Discrimination in Hiring
International workshop (Louvain-la-Neuve/Brussels)
October 15-16
Université catholique de Louvain
As part of the Bernheim Course « Social Responsibility in Econmic Life » (ESPO2212)
Convenor : Axel Gosseries
This workshop will bridge perspectives from philosophy, law and the social sciences on discrimination in hiring. The aim is to find out when a differential treatment at the level of hiring becomes morally unacceptable.
We wish to thank here the Bernheim foundation and the LSM International Chair for their financial support.
Registration free of charge but obligatory by mail to Therese Davio no later than 13 October
October 15
Louvain-la-Neuve, Salle Oleffe
Chairperson: Annabelle Lever
I - 14h-15h15 - Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen (Politics, Aahrus, Denmark)
Intentions and discrimination in hiring
Fundamentally, intentions do not matter to the permissibility of actions, according to Thomas Scanlon. Yet, discriminatory intentions seem essential to certain kinds of discrimination in hiring and firing and, according to some accounts, something in virtue of which direct discrimination on the job market is distinctively morally wrong. Scanlon's account of the wrongness of discrimination attempts to accommodate this view through the notion of the expressive meaning of discriminatory acts and a certain view about how permissibility relates to the meaning of actions. My paper explores the strengths and weaknesses of this account.
Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen is professor of political philosophy at the department of politics, University of Aarhus, Denmark. His work focuses on egalitarianism, moral responsibility, deontology, and discrimination. Main publications include: Lippert-Rasmussen, K., Holtug, N., Lægaard, S. (eds.) 2009, Nationalism and Multiculturalism in a World of Immigration (Macmillan, 2009), “Reaction Qualifications Revisited”, Social Philosophy and Practice (2009), "Against Self-Ownership", Philosophy and Public Affairs (2008), "Nothing Personal: On Statistical Discrimination", Journal of Political Philosophy (2007). He is an associate editor of Ethics. E-mail: lippert@ps.au.dk
Discussant : Paolo Piacquadio (UCL, CORE)
II. 15h15-16h45 – Shlomi Segall (Politics and PPE, Hebrew University of Jerusalem)
Should the Best Qualified be appointed?
Does justice require appointing the best qualified? This paper examines the various arguments prevalent in the literature that argue that justice requires filling jobs according to skills. It concludes that all of these arguments are vulnerable in one way or another and fail to justify appointing the best qualified as a requirement of justice. Instead, the paper examines the implications of adopting an alternative view of justice in hiring, one that does not view meritocracy as a requirement of justice. In effect, the position I adopt and examine proposes allocating jobs according to needs rather than skills. This of course does not mean that we ought to reject giving some consideration to skills in filling jobs. It rather means that those reasons are ones that are external to justice, and thus ought to be traded off with it. An important advantage of the proposed (essentially luck egalitarian) account of justice in hiring is that it is able to explain something which most other egalitarian account struggle with, namely affirmative action. The paper concludes in examining a potential objection, namely that the proposed luck egalitarian account empties the once glorified notion of ‘levelling the playing field’ of much of its content. I argue that even if this is the case it might not, after all, be such a regrettable outcome.
Shlomi Segall is a lecturer in the program of Politics, Economics, & Philosophy (PPE) at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His main research interests are in egalitarian theory and in the ethics of health. His book, Health, Luck, and Justice will be published this fall by Princeton University Press. shlomi.segall@huji.ac.il
Discussant: Nicholas Vrousalis (Chaire Hoover (UCL), ARC Post-Doc Fellow). E-mail: nicholas.vrousalis@uclouvain.be
III. 17h-18h15 – Matthew Clayton (Politics, Warwick)
Meritocracy in selection for higher education and employment
A common view holds that, in hiring or selection for higher education, the best qualified are wronged if they lose out to less qualified candidates. This paper evaluates that view by distinguishing different ways in which selection in education and employment can be unjust. It goes on to challenge certain desert-based arguments for hiring the best qualified and provides a partial defence of selecting less qualified candidates.
