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Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com
The author of The Litigation Explosion returns with a forceful account of how employment law increasingly makes mediocrity the norm of the American workplace. Thanks to the unintended consequences of well-meaning laws such as the Americans with Disabilities Act, it is now increasingly difficult to fire slacking employees for perfectly justifiable reasons. Olson tells story after story of abuse, including one in which a jury awarded nearly $200,000 to a man fired for showing up late to work 215 times in a two-year period. This hurts employers who need productive staffs and insults hard-working people everywhere. The Excuse Factory is hands-down one of the best books available on America's faltering legal system. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Commentary Magazine, Franklin Hunt
Over the past several decades, the erosion of the common-law doctrine of "employment at will," and the passage of new or the reinterpretation of old statutes like the Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967, the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, and the several civil-rights acts, has created what Walter K. Olson calls a "new" employment law. This law not only generates a flood of excuses for failings on the job, but has also transformed the workplace and labor market.
The author of The Litigation Explosion returns with a forceful account of how employment law increasingly makes mediocrity the norm of the American workplace. Thanks to the unintended consequences of well-meaning laws such as the Americans with Disabilities Act, it is now increasingly difficult to fire slacking employees for perfectly justifiable reasons. Olson tells story after story of abuse, including one in which a jury awarded nearly $200,000 to a man fired for showing up late to work 215 times in a two-year period. This hurts employers who need productive staffs and insults hard-working people everywhere. The Excuse Factory is hands-down one of the best books available on America's faltering legal system. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Commentary Magazine, Franklin Hunt
Over the past several decades, the erosion of the common-law doctrine of "employment at will," and the passage of new or the reinterpretation of old statutes like the Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967, the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, and the several civil-rights acts, has created what Walter K. Olson calls a "new" employment law. This law not only generates a flood of excuses for failings on the job, but has also transformed the workplace and labor market.
Olson believes that the new employment law will in time produce European-style rigidities in the labor market, with permanent high unemployment and a large measure of inefficiency and waste. The net effect is the creation of a zero-sum lottery in which a lucky few (and their even luckier lawyers) sometimes receive fabulous windfalls while the cost of employing everyone else rises.
But the real surprise of Olson's book concerns the ways being found to avoid many of the new law's rigidities. Small employers attempt to keep the number of their workers below the threshold at which the rules apply. Some companies also make across-the-board reductions in their labor force to avoid having to justify the discharge of particular troublesome employees. More employers engage temporary workers. Perhaps most significantly, employers are factoring the higher costs of the new law into wages, thereby shifting the burdens to other employees. Thus does bad law not only fail to achieve its primary purpose, but creates ever widening distortions in our economic and social life.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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