Tag: Labor

The Law & Political Economy of Disability Accommodations

By Shirley Lin

The touchstone of contemporary disability law, the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, was a victory of the militant disability rights movement, and was drafted with the social model in mind. However, Congress essentially delegated the design for this mandate to the Reagan-era EEOC, which in turn operationalized accommodations through private exchanges between employees and employers. Market logic further limited its redistributive work and society’s ability to critique its effectiveness.

Producing Subjects: Rethinking Productivity, Subjectivity, and Value Part 2

By Susan Dianne Brophy, Anastasia Tataryn

In part two of this series, Susan Dianne Brophy interviews Anastasia Tataryn. Continuing their discussion on how law and markets intersect to produce subjects, and ways to rethink subjectivity in scholarship.

Producing Subjects: Rethinking Productivity, Subjectivity, and Value Part 1

By Susan Dianne Brophy, Anastasia Tataryn

In part one of this series, Anastasia Tataryn interviews Susan Brophy regarding the importance of rethinking productivity, subjectivity, and value.

Law and Organizing for Countervailing Power

By Kate Andrias, Benjamin Sachs

Readers of this blog need no reminder of the pervasive inequalities that define American society. Nor do readers need to be convinced that a perverse concentration of wealth has had profoundly corrosive effects on the viability of American democracy. In a recent article published in the Yale Law Journal, we argue that the traditional approaches to combatting political inequality—campaign finance reform, voting rights, participatory governance—do not go far enough, and we ask what else might be done to redress the fundamental power imbalances that define our politics. We argue that the key lies in building countervailing power among poor and working-class people, and that law can and should be used to facilitate organizing by the poor and working class: not only as workers, but also as tenants, debtors, welfare beneficiaries and others.

Labor Governance in the Shadow of Racialized Mass Incarceration

By Noah Zatz

The threat of precarious work does not come exclusively from marketization swamping a shrinking welfare and regulatory state. It comes as well from a metastasizing and thoroughly racialized carceral state, one that simultaneously speaks the language of public violence and sings in the liberal key of choice. Even critical accounts of the criminal legal system fail to fully capture the relevance of this dynamic, focusing only on how it produces economic exclusion, not also incorporation on subordinated terms.

Reconstructing the Algebra of Race and Rights

By Raul Carrillo

I follow Patricia Williams, Angela Harris & Aysha Pamukcu, in arguing universal rights, to basic income and other resources, are insufficient but necessary ingredients for justice. Indeed, I argue for permanent, non-discretionary funding of these rights. No one truly knows how much money the U.S. government spends encoding and encasing private property rights, much less private capital’s rights to coordinate or contract. In many ways, these costs are “baked into” society. So, ultimately, should it be for rights to income, healthcare, housing, education, employment for all.

Leftist Benefits are In-Kind, Actually

By Lydia Nicholson

The argument goes that cash benefits, such as UBI, afford recipients the dignity to choose what they need, versus in-kind benefits which paternalistically define that need for them. By removing government restrictions on spending, they allow recipients the freedom to consume on their terms. However, this so-called choice is in name only without a guarantee that basic needs will be met. The context of housing provides one example of this. The reality of cash benefits is that even where choice is not restricted by the state, it remains restricted by the failures of the market.

Basic Income and the Freedom to Refuse

By Noah Zatz

It would be ironic indeed if a UBI slipped quickly through the fingers of lower-income people of color and into the coffers of jurisdictions most aggressively criminalizing poverty. This would negate UBI’s ability to facilitate work refusal because UBI—devoured by debt—would no longer be available to meet basic needs without a wage (or connection to a wage-earner). Moreover, this negation’s radically unequal racial distribution would mock UBI’s pretensions to universalism. Substantive universality requires more than formal inclusion and nominally equal payments. It requires cash receipts that deliver equal capacity to refuse work.

Constitutionalizing Property’s Priority over Farm Worker Organizing: The Threat of Cedar Points

By Don Rhodes

This year the Supreme Court will hear Cedar Points Nursery v. Hassid, a case out of California which challenges a forty-five-year-old farm labor regulation. The petitioners are alleging that this regulation, which grants farm labor unions a limited right of access to an employer’s property, is unconstitutional on the grounds that it amounts to the government taking their property rights without compensation. This case potentially represents the culmination of a decades-long reactionary campaign against the ability of unions to access an employer’s property. It’s another legal gut-punch to the labor movement and part of a long history of judicial antagonism against workers.

“Long Live Farmer-Laborer Unity”: Contextualizing the Massive Resistance Going on in India

By Veena Dubal, Navyug Gill

Although it has hardly broken through the parochialism of the US news cycle, India is currently experiencing what is perhaps the largest strike wave in world history. In this post, Veena Dubal interviews Navyug Gill about the strikes, the agricultural reforms that led to them, what those outside India can learn from them, and what the future might portend.

A Labor Theory of Negotiation: From Integration to Value Creation

By Amy Cohen

American negotiation theory started as, and for a long time remained, an engagement with labor and class relations. When early scholars developed their theories of negotiation in the context of workplace conflict, they did so in a moment when many workers were familiar enough with Marxist theories of class struggle to readily believe that some differences—for example, between management and labor—were not reconcilable, no matter how one performed in a negotiation. In this context, negotiation theorists aimed to open a space for potentially harmonious group relationships by introducing the concept of “integration”— the idea that labor and management could reorient their interests by creating new common values together.

The Algorithmic Capture of Employment and the Tertius Bifrons

By Ifeoma Ajunwa

Automated hiring systems are paradoxical. Although often the stated reason for adopting them is to curtail human bias, they frequently end up exacerbating the biases they’re meant to correct. Even as employment discrimination continues to morph with the introduction of new technologies, so, too, should the law change to meet it head to head.

Automation of Labor, Labor of Automation

By Frank Pasquale, Sandeep Vaheesan

Sandeep Vaheesan interviews Frank Pasquale about his forthcoming book, New Laws of Robotics: Defending Human Expertise in the Age of AI.

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