Matthew Clayton is Associate Professor of Political Theory at the University of Warwick. He works on issues concerning distributive justice and contemporary liberal political philosophy. He is the author of Justice and Legitimacy in Upbringing (OUP, 2006) and co-edited The Ideal of Equality (Palgrave, 2002) and Social Justice (Blackwell, 2004). E-mail: M.G.Clayton@warwick.ac.uk
Discussant: Enrico Biale
October 16
Académie Royale de Belgique (Brussels)
Salle Baudouin
Morning Session
Chairperson : Dr. Manal El Abboubi (Management, UCL & Belgacom)
I. 9h30-10h45 - Geert Demuijnck (EDHEC Business School – Lille)
Non discrimination in the labour market.
Discrimination in the labour market on the basis of ethnic background is widely observed, despite anti-discrimination legislation and the existence of specific institutions which provide legal assistance to victims of discrimination. Various explanations have been given to account for the persistence of discrimination in the labour market: the limited effectiveness of regulation and punitive action, the different discrimination mechanisms that do not conflict with economic rationality (despite Gary Becker’s general optimistic picture), the influence of social-psychological mechanisms, etc. They suggest that, without proactive behaviour of private actors, discrimination may prevail for a long time.
In this paper, I will argue that substantive equality of opportunity in the labour market is typically an issue with respect to which the notion of business ethics makes sense. Political philosophers are mostly sceptical about attributing moral responsibilities to economic agents in a competitive market, often with reason. In this case however, there is a case for corporate social responsibility. The paper defends a ‘division of labour’ concerning the implementation of non discrimination norms. Insofar as political measures seem limited in effect, and insofar as large economic agents like corporations can influence mentalities at a non prohibitive cost, the latter may legitimately be held responsible for omitting or for implementing diversity policies.
Geert Demuijnck is a philosopher and an economist. He teaches economic ethics and political philosophy at EDHEC Business School. His research interests are in distributive justice. He has published articles in journals such as Ethical Perspectives and J. of Business Ethics.
Discussant : Sylvie Loriaux
II. 11h-12h45 – Pascale Petit (Université d’Evry (Paris))
Cross Effects of Gender, Origin, Location and Mobility on Hiring Discrimination: Three Field Experiments on High Skilled Job Offers (Petit et al. )
Using experimental data collected in 2009 through three field experiments, we estimate 1) cross effects of gender, origin, place of residence in a privileged or underprivileged city on hiring discrimination, 2) cross effects of gender and mobility on job access gap, 3) cross effects of gender and origin on hiring discrimination. We have used correspondence testing method to collect data. We have built the CV and letters of application of fictive applicants and we have sent them simultaneously to the same job offers. These applications were similar except for a characteristic: gender, origin, place of residence, etc. To evaluate hiring discrimination on collected data, we use appropriate econometric methods. In particular, we estimate whether hiring discrimination depends on job characteristics (distance place of residence/ place of work, labor contract, offered wage, etc.) and firm characteristics.
Pascale Petit is a labour economist, specialising in the evaluation of discrimination on the labor market. She builds and uses experimental data to estimate hiring discrimination and survey data to evaluate wage discrimination. She is an assistant professor at Evry University near Paris and she heads of the Group for the evaluation of the sources of hiring discriminations (GEODE), located at the Centre d’Etudes de l’Emploi. Her publications include articles in the Annales d’économie et de statistique and Labour Economics. E-mail: pascale.petit@univ-evry.fr
Discussant: Axel Gosseries
Afternoon session
Chairperson: Eszter Kollar
I. 14h-15h15. Daniel Sabbagh (Sciences-Po Paris)
Employment discrimination in the US Supreme Court’s Case Law: The Rise and Fall of the Disparate Impact Paradigm?
