An alliance between religious and economic conservatives is playing a central yet overlooked role in the resurgence of concentrated economic power in America, resulting in the transfer of public funds, services, and decision-making away from more democratic institutions. Nowhere is this more evident than in the rise of “government-religious hospitals”: these hospitals are state owned, yet religion permeates their halls, and faith dictates the care they offer. To mitigate the risk that these arrangements pose, we must make innovative use of LPE’s tools, including antitrust, public utility regulation, and public options.
Jonathan Harris on consumer law as work law, Alyssa Battistoni & Matthew Robinson on Reconsidering Reparations, an upcoming LPE Conference(!!), a call for submissions from the JLPE, and new pieces from Sandeep Vaheesan, Dan Rohde, and others.
A growing number of employers are relying on Training Repayment Agreement Provisions to discourage workers from quitting. Courts, meanwhile, have routinely rejected legal challenges that claim these agreements violate employment laws, such as wage-and-hour laws and non-compete limitations. There is, however, another legal mechanism to stop this harmful and mobility-restricting practice: consumer law. When firms treat workers as their consumers by selling them services and credit products, the workers become worker-consumers and consumer law becomes work law.
What happens when we stop generalizing about the economy from the starting point of the grain market, as neoclassical models all seem to, and start generalizing from the post office, or the operating system? That’s the kind of question that Networks, Platforms, and Utilities puts on the table, and it is a major accomplishment. From an LPE perspective, however, one might worry that the book’s current approach is insufficiently attuned to the “political” part of political economy.
By generating huge data sets to feed increasingly sophisticated algorithms, workplace surveillance allows employers to extract even more value from their employees. Greater data protection rights provide one possible avenue to change these power dynamics. But if employees truly want to participate in the management of their data and tap into it as a source of value, they need to wield power over data collection systems through collective bargaining and shared workplace governance.
Electronic surveillance and automated management should not be understood as merely imposing some new, discrete set of harms on workers. Rather, pervasive employee monitoring should be seen as fundamentally altering the employment context in a way that threatens a wide range of employment and labor law protections. From worker safety, compensation, and classification to workplace discrimination and disability policy, policymakers and regulators must ensure that longstanding protections remain effective in the face of new technology.
The scourge of algorithmic wage discrimination, racial capitalism in the civil courts, and some LPE highlights from around the web, including David Pozen, Tim Barker, and an on-going symposium at Notice & Comment.
Barry Maguire on the alienation objection to efficient markets, Evelyn Atkinson on Telegraph Torts, and eight friends of the blog on the FTC’s proposed rule to ban non-compete agreements. Plus, a new citywide LPE group in NYC, a junior scholars workshop in NYC, an LPE reading group in Toronto, two great upcoming events, and Matt Stoller on l’affaire Hovenkamp.
As we grapple with the law’s ability to address today’s most powerful corporations, one interesting yet largely forgotten set of cases can help us find our bearing: the “death telegram” cases. These suits involved claims for emotional distress against telegraph corporations for failing to deliver telegrams involving the death or illness of a family member. Astonishingly, nearly half the state courts that encountered these claims allowed them, in spite of the long-established common law rule that absent physical injury, mental anguish alone could not be recognized in law. This exception was justified, in part, because the companies were seen as “public service corporations” – a monopolistic business entity that controlled access to a vital public resource and had special emotional duties to its customers. What would it mean to revive such a conception of the corporation today?
Setting aside their habit of quoting Augustine, the post-neoliberal right can at times sound surprisingly like fellow travelers in their critique of the market. So how does their vision of life after neoliberalism differ from our own? And what does their arrival on the scene mean for the LPE movement?
Neoliberalism, we are increasingly told, has one foot in the grave. It is worth, then, thinking seriously about what comes next. What paradigms might replace it, or give it one more mutated form? One possibility, gaining attention in mainstream progressive policy circles, is what some call “productivism” or “supply side liberalism.” But will a focus on production really address the fundamental problems with our political economy? And to what extent does this supposedly new version of industrial policy move us beyond the governing vision that defined neoliberalism itself?
