Joshua P. Fershee and Kendra Huard Fershee will speak at United Association for Labor Education Conference.

Associate Dean for Academic Affairs and Research, Associate Professor of Law Joshua P. Fershee and Assistant Professor of Law Kendra Huard Fershee will speak at the United Association for Labor Education Conference: Subterranean Fire: The Labor Movement in Hard Times on Friday, March 23, 2012 on the panel The Role of Law in Creating the Good Employer.

Joshua P. Fershee will speak on Energy Employers where he states that in the past five years, the energy industry has been touted as the both the consummate evil actor and the great savior in a down economy. The Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico was one of the worst environmental disasters in history, and it began as a tragic failure of an employer to its employees. In contrast, states like North Dakota and West Virginia, which are strong energy producing states, have low unemployment rates and are the exception to rule of state budget deficits and falling home values. So which is it, bad employer or good employer? The answer is complicated, but an employer is neither inherently bad because an accident happened, nor inherently good because its employees are numerous and (at least comparably) wealthy. The focus here, then, will be identifying the real impacts of energy employers, beyond mere economics, and the potential impact those employers can have on the economy, and, in turn, the greater labor market.

Kendra Huard Fershee will present The Pregnant Employee and Her "Good Employer" which will explore what it means to a pregnant employee to work for a “good employer”? At first blush, it would seem that the good employer of a pregnant employee would be extremely flexible with that employee when determining time off during and after her pregnancy, allowing her to accumulate seniority during her maternity leave, accommodating disability needs that may arise from the pregnancy, avoiding assumptions that pregnancy will always result in a disability (and therefore including the pregnant employee in all facets of her employment), and more. But if an employer does all of those things for its pregnant employee, is it a good employer to all of its employees?

If the accommodations given to pregnant employees increase the responsibilities and shared work burdens of other employees, the good employer of the pregnant employee likely would become less of a good employer to the larger group. Perhaps the good employer is an employer that not only accommodates a pregnant employee, but thinks about how to compensate non-pregnant employees for their additional burdens (even if a temporary replacement is hired). But then the good employer’s costs could significantly increase, which could put some good employers in a less stable financial position. Ultimately, the concept that any employer can be a good employer to every employee, at all times, is a delicate, and perhaps dubious, one, even when factoring in less tangible considerations, such as being an employer that is well-respected for the care it takes to support its pregnant employees.

Conference materials can be found at http://uale.org/conference/conference-2012