Since the landmark case of Griggs v. Duke Power Company in 1971, in the employment field, the US Supreme Court has defined the concept of discrimination as covering all kinds of indirect (“disparate impact”) discrimination. From then on, recruitment practices that do not rely on any of the unlawful grounds for employment decisions enumerated in Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act (race, colour, religion, sex or national origin) yet work to the disadvantage of a disproportionate number of minority group members (whether intentionally or not) have been held to be illegal, unless they can be defended as a matter of “business necessity”. Still, in domains other than employment (higher education and public contracting), a backlash against affirmative action has been unfolding since the second half of the 1990s, with limited yet significant success. The paper will explore the evolving nature of the connection(s) between those two developments – or lack thereof – in light of the 2009 case Ricci v. DeStefano, with a view to answering the following question: are we now witnessing the demise of the theory of discrimination as disparate impact as a further step in the process of doing away with race-based affirmative action programs?
Daniel Sabbagh is a Senior Research Fellow at the Centre d'études et de recherches internationales (Sciences Po/CERI). He is the author of L'Égalité par le droit: les paradoxes de la discrimination positive aux États-Unis (Paris, Économica, 2003; François Furet Book Award 2004), an updated and partial translation of which was published under the title Equality and Transparency: A Strategic Perspective on Affirmative Action in American Law (New York, Palgrave, 2007). His work deals with antidiscrimination and affirmative action policies, from a comparative and interdisciplinary perspective. He teaches at Sciences Po. Along with sociologists Devah Pager and Agnès van Zanten, he is a member of the steering committee of the French American Foundation’s Equality of Opportunity program. E-mail: sabbagh@ceri-sciences-po.org
Discussant: Denis Martin (European Commission & UCL)
Denis Martin is a member of the Legal Service of the European Commission and professor at the University of Louvain (UCL). He works on issues concerning free movement of persons as well as on those linked to the application of the principle of equality in the various areas of Community law. He is the author of The Free Movement of Persons Within the EU (Bruylant, 1995 & Butteworths, 1996) and of Egalité et non-discrimination dans la jurisprudence communautaire - Etude critique à la lumière d'une approche comparatiste (Bruylant, 2006). E-mail: denis.martin@ec.europa.eu
II. 15h30-16h45 - Christian Bayart
Christian Bayart is a partner with Allen & Overy LLP where he heads the "Employment & Benefits" department in the Antwerp office. He has a particular interest in employment matters related to business reorganisations (M&A, outsourcing, collective dismissal and closure), the statute of managers, international employment, employee benefits and occupational pensions. Christian publishes and regularly lectures on employment law and is a research fellow at the University of Antwerpen. Amongst others, he published a standard work on European and Belgian employment discrimination law.Discussant: Annabelle Lever (Univ. of Manchester/Chaire Hoover)
Discussant: Annabelle Lever is a Research Fellow in Bioethics at the Institute in Science, Ethics and Innovation at Manchester School of Law and will be a Hoover Fellow at the Hoover Institute in Spring 2010. She has published widely on privacy, sexual and racial equality, democracy and intellectual property. Her latest research on compulsory voting and judicial review can be found in politics, and will be published by the British Journal of Political Science, and Perspectives on Politics. On Privacy will be published by Routlege in 2010. She is also editing Philosophy and Intellectual Property, for CUP and writing Contemporary Democratic Theory: A Critical Introduction for OUP.
III. 17h-18h15 – Mark Heemskerk (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam)
Age discrimination: recruitment and selection from a legal point of view
In this paper I will lay out the legal framework of age discrimination in hiring. I will analyse the European Age Discrimination Directive and present case law from the European Court of Justice as well as the Dutch perspective and experiences so far. I will show in this paper that age discrimination is and should be treated differently from other discrimination grounds, such as racial or gender discrimination.
Mark Heemskerk is head researcher of the Knowledge Center for Older Workers at the Vrije Universiteit of Amsterdam as well as a lawyer for Houthoff Buruma N.V. In 2009, he published his legal Ph.D. research on the labour participation of older workers. He also has a degree in economics. He publishes on a regular basis in various journals on employment and pension and is a fellow of the Expert Centre Pension Law of the Vrije Universiteit. He also works. Mark specializes in age discrimination, ageing, dismissal- and pension law.
E-mail : m.heemskerk@rechten.vu.nl
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