Anti-trafficking laws and policies in the United States — in particular, the Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA) — define certain types of coerced work as unlawful forced labor. Paradoxically, the TVPA’s operation also enables status coercion by casting trafficked workers as either “victims” or “criminals” once they are removed from. . .
William Novak’s New Democracy demonstrates that the long progressive era was devoted to a reconfiguration of the very nature of modern American capitalism. Yet we must not lose sight of the different visions of state, economy, and democracy that comprised the progressive project.
Despite growing interest in public ownership at the municipal and even national level, LPE scholars have expressed relatively little interest in the topic. This is a mistake: proposals for public ownership can unite the left by achieving multiple policy goals at once and provide an alternative vision of what society should look like.
An LPE account of the global food crisis, two new entries in our symposium on Coerced, an amazing LPE job at HLS, a symposium on William Novak’s New Democracy, and some podcast episodes to help digest the Supreme Court’s most recent term.
Playing through pain or while injured is a common practice in college athletics, as players fear losing access to the social mobility that their position makes available. Players are coerced to “just do it,” surrendering their agency to practices that border on deviant, both physically and psychologically.
While employers have long conflated status with vulnerability, workers are starting to show how status itself can also be as a source of power — one that the courts, co-workers, and the public increasingly see as justification for broad-based change.
Due to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, food prices are higher in real terms today than at any point since the early 1970s. Yet it is the underlying political economy of the global food system that has created the conditions where hundreds of millions of people don’t get enough to eat.
A new symposium on Erin Hatton’s Coerced: Work Under Threat of Punishment, some awkward moments in radical real estate law, and a CFP for the Effect of Dobbs on Work Law.
Workers from the Sustainable Economies Law Center share some memorable moments with clients that have transformed how they approach radical real estate law.
Employers wield power over workers by virtue of control over their institutional status and not solely, or even principally, by virtue of the power to cut off wages. Yet, in attempting to distinguish “status” and “economic” coercion, we must avoid the idea that status is implicitly non-economic and the economy operates apart from. . .
Economic coercion is not the only power dynamic that shapes labor relations. In a range of cases – including prison laborers, welfare workers, college athletes, and graduate students – employers exercise power over workers by controlling their “status” and all of the rights, privileges, and opportunities that such status confers.
A call for courage in the wake of West Virginia v. EPA, a reckoning with the arc of the American rights tradition, and a discussion of what it would take to build worker and union power in the 21st century economy. Plus, an upcoming all-star Antimonopoly event and a recently released state-level antimonopoly reform guide.
Building worker and union power across the various sectors of the 21st century economy requires both scaling up from our dysfunctional firm-based system of collective bargaining, as well as scaling down to the community level to enable greater self-determination over persistent assaults to decent daily conditions of living.
To understand this precarious constitutional moment, we must look back not only to our forgotten anti-oligarchic tradition, but also to the strategies, practices, and ideas that led to earlier moments of retrenchment.
Each year, the Supreme Court hears roughly 65 merits cases. The administrative state, meanwhile, issues thousands of rules. Given this institutional reality, along with the inherent vagueness of the so-called major questions doctrine, the worst mistake an agency can make is to clip its own wings.