In a stunning betrayal of 30 million workers, the Federal Trade Commission has abandoned its nationwide ban on non-compete agreements. Fortunately, states are filling the void with remarkable creativity — drawing on both new legislation and existing competition and consumer laws to enhance worker mobility.
As legal protections for labor organizing face existential threats, the American labor movement must confront a deeper challenge: the erosion of social norms that once condemned union-busting as morally wrong.
Despite a recent surge in campus organizing, tenured faculty at private universities haven’t unionized. Why is this? The conventional answer is that the Supreme Court said they can’t. Fortunately, the conventional answer is wrong.
New Uber-style firms like CareRev and Clipboard Health use algorithmic scheduling, staffing, and management technologies to match understaffed medical facilities with nearby nurses and nursing assistants looking for work. These companies, while promising flexibility, are facilitating a race to the bottom among healthcare workers and contributing to the erosion of America’s already-strained health care system.
Tech elite’s turn towards far-right politics should be understood as part of a broader effort to suppress collective power and worker activism. Organized labor is crucial to challenging the influence tech oligarchs wield across society and within the tech industry.
With summer just around the corner, are you looking to indulge in some juicy, page-turning scholarship? As always, the Blog has you covered with our biannual roundup of some of our favorite forthcoming LPE and LPE-adjacent articles.
Silicon Valley tech bosses often promote Universal Basic Income as a progressive solution to job losses caused by automation. However, by portraying such displacement as inevitable rather than socially determined, these proposals obscure the critical role that power structures and market dynamics play in shaping technological innovation. They also fail to address how automation further concentrates control over technology, production, and data.
Many unitary executive proponents argue that federal labor rights undermine presidential power. This position is simplistic and short-sighted: labor rights offer the executive a different, more valuable form of power – expanded state capacity – that is necessary for modern presidents to deliver on their political priorities. And they so do in a manner that is more democratically accountable than any of the likely alternatives.
Amid growing federal attacks, public sector workers can’t count on the courts for protection. Instead, they should take inspiration from the trade unionists who organized before the passage of the National Labor Relations Act.
When students, staff, or faculty are accused of being associated or “aligned” with terrorist organizations, universities may be pressed to take immediate and harsh action, if only to quell media attention and appear compliant with this lawless Administration’s wishes. Universities must prepare for this possibility, learn about the underlying legal frameworks, and refuse to operate on the basis of fear rather than legal necessity or moral principle.
By purging African Americans from the federal workforce, the Trump administration does not merely aim to undermine racial integration; rather, it seeks to bring about the economic immiseration of Black communities, thereby ensuring the entrenchment of a Black American underclass.
Despite discouraging federal policy developments, unions remain well-positioned to protect workers and beat back Trumpism.
The online targeting and harassment of the LPE Project’s Deputy Director, Helyeh Doutaghi, is part of a broader environment of speech repression, particularly of anti-war and pro-Palestinian views.
In the midst of the chaos, an ambitious policy agenda beckons. Elizabeth Wilkins, Chiraag Bains, Bharat Ramamurti, Samuel Bagenstos, Shilpa Phadke, and K. Sabeel Rahman reflect on how to rebuild, rather than merely reproduce, what came before the wreckage.
By removing Gwynne Wilcox from her seat on the National Labor Relations Board, Trump has left the Board without a quorum and thus unable to act. In doing so, he may have unwittingly opened up space for states and cities to regulate conduct that previously fell within the Board’s jurisdiction.
