needed to engage in conscious “shmoozing” to build rapport.  We discovered that one Hastings student was actually a Marquette alum — building instant rapport — while other overly brusque email exchanges did not work as well.  Tone in email matters.  Students also appreciated the asynchronous part of email negotiations.  They could think, do some research, and then email back to their counterparts.  They also noted when they got in a good email rhythm with the other negotiator.  At the same time, email also made it easier to lose touch and for the negotiation to take longer than it would have otherwise.

We also saw some other effects from the email negotiation — diminished information exchange and diminished trust — that students needed to overcome.  But, having talked about this in advance, students knew that they would need to work at this.  All of which goes to the point that this was a very worthwhile exercise and practice. 

As the New York Times wrote about last month in a very good article, even real estate deals are being done over email. 

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Little Reforms Have Big Implications at SEC

The Director of the Securities and Exchange Commission’s 21st Century Disclosure Initiative, Dr. Bill Lutz, was on the Marquette University campus May 4.  He was kind enough to give an update on the Initiative over lunch to a group of faculty from the Law School and the College of Business Administration.  Dr. Lutz is an interesting choice to lead the SEC’s effort to reconceptualize the manner in which the agency collects, analyzes, and disseminates financial information.  He is Professor of English emeritus at Rutgers University, and one rarely thinks of the words “English language” and Form 10-K in the same breath.

The 21st Century Disclosure Initiative finished its Report in January 2009.  You can read the Report here: www.sec.gov/spotlight/disclosureinitiative/report.shtml.  The recommendations in the Report are both modest and potentially revolutionary.  Today the SEC continues to operate under the same system of preparing and filing specific disclosure documents such as annual reports and quarterly reports that was instituted in 1934.  In the 1990s, the Commission adopted EDGAR, a system for filing and viewing each individual report electronically.  However, the “document centric” format remains and anyone searching for specific items of company data today on EDGAR still has to typically scroll through hundreds of pages to find what they are looking for.

The Report by the Initiative proposes the adoption of company-specific databases for each company required to file reports with the SEC. 

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