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LPE Originals

The Necropolitics of Milei’s Labor Governance

Javier Milei’s labor policies in Argentina highlight two often overlooked features of contemporary capitalism: the emergence of new labor subjects and the role of violence in processes of labor precarization. This production of precarity serves as a mechanism for framing certain lives as disposable and bolsters illegal economies that are increasingly replacing the welfare state’s promise of social inclusion.

LPE Originals

Can Workers Bargain Over Bombs?

In their statement calling for a ceasefire between Israel and Palestine, the UAW International Executive Board raised a tantalizing possibility: What if UAW workers were to divest their labor from the construction of weaponry? Under current labor law, how might workers make their complicity in the military-industrial complex a mandatory subject of bargaining?

LPE Originals

Territorial Labor and the Political Economy of American Empire

From Afro-Diasporic laborers building the Panama Canal to contemporary Micronesians trafficked to work in Iowa’s pork industry, the labors of “territorial peoples” have been central to America’s economic rise. This often overlooked history is both an indictment of our constitutional tradition and a harbinger of the tactics of legal disempowerment deployed against labor writ large.

LPE Originals

Taking Media Out of the Market

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.

LPE Originals

The Political Economy of Employment Status Disputes

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.

LPE Originals

The Limits of Anti-Monopsony Antitrust

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?

LPE Originals

Why Labor Unions Should Join the Housing Fight

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.

LPE Originals

Seven Reactions to Biden’s Executive Order on Artificial Intelligence

President Biden’s recent executive order on artificial intelligence addresses a wide array of concerns about the nascent technology: risks to national security, the use of deceptive AI-generated content, market concentration, and much else. To help sort through the meaning and implications of these various directives, we asked seven experts for their initial reactions.

LPE Originals

A Call for Institutional Fairness on Palestine

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.

LPE Originals

Surveillance Wages: A Taxonomy

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.

LPE Originals

Early Edition: (More of) the Best New LPE and LPE-Adjacent Scholarship

Some people head to the pumpkin patch. Others drink from the unholy fountain of the pumpkin spice latte. But here at the Blog, our favorite autumnal activity is decidedly less gourd-based: we scour the internet for the most exciting forthcoming LPE and LPE-adjacent articles. Covering tech, labor, housing, the administrative state, criminal justice, family law, religious freedom, finance, legal theory, and so much more, this scouting report is not to be missed.

LPE Originals

The Latest US Export to Brazil? Legalized Labor Exploitation

Multinational platform companies, including Uber, iFood, Rappi, and 99, are currently pushing to export the United States’ most exploitative new labor laws to Brazil. Lawmakers should reject these attempts. As empirical evidence from the U.S. context shows, adopting a new “intermediate” worker category would be disastrous for low-income workers, and as Courts around the world have found, platform companies exert high levels of control over their workers and thus should be subject to standard labor and employment regulations.

LPE Originals

How to Protect Federal Agencies through Collaborative Bargaining

Collective bargaining agreements offer the chance to proactively build in protections for federal workers that will be vital if a dangerously anti-administrative candidate like Trump or DeSantis takes office. But to take advantage of this opportunity, agency leadership must be conciliatory and collaborative in negotiations.

LPE Originals

The Care Bureaucracy

In response to an expanding need for at home care, the state has established a highly bureaucratic system for delivering and compensating such assistance. This rigid approach to valuing care, in which needs are fragmented into easily quantifiable units, imposes under-recognized yet significant costs on workers and recipients alike.