Williams Institute Reading Room: Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Resources in Law and Public Policy: Employment

Workplaces have traditionally been viewed as "straight spaces" in which queer people passed. As a result, historians have directed limited attention to the experiences of queer people on the job. Queer Career rectifies this, offering an expansive historical look at sexual minorities in the modern American workforce. Arguing that queer workers were more visible than hidden and, against the backdrop of state aggression, vulnerable to employer exploitation, Margot Canaday positions employment and fear of job loss as central to gay life in postwar America. Rather than finding that many midcentury employers tried to root out gay employees, Canaday sees an early version of "don't ask / don't tell": in all kinds of work, as long as queer workers were discreet, they were valued for the lower wages they could be paid, their contingency, their perceived lack of familial ties, and the ease with which they could be pulled in and pushed out of the labor market. Across the socioeconomic spectrum, they were harbingers of post-Fordist employment regimes we now associate with precarity. While progress was not linear, by century's end some gay workers rejected their former discretion, and some employers eventually offered them protection unattained through law. Pushed by activists at the corporate grass roots, business emerged at the forefront of employment rights for sexual minorities. It did so, at least in part, in response to the way that queer workers aligned with, and even prefigured, the labor system of late capitalism. Queer Career shows how LGBT history helps us understand the recent history of capitalism and labor and rewrites our understanding of the queer past.
*Also available online (UC users only)

A powerful, personal critique of capitalist patriarchy as seen through the eyes of a queer radical. Capitalism has infiltrated every aspect of our personal, social, economic, and sexual lives. By examining the politics of gender, environment, and sexuality, we can see the ways straight, cis, white, and especially male upper-class people control and subvert the other - queer, non-binary, BIPOC, and female bodies - in order to keep the working lower classes divided. Patriarchy and classism are forms of systemic violence which ensure that the main commodity of capitalism - a large, disposable, cheap, and ideally subjugated work force - is readily available. There is a lot wrong with the ways we live, work, and treat each other. In essays that are both accessible and inspiring, Lori Fox examines their confrontations with the capitalist patriarchy through their experiences as a queer, non-binary, working-class farm hand, labourer, bartender, bush-worker, and road dog, exploring the ugly places where issues of gender, sexuality, class, and the environment intersect. In applying the micro to the macro, demonstrating how the personal is political and vice versa, Fox exposes the flaws in believing that this is the only way our society can or should work. Brash, topical, and passionate, This Has Always Been a War is not only a collection of essays, but a series of dispatches from the combative front lines of our present-day culture.

Everything you need to know about creating LGBTQ2+ inclusive workplace, from A to Z. Every year, companies who aren't doing the necessary work are losing millions of dollars to low productivity, staff turnover, missed opportunities, and reputational damage--and no, simply slapping a rainbow over your company logo isn't going to cut it. In this myth-busting follow-up to the 2020 breakout bestseller Birds of All Feathers, diversity and inclusion expert Michael Bach breaks down everything you need to know about creating inclusive workplaces for people who don't fit squarely into the "straight" and "cis" box. And don't worry if you're already feeling lost; by the time you've finished this book, you'll know exactly LGBTQ2+ means--and a whole lot of other stuff to boot. With clarity and a healthy dose of humor, Bach lays out a road map on how to ensure your workplace is safe for LGBTQ2+ people. You'll gain a clear understanding of sexuality, gender identity, and gender expression; what a Safe Space is, and how to turn your workplace into one; how to create and properly enforce a workplace Code of Conduct; and how to grab a piece of the fabulous "pink dollar" (worth more than $1 trillion dollars annually in the Canada and US alone!). A must-read for leaders, HR professionals, CEOs, and managers of all levels, Alphabet Soup is a critical guide to creating a truly inclusive workplace for all.

Setting out best practices and professional guidance for creating LGBT+ inclusive workplaces, this approachable and easy to follow book guides current and future leaders of all industries toward appropriate and proven ways to create safer working environments, update company policies, enhance continuing education and training, and better support LGBT+ people in the workplace. Featuring real-life situations and scenarios, a glossary, and further resources, Creating an LGBT+ Inclusive Workplace enables professionals in all aspects of professional roles to integrate foundational concepts into their everyday interactions with staff at all levels as well as within the community to create an overall workplace culture that nurtures a welcoming, inclusive, and affirming environment for all. This book includes postcards from PostSecret as its foreword and more than a dozen exclusive interviews from the world's top leaders in a variety of industries with world-renowned reputations. Enabling professionals in a variety of business roles to create an overall workplace culture that nurtures a welcoming, inclusive, and affirming environment for all, this book is an essential resource for independent readers, department teams, and entire corporations.

What do Apple, Coca Cola, Google, Wal-Mart and Dow Chemical have in common? Aside from being a few of the nation's largest employers, they are among the nearly 400 companies to file an amicus brief with the Supreme Court in the seminal Obergefell v Hodges case explaining that discrimination against LGBT people was harmful to business. Legal scholar Carlos Ball tells the story of how LGBT rights activism aimed at corporations during the twentieth century helped turn them from enterprises either indifferent to or openly hostile toward LGBT equality and into reliable and powerful allies of their movement. From the street protests, "zap actions," and boycott of the Coors Brewing Company in the 1970s, the AIDS activism directed at pharmaceutical companies in the 1980s, and the push for nondiscrimination policies and domestic partnership benefits in the 1990s, LGBT activism changed corporate America's understanding and treatment of LGBT people. By the time LGBT rights issues exploded onto the national scene in the 2000s, corporations were frequently and vigorously promoting LGBT equality both within their own institutions and in the public sphere. At a time when the LGBT movement is facing considerable political backlash, The Queering of Corporate America complicates the narrative of corporate conservatism, and provides insights into the future of the legal, political, and cultural implications of this unexpected relationship.

Long-haul trucking is linked to almost every industry in America, yet somehow the working-class drivers behind big rigs remain largely hidden from public view. Gritty, inspiring, and often devastating oral histories of gay, transsexual, and minority truck drivers allow award-winning author Anne Balay to shed new light on the harsh realities of truckers' lives behind the wheel. A licensed commercial truck driver herself, Balay discovers that, for people routinely subjected to prejudice, hatred, and violence in their hometowns and in the job market, trucking can provide an opportunity for safety, welcome isolation, and a chance to be themselves--even as the low-wage work is fraught with tightening regulations, constant surveillance, danger, and exploitation. The narratives of minority and queer truckers underscore the working-class struggle to earn a living while preserving one's safety, dignity, and selfhood. Through the voices of drivers from marginalized communities who spend eleven- to fourteen-hour days hauling America's commodities in treacherous weather and across mountain passes, Semi Queer reveals the stark differences between the trucking industry's crushing labor practices and the perseverance of its most at-risk workers.
*Also available as an ebook (UC users only): Semi Queer

*At Young Research Library.
A delicate exploration of the discrimination that gender-diverse people face, this book analyzes the relationship between gender identity and performance in the workplace while considering the emotional and economic survival of those who identify as transgender. * Discusses long-ignored nuances of transgender identity through narratives of non-binary, gender-fluid, and genderless experiences, in the context of workplace discrimination * Extends existing theoretical literature on masculinity in the workplace, gender discrimination, and gender performance * Identifies factors that may preclude and minimize discrimination * Proposes a pragmatic set of policy recommendations for employers, community leaders, and others * Provides best practices around such policy items as bathroom access, workplace transition, hiring practices, and inclusive workplace culture.

This book examines the working lives, retirement plans, and old age experiences of three generations of gay men born 1924-86. It draws on data collected from interviews with 82 men in Australia, England, New Zealand, and USA. The first half of the book concentrates on the men's working lives, while the second half of the book explores the interviewees' concerns about old age and retirement. The author analyses the men's contrasting stories, highlighting key generational differences in their experience of being 'out' in the workplace and the dominant work narratives which emerge in each age group. This important work will have cross-disciplinary appeal to scholars of sociology, gerontology, health sciences, gender, queer, and gay and lesbian studies, as well as practitioners.
*Also eBook (UC only): Gay Men's Working Lives

From the first game of the National League of Professional Baseball Clubs on April 22, 1876, tens of thousands of men have played professional sports in the Big Four--baseball, basketball, football, and hockey--major professional sports leagues in the United States. Until April 29, 2013, however, when National Basketball Association center Jason Collins came out publicly as gay, not one of those tens of thousands of men had ever come out to the public as gay while an active player on a major league roster. Is it because gay men can't jump (or throw, or catch, or skate)? Or is it more likely that the costs of coming out are too high? In Antigay Bias in Role-Model Occupations, E. Gary Spitko argues that in the case of athletes, and others in role-model occupations, a record of widespread and frequently systematic employment discrimination has been excluding gay people from the public social spaces that identify and teach whom society respects and whom members of society should seek to emulate. Creating a typology of role models--lawyers/judges, soldiers, teachers, politicians, athletes, and clergy--and the positive values and character traits associated with them, Spitko demonstrates how employment discrimination has been used for the purpose of perpetuating the generally accepted notion that gay people are inferior because they do not possess the requisite qualities--integrity, masculinity, morality, representativeness, all-American-ness, and blessedness--associated with employment in these occupations. Combining the inspirational stories of LGBT trailblazers with analysis of historical data, anecdotal evidence, research, and literature, Antigay Bias in Role-Model Occupations is the first book to explore in a comprehensive fashion the broad effects of sexual orientation discrimination in role-model occupations well beyond its individual victims.
*Also eBook (UC only): Antigay Bias in Role-Model Occupations

A Bloomberg BNA treatise; with the assistance of The National LGBT Bar Association and its Executive Director D'Arcy Kemnitz. *See chapters by Williams Executive Director Brad Sears and Senior Counsel Christy Mallory: Chapter 40, Employment Discrimination Against LGBT People: Existence and Impact; and Chapter 41: How LGBT-Related Workplace Policies Can Have a Positive Impact on the Corporate Bottom Line.
*Also available on Bloomberg Law (password required).

Out and About: The LGBT Experience in the Legal Profession is a collaboration between the American Bar Association Commission on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity ("SOGI") and the National LGBT Bar Association ("LGBT Bar"). Both SOGI and the LGBT went to great lengths to identify and encourage authors to share their stories. This joint publication is an anthology of first person narrative accounts. While developing this book, SOGI and the LGBT Bar sought diversity in all its forms--differing sexual orientation and gender identities as well as differing ages, races, geographic locations, practice settings, law schools, years of experiences, and more. This book's goal is to promote full and equal participation in the legal profession by persons of differing sexual orientations and gender identities. Out and About will explore the significant challenges and barriers that the LGBT community faces in their quest for full acceptance and participation in their chosen fields of legal expertise.This book will educate the legal profession and the general public about the LGBT community, its contributions and its ongoing struggles for equality. Equally as important, Out and About serves as a resource for identification, inspiration and education to the LGBT legal community on how to deal with situations they may face.

Even as substantial legal and social victories are being celebrated within the gay rights movement, much of working-class America still exists outside the current narratives of gay liberation. In Steel Closets, Anne Balay draws on oral history interviews with forty gay, lesbian, and transgender steelworkers, mostly living in northwestern Indiana, to give voice to this previously silent and invisible population. She presents powerful stories of the intersections of work, class, gender, and sexual identity in the dangerous industrial setting of the steel mill. The voices and stories captured by Balay--by turns alarming, heroic, funny, and devastating--challenge contemporary understandings of what it means to be queer and shed light on the incredible homophobia and violence faced by many: nearly all of Balay's narrators remain closeted at work, and many have experienced harassment, violence, or rape. Through the powerful voices of queer steelworkers themselves, Steel Closets provides rich insight into an understudied part of the LGBT population, contributing to a growing body of scholarship that aims to reveal and analyze a broader range of gay life in America.

Today gay men and women in the Western world enjoy greater acceptance and more legal protections than ever before. Yet an alarming number of businesspeople choose to remain closeted at work. In The Glass Closet, John Browne, the former chief executive of BP, argues that whether you're lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or straight, it's better for you and your business when you bring your authentic self to work. Browne draws on the latest research, his own experience as a closeted gay man in the oil industry, and interviews with gay and lesbian leaders to expose the lingering culture of homophobia in corporations around the world, and to inspire the LGBT community to share who they are with their employers and coworkers.

**See Chapter 6, Requiring Equal Benefits for Domestic Partners, by Williams Executive Director Brad Sears and Senior Counsel Christy Mallory! Also available as an eBook: When Mandates Work

Starting in the 1990s, San Francisco launched a series of bold but relatively unknown public policy experiments to improve wages and benefits for thousands of local workers. Since then, scholars have documented the effects of those policies on compensation, productivity, job creation, and health coverage. Opponents predicted a range of negative impacts, but the evidence tells a decidedly different tale. This book brings together that evidence for the first time, reviews it as a whole, and considers its lessons for local, state, and federal policymakers.

Out in the Union tells the continuous story of queer American workers from the mid-1960s through 2013. Miriam Frank shrewdly chronicles the evolution of labor politics with queer activism and identity formation, showing how unions began affirming the rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender workers in the 1970s and 1980s. She documents coming out on the job and in the union as well as issues of discrimination and harassment, and the creation of alliances between unions and LGBT communities. Featuring in-depth interviews with LGBT and labor activists, Frank provides an inclusive history of the convergence of labor and LGBT interests. She carefully details how queer caucuses in local unions introduced domestic partner benefits and union-based AIDS education for health care workers-innovations that have been influential across the U.S. workforce. Out in the Union also examines organizing drives at queer workplaces, campaigns for marriage equality, and other gay civil rights issues to show the enduring power of LGBT workers.

At Young Research Library.
*Also eBook (UC only): Plane Queer

*Research done in United Kingdom.