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LPE Originals

Care Work In & Beyond the Labor Market

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Focusing on universalizