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Accessing pension resources: the right to equality inside and out of the labour market

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 December 2014

Kendra Strauss
Kendra Strauss*
Affiliation:
Simon Fraser University. Email: [email protected].
*
[email protected]
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Abstract

Pensions constitute an important link, in many welfare regimes, between processes of social categorisation and labour market segmentation over the life-course. Pensions also reveal how socio-economic rights are defined in relation to normative and ideological categories (such as gender, class and race), how (and for whom) the state prioritises their distribution, and what these processes reveal about notions of equality and their political and legal institutionalisation. In this paper, I argue that pensions, especially but not only occupational pensions, therefore fall within the ambit of a broad conception of labour law; they should be of interest to feminist legal scholars not solely because of their linkages to paid employment, however, but because of their relationship with the organisation of both production and social reproduction – and the evolution of norms of equality across these domains.

Type
Research Article
Information
International Journal of Law in Context , Volume 10 , Issue 4 , December 2014 , pp. 522 - 537
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

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