At the Blog
On Monday, Ann Sarnak introduced a symposium on workplace surveillance and collective resistance, which will examine how the law currently facilitates employer surveillance, as well as the strategies that are best suited to combat the individual and collective harms of invasive monitoring at work. With companies deploying everything from social media monitoring to heat mapping software in order to collect data about their employees and stifle collective action, how might employees, regulators, and government officials prevent these new forms of domination? Stay tuned!
On Tuesday, Karen Levy explained what we what can learn about the diffusion of surveillance by looking at recent changes in the trucking industry. In 2017, the United States government required that all long-haul truck drivers install electronic logging devices. While this mandate had only limited success in making the roads safer and reducing trucker fatigue, it provided a foundation for additional surveillance by employers and other profit-seeking companies. As Levy demonstrates, this layering of government, employer, and commercial surveillance into one apparatus stacked the deck against the workers and may be a bellwether of things to come in other workplaces.
And on Thursday, Sarrah Kassem examined surveillance and resistance in Amazon’s growing platform ecosystem. She argues that by comparing Amazon’s e-commerce platform, where workers are gathered in warehouses, with MTurk, it’s distributed digital labor platform, we can see how both the nature of the platform and nature of the work give rise to distinct modes of surveillance, as well as their own possibilities for resistance.
In LPE Land
Over at Legal Form, Nate Holdren has a review essay covering three recent Marxist books, each of which significantly enriches Marxism as both theory and concrete investigation.
Across the sea, the Spanish socialist magazine Sin Permiso translated two recent posts by Amy Kapczynski and Veena Dubal.
Kate Jackson has posted a new article arguing that recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions invalidating agency policymaking based upon the major questions doctrine rely on a normatively and empirically mistaken notion of democratic popular sovereignty.
Sandeep Vaheesan and our friends at Open Markets filed an amicus brief in District of Columbia v. Amazon.com Inc.
Lenore Palladino has a piece up at ProMarket about discrete policies to limit corporate extraction in industrial policy.
And a reminder, the launch of LPE x NYC is less than two weeks away! Corinne is getting excited.
