Automation of Labor, Labor of Automation
Sandeep Vaheesan interviews Frank Pasquale about his forthcoming book, New Laws of Robotics: Defending Human Expertise in the Age of AI.
Care Work In & Beyond the Labor Market
Click here to read all posts in our Care Work series. Big ideas are flourishing these days—the Green New Deal, Medicare for All, sectoral bargaining, Universal Basic Income, prison abolition. This makes it all the more noteworthy when major policy areas are relatively quiet. One example is child care, despite Elizabeth Warren having started there…
The Neglect of Long-Term Care
Click here to read all posts in our Care Work series. Caregiving has long been shunted aside and undervalued in the United States. Long-term care (LTC) is no exception. Sometimes called “long term services and supports,” LTC is the help that over 40 million Americans who are sick or disabled need every day to complete…
Making Care Work Green
Click here to read all posts in our Care Work series. “Domestic workers arrive to smoke, ash,” the headline in the Los Angeles Times read on October 29, 2019. Unaware of mandatory evacuations from a fire sweeping through exclusive enclaves near the Getty Museum, domestic workers had trudged up deserted streets and through particle-filled air…
Building Power by Building Connections: Domestic Worker Organizing for Collective Freedom
This is the first post in our series on Care Work. Click here to read all posts in the series. Domestic workers are essential to our economy and society. They are the nannies that take care of children, the house cleaners that maintain homes, and the care workers that allow aging loved ones to live…
The Constitutional Role of Economic Coordination Rights
There’s a common notion that pervades legal and policy debate—including among fairly liberal Democrats—that collective bargaining mechanisms, and even public coordination of markets through minimum wages and working conditions, distort market outcomes and are therefore inefficient (though they may be justified by countervailing considerations). This position immediately sets up a kind of presumption against labor…
A Political Economy the Constitution Requires
Join us this week for a series on the political economy of labor & the constitution. “Political economy” has an antique ring. More than a century ago, the field of “political economy” began to give way to what was called “economics.” By the mid-twentieth century, political economy was forgotten; economics ruled the roost. But what…
The Uber/Lyft “Workers’ Association” Debate: A Response to Dubal
N.B.: Benjamin Sachs penned this response to Part I of Veena Dubal’s post on comparing solidarity unionism with company unions earlier this week. In the spirit of debate, we’re cross-posting from On Labor. Veena Dubal writes an important piece that raises concerns about Uber and Lyft’s suggestion that drivers in California form a “workers’ association.” Dubal worries…
Solidarity Unionism v. Company Unionism in the Gig Economy
The CEOs of the two top-competing gig firms—Uber and Lyft—penned a June 12, 2019 OpEd in the San Francisco Chronicle in which they claim that after over six years of local, state, federal, and international law-breaking, ignoring the concerns of drivers, and viciously fighting any efforts to achieve living wage and benefits, they are ready…
Three Views of Constitutional Political Economy
Constitutional Political Economy – What Is It Good For? – On the Labor Scene, Part III of III To recap, what constitutional political economy is good for on the labor scene is three-fold: as a movement discourse that provides moral and political legitimacy to acts of civil disobedience and law-breaking – and lends reform-minded publics…
Janus in Appalachia
Constitutional Political Economy – What Is It Good For? – On the Labor Scene, Part II of III Unlike the workers’ organizations in Kate’s study, just about everything the striking teachers did in West Virginia and Kentucky fell outside the bounds of legality – the strikes themselves, the efforts to “bargain” over not only teachers’…
The Labor Movement Never Forgets?
Constitutional Political Economy – What Is It Good For? – On the Labor Scene, Part I of III Is it really a good idea for liberals and the left to be making constitutional arguments against economic inequality? Give it a rest! Take a break from constitutionalizing everything. And don’t talk about “taking the Constitution away…
“Hey Google, What’s a Strike?”
Yesterday morning, tens of thousands Google employees walked off the job in Dublin, London, Singapore, Zurich, Haifa, Berlin, New York, Ann Arbor, and many other cities. The immediate spark for the protests was revelations that the company had given generous exit packages to a few executives credibly accused of sexual misconduct, including one accused of…
Sachs & Block on Labor Day
We’re back from our hiatus, and first up, this cross-post from On Labor, about a new blueprint for labor law. Shouldn’t every day be Labor Day? This Labor Day, A Clean Slate for Reform As divided as we have become as a country, we arrive at this Labor Day with a shared national understanding: both…
Worker Surveillance and Class Power
Companies around the world are dreaming up a new generation of technologies designed to monitor their workers—from Amazon’s new employee wristbands, to Uber’s recording whether its drivers are holding their phones rather than mounting them, to “Worksmart,” a new productivity tool that takes photos of workers every ten minutes via their webcams. Technologies like these…