Workers with Disabilities Between Legal Changes and Persisting Exclusion: How Contradictory Rights Shape Legal Mobilization

Abstract

It has become commonplace within disability sociolegal scholarship to argue that, in the last 30 years, a new legal and policy approach to disability has emerged, leading to a paradigm shift from a social protection framework to an antidiscrimination model. Some authors have stressed, however, that the new model has not fully replaced the older social protection approach. Yet little is still known about how the coexistence of these different models impacts on the everyday experience of disability in the workplace and on potential legal mobilization. Based on interviews with workers with disabilities who mobilized the law to obtain reasonable accommodation in Belgium combined with an analysis of evolving Belgian legal schemes relating to disability, this article explores how interactions between social, labor, and antidiscrimination rights shape legal mobilization of persons with disabilities in the workplace. We find that individual's initial self‐identification as workers or persons with disabilities influences how they frame their claim and the kind of legal norms they refer to in a first stage but that both their identification and their rights consciousness evolve and change through the course of legal mobilization as they interact with various professionals and navigate between the different concepts and rights available in current law.

Law, compliance, and variation: Proximity and preferences regarding workplace lactation accommodations

“…The extant literature documents that workers might have broadly different preferences (e.g., research on workers' variation in desired changes to their workplaces and industries by Trautner et al [2013]; McCann's study of variations in employees' mobilization around different workplace rights [1994]; or Reynolds and May's [2014] research on how mothers' religious identities affect their preferences for number of hours worked). However, employee variation in the assessment of specific accommodations in the workplace is rarely considered (for exceptions, see Hodson, 2001; Lejeune & Ringelheim, 2019; Marshall, 2005). As this article's data show, some lactating employees might want accommodations to help them stay productively engaged during their lactation breaks, while others might want lactation rooms to facilitate relaxation and reconnecting with their families.…”

All That Glitters Is Not Gold? Civil Society Organisations and the (non‐)Mobilisation of European Union Law

“…In the context of EU law, this could (for example) pertain to the way in which EU law is viewed and consequently acted upon. Other research has pointed to the relevance of framing as well, by speaking of the ‘perception’ of litigants when deciding to mobilise or not to mobilise the law (Lejeune and Ringelheim, 2019, 2022).…”

The role of legal intermediaries in the dispute pyramid: inequalities before the French legal system

“…Various studies have explored how the social characteristic of those involved in the conflicts influence legal mobilisation. They have shown that some specific groups have a lower ability to assert their rights, such as those who experience discrimination (Bumiller, 1987;Clermont and Schwab, 2004), women in situations of sexual harassment (Marshall, 2005) or people with disabilities (Engel and Munger, 2003;Lejeune and Ringelheim, 2019). Later, Nielsen (2000) and Morrill, Edelman, Tyson and Arum (2010) showed that people react differently to an offence depending on their race or gender.…”