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How the Court is Pitting Workers Against Each Other

Next week, the Supreme Court will hear arguments in a case that may allow some employees to foist the cost of their religious exercise onto their co-workers. Such an outcome, beyond its obvious unfairness, threatens to reduce collective labor power. Workplaces and unions rely on a sense of reciprocity, mutual support, and solidarity. But if employers are required to inflict the burdens of one religious worker’s accommodation on their fellow employees, workers may come to see themselves as competitors, rather than allies. By pitting workers against each other, the Court threatens to dissolve workplace solidarity and sabotage workers' ability to act collectively.

The Law and Political Economy of Religious Freedom

As recent Supreme Court cases make clear, the libertarian and Christian wings of the conservative legal movement have orchestrated a two-step process to shift the allocation of public resources to private religious power. First, privatize public goods and services. Second, eliminate the distinction between religious and secular in the newly empowered private sphere. Their objective is to replace the New Deal settlement not with a libertarian vision of market freedom, but rather an arrangement in which the market is embedded in a conservative Christian social vision.

Last Week’s Surprisingly Deep Victory for LGBT Workers

This post was originally published at Jacobin. Last Monday, the Supreme Court ruled that employment discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity is prohibited by Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The decision brings employment law in line with public opinion: a majority of Americans favor employment protections for LGBT…

Signing Off

Dear Readers, When Amy Kapczynski introduces law and political economy, she often begins by describing a paradigmatic law student who arrives ready to fight injustice and is quickly sucked into an alienating vortex of efficiency-seeking and cost-benefit analyses. I was that student when I started law school, and by chance stumbled into the nascent LPE…

Many Neoliberalisms: Market Logic and Social Values

This post is part of our symposium on Quinn Slobodian’s Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism. Read the rest of the symposium here.  As many of the other contributors to this symposium have attested, one of the signal achievements of Globalists is the evidence that “neoliberalism” is indeed a coherent set of…

A Neoliberal Masterpiece?

In our market supremacist era, is anyone allowed to bring their full self to the marketplace and the workplace?  Or must we all be “everywhere and only homo oeconomicus,” as Wendy Brown put it?  One of the more arresting aspects of the Supreme Court’s recent Masterpiece Cakeshop case is how neoliberal it isn’t. If neoliberalism casts us…