Thoughts About Violence Against Trafficked Women on International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women

November 25th is designated by the United Nations as “International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women.”  The date was selected to “commemorate the lives of the Mirabal sisters,” who were assassinated on November 25, 1960 during the Trujillo dictatorship, as explained in the General Assembly resolution designating the day:

Previously, 25 November was observed in Latin America and a growing number of other countries around the world as “International Day Against Violence Against Women”. With no standard title, it was also referred to as “No Violence Against Women Day” and the “Day to End Violence Against Women”. It was first declared by the first Feminist Encuentro for Latin America and the Caribbean held in Bogota, Colombia (18 to 21 July 1981). At that Encuentro women systematically denounced gender violence from domestic battery, to rape and sexual harassment, to state violence including torture and abuses of women political prisoners. The date was chosen to commemorate the lives of the Mirabal sisters. It originally marked the day that the three Mirabal sisters from the Dominican Republic were violently assassinated in 1960 during the Trujillo dictatorship (Rafael Trujillo 1930-1961). The day was used to pay tribute to the Mirabal sisters, as well as global recognition of gender violence.

The resolution “[i]nvites, as appropriate, Governments, the relevant agencies, bodies, funds and programmes of the United Nations system, and other international organizations and non-governmental organizations, to organize on that day activities designed to raise public awareness of the problem of violence against women.”  

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As Honest As We Like to Think We Are

So . . . if no one knew when you lied, would you do it? Would you lie to save money? Would you lie to save your client money? Would the amount of money matter?

I have often taught negotiation ethics using Richard Shell’s division of people: the idealists, the pragmatists, and the poker-players. The poker-players assume that everyone who negotiates views it as a game: we all know that bluffing and puffing are part of the system -– caveat emptor. The pragmatists think that lying is generally unwise -– you’ll be found out, it’s not worth it, etc. The final school is the idealists -– lying is wrong and you shouldn’t do it.

It is wonderful when you can find a real-life example of idealistic telling-the-truth, and so I connect here to a lovely story about J.P. Hayes, a golf player. He played a nonconforming ball for a single hole of the second stage of the PGA Qualifying Tournament. He realized it more than a day after the “violation,” called it on himself, and disqualified himself from the tournament. This has, according to Yahoo, some severe career-altering effects down the line.

Now, the easy move here would be to either do nothing or blame the caddy. Hayes rose above both those temptations, putting all the blame on himself and asserting that everybody else on the PGA in his shoes would have done the exact same thing. We’ll never know, but let’s hope so.

Also, Hayes already has more than $7 million in career earnings, so it’s not like he’d consigned himself to another year working the counter at the Quik Stop. But still, knowing you’re taking yourself out of the running for a year of career stability and wealth takes some serious situational ethics.

But, as J.P. puts it, at least he can sleep at night. What would you have done?

Cross posted at Indisputably.

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New York Nuisance Law Survives NLRA Preemption

Newyork Thanks to Bill Herbert (Deputy Chair and Counsel to the New York PERB) for letting us know about a recent New York Court of Appeals ruling concerning whether a nuisance suit under New York law was preempted by the NLRA.  Readers will recall that Prof. Hirsch and I debated the relationship between the NLRA and state laws in our recent on-line debate in PENNumbra and it is a topic I recently wrote on separately in the captive audience meeting context.

In this case, Helmsley-Spear, Inc. v. Fishman, 08-164 (Nov. 24, 2008), the New York Court of Appeals (the state’s highest court) found in a 4-2 decision (one Justice not participating) that the plaintiffs’ private nuisance cause of action was not preempted by the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA).  More specifically, the court found that:

[E]ven if one were to assume that the drumming [outside of the building by the union] constituted arguably “protected” conduct under the NLRA, as the Union argues and the Appellate Division implied, it does not necessarily follow that our state courts are foreclosed from adjudicating plaintiffs’ claim. This point was made clear in Sears, Roebuck & Co., where the United States Supreme Court held that a state trespass claim lodged by an employer against picketers — challenging the location of the picketing as opposed to the picketing itself — was not preempted by the NLRA even though trespass was arguably protected under the Act (436 US at 198-204) . . . .

Balancing the state interest in adjudicating private nuisance claims against the interference with the NLRB’s ability to determine matters committed to it by the NLRA and the risk that state courts will prohibit conduct otherwise protected by the Act, we conclude that Congress did not intend to preempt the jurisdiction of state courts to adjudicate the tortious conduct alleged here.

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