As domestic industrial relations and labor conditions have been seriously challenged by globalization, various international labor standards have been proposed to safeguard and promote labor rights. However, an important question remains: are these rules and standards enforceable and well enforced?

Compliance and Compromise: The Jurisprudence of Gender Pay Equity examines the status of one of the core international labor standards—gender pay equity—that has been largely overlooked, and explores how domestic legislative and judicial systems respond to the core International Labor Organization Convention No. 100 on Equal Remuneration. It unravels under what circumstance legislative and judicial compliance occurs, with the novel application of the relatively new theory “transnational legal process” to explicate the phenomenon of “compliance”.

Compliance and Compromise provides an excellent overview and examples in the variation in enforcement mechanisms that covers everything from the three main concepts of equal pay (the more common and narrower equal pay for equal work, equal pay for similar work, and finally the less frequent and more progressive, equal pay for work of equal value) to how claims can be evaluated and resolved.

-Jennifer Woodward, The Law and Politics Book Review

Cher Weixia Chen is an Assistant Professor of International Studies at New Century College, George Mason University. She has published in the areas of international law and comparative law on issues such as capital punishment and cultural defense.