This is Part I of a conversation between David H. Webber and Michael McCarthy on the prospect of combating neoliberal corporate governance through the shareholder activities of workers’ pension funds.
As has been widely reported, the U.S. Department of Labor issued an “opinion letter” yesterday concluding that an unnamed “virtual marketplace company” does not employ the workers who make the company viable. Instead, the letter finds that these workers are independent contractors. The letter is flawed in multiple ways. As Sharon will explain, deciding a major…
Anderson’s analysis is insufficiently attentive to the structural realities of the “fissured workplace.”
Concepts like “freedom” and “exploitation” are grounded in material reality–as historically embedded attempts to express attitudes about certain institutional arrangements
Three potential strategies the labor movement could adopt to combat private domination at work.
Technology and automation are key forces spinning workers away from from powerful, resourceful firms into the cracks of the fissured workplace.
Some reflections on practical lessons that labor law practitioners and academics might draw from Elizabeth Anderson’s work.
This post opens a symposium on Elizabeth Anderson’s Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives (and Why We Don’t Talk about It).
Contracts is more than an area of law; it is a key piece of the vision we lawyers bring to many other areas of law. The 1L Contracts course supplies a foundation-stone of the “pre-analytic vision” with which lawyers will eventually think about many other things, including labor relationships. Labor regulation as such is addressed…
Noah Zatz on what a 1L Contracts course might look like from a law and political economy perspective.
Let me close this series by briefly sketching two rival visions of constitutional political economy.
Many lawyers, scholars and activists on the left agree that the decrepitude of the New Deal framework, along with the Court’s unvarnished neo-Lochnerian constitutional attack on that framework, seem to require an alternative account of the Constitution’s bearings on labor law
Is it really a good idea for liberals and the left to be making constitutional arguments against economic inequality?
About a decade ago, when legal employment dipped sharply, there was a raging debate on the future of the legal profession. Some said the drop reflected a permanent decrease in legal work. The logic here was simple: computers were increasingly capable of completing more sophisticated projects. Having eclipsed paralegals in some document review tasks, they…
Successful ideological entrepreneurs change policy-makers’ focus and their presumptions. Those on the right, in particular, have been very effective at shifting attention from core confrontations of capital and labor to peripheral conflicts among laborers. We see this repeatedly in inequality policy, where fundamental tensions between capital and labor are ignored, obfuscated, or trivialized by a…
