Postwar steelworkers and contemporary healthcare workers inhabited strikingly different economic circumstances. Yet in both eras, courts allocated to companies various powers they could use to impose market discipline on workers, thereby facilitating the degradation of work.
Yesterday morning, tens of thousands of Google employees walked off the job in Dublin, London, Singapore, Zurich, Haifa, Berlin, New York, Ann Arbor, and many other cities. The immediate spark for the protests was revelations that the company had given generous exit packages to a few executives credibly accused of sexual misconduct, including one accused…
Companies around the world are dreaming up a new generation of technologies designed to monitor their workers—from Amazon’s new employee wristbands, to Uber’s recording whether its drivers are holding their phones rather than mounting them. Technologies like these can erode workplace privacy and encourage discrimination. Without disregarding the importance of those effects, I want to focus in this post on how employers can use new monitoring technologies to drive down wages or otherwise disempower workers as a class.
Earlier this week, a Politico piece by Eric Posner (Chicago Law) and Glen Weyl (Microsoft Research) started to bounce around in progressive labor and twitter circles. It’s entitled “Sponsor An Immigrant Yourself,” and proposes a new “Visas Between Individuals” program through which, they assert, “native workers rather than corporations” could reap the benefits of liberalized…
How will new advanced information technologies impact work? This is a major focus of public debate right now, driven by widespread fears that automation will soon leave tens of millions unemployed. But debate so far has tended to neglect the relationship among technological innovation, political economy, and the law of work. This is a major…