How your job is like a marriage

Law professor argues that employment law should be revised to mimic marriage law in order to legally recognize employer-employee relationship.

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Chad Brooks, BusinessNewsDaily

Thu, Sep 27 2012 at 3:24 PM

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In the eyes of the law, the employer-employee relationship should be looked at more like a marriage, one legal expert argues.

Marion Crain, an expert on labor and employment law and professor of law at Washington University in St. Louis, said current work laws ignore the interdependence and mutual investment employees and employers have in each other by using a model that promotes an impersonal cash-for-labor association.

Crain suggests looking at other legal models, such as marriage laws, to more accurately respond to the realities of the employment relationship, especially during times of terminations.

"The employment relationship possesses many attributes that we associate with marriage: emotional and economic investment, interdependence and expectations that the relationship will endure absent bad behavior," she said. "Marriage law offers a status-based framework designed to recognize and protect investment in relationships characterized by interdependence and investment."

Crain contends the law must be restructured to consider the emotional and financial investment employees make in their employers.

"It’s time to reform the employment law framework from one that assumes an arm's-length exchange of labor for dollars to one that recognizes employment as a relationship," Crain said.

The differences might be as simple as requiring notice and severance pay linked to longevity and investment, Crain said, or as radical as recognizing new common law claims based on property rights for workers.

Crain's full argument appears in in a recent issue of the Washington University Journal of Law and Policy.

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Comment: 1

obbopp Oct 11 2012 at 10:36 AM

Many variations and exception but my life experience has led to my conviction that working for pay in the USA is based upon those employing others to use those folks as a tool to create wealth; enough wealth to cover the costs of keeping the tool working while outputting enough wealth to tender wealth to the hirer. Logical what with the economic system we exist within. However... all too often... the wealth generated by the employee is divvied up in a manner that tends to send the maximum wealth

.... More

to the hirer with the employee used and often abused.... and I AM inserting morality here... my morality. An incredibly complicated topic with immense amounts of emotionality involved. In general... use others before they can use you. I could not exist as a very rich person knowing that the ones creating my wealth go home at night facing financial woes and wonder how they will be able to pay for a medical bill or keep the dilapidated car running to keep getting to work.

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