The recent spate of job losses in journalism make evident the need for systemic alternatives to commercial media. Tweaking market mechanisms and scrambling for new business models is futile when the market itself is a core part of the problem. Our democracy requires that we disentangle news and information from capitalism — we need a horizon for journalism beyond the market.
Regulators at both the NLRB and Department of Labor have recently rolled back Trump-era employment status rules. To an outsider, these changes can seem pedantic and inconsequential. A political economy perspective, however, reveals a deeper logic to the new rules, which address three pernicious trends in employment classification — the ability of businesses to manipulate the inherent ambiguity in treating employment like a contract, the ascension of the ideology of human capital, and the norm of the arbitrage economy.
The Biden administration’s antitrust policy has been the most pro-labor in decades. And yet, the response from labor advocates and the labor movement has been rather muted. Why the disconnect? And what can it teach us about the limits of antitrust policy that takes the ideal of perfect competition as its normative benchmark?
A little-known Reagan-era competition rule continues to block innovative policy efforts by state and local governments. By re-interpreting this rule, the Biden Administration can empower local communities to help build a sustainable economy.
Every union has reason to address the high cost of housing, which diverts wage raises into profits for landlords, acts as a structural constraint on labor actions, and generally makes life worse for its members. And as UNITE HERE Local 11 has demonstrated, unions are well-positioned to address the problem: from spearheading local tenant ordinances to putting creative housing demands on the bargaining table, unions can lead the fight for affordable housing.
A US-based, VC-backed company is suing the Honduran Government for shutting down the firm’s private, libertarian city-state. The lawsuit highlights how Investor-State Dispute Settlement provisions, written into US trade agreements across the world, allow corporations to extract billions of dollars from governments in the developing world for passing any regulation that might impinge on their profit margins.
In the face of increasing inequality, legal regimes in the Global North have started to grapple with the distributive consequences of corporate law. They would do well to look to the Global South, where several jurisdictions have pioneered heterodox approaches to corporate law that take into account a broad range of public policy and distributional objectives.
Earlier this month, Sam Bankman-Fried was found guilty of seven counts of fraud and conspiracy. His conviction should not, however, be seen as any kind of victory. For the past three years, SBF successfully exploited a financial regulatory system stuck in older ways of thinking and increasingly incapable of averting illicit finance in the platform economy. To prevent such predation in the future, LPE scholars must help accelerate the turn to proactive planning, including via the day-to-day, direct supervision of major financial institutions.
Institutional leaders must affirm that advocacy for Palestinian rights, as well as concern for and celebration of Palestinian lives, is squarely within the sphere of legitimate discourse.
Recent efforts to suppress the expression of the most basic aspirations for Palestinian freedom offend not only civil libertarian commitments to free speech and related ideas of academic freedom, but, perhaps more surprisingly, civil rights commitments to nondiscrimination.
In late October, Florida banned chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine from operating on state university campuses. This ban, which alleges that the national organization provided material support to designated terrorist organizations, is unlikely to survive judicial scrutiny. Nevertheless, it represents a dangerous escalation of recent efforts to restrict the speech of pro-Palestine advocates, while providing a blueprint for the future repression of other disfavored groups.
Though dominant features of the American economy for most of the 20th century, corporations have become less numerous in the past three decades. Meanwhile, neglected alternatives to the public corporation have proven surprisingly durable. Given the manifest pathologies of shareholder capitalism, the combination of these two trends may suggest pathways out of our current dilemma.
Algorithmic wage discrimination – paying workers personalized wages using opaque and fluctuating formulas – is common in the gig economy. But with the recent development of intrusive new forms of employee surveillance, such wage-setting practices will be coming soon to a workplace near you. This post offers a brief taxonomy of five different forms of algorithmic wage differentiation, each of which is already visible in the gig work economy, and explains how the spread of these management techniques threatens workers’ well-being and political freedom.
In Paul Gowder’s recent blog post, as well as in his new book, he argues that we should democratize, rather than dismantle or restructure, Big Tech platforms. However, this familiar framing obscures more than it reveals, relying upon an impoverished account of the political economy of technology, of the co-evolution of politics and production, and of the core role of material infrastructure in digital settings.
Once the near-exclusive prerogative of the United States, unilateral economic sanctions are increasingly a multipolar phenomenon. As Aslı Bâli has recently argued, this current conjuncture may offer a new window to resist forms of economic coercion that legitimate and enforce an unjust neocolonial global order. At the same time, however, there are new dangers inherent in the transformation of sanctions and related coercive practices into tools of open hegemonic contestation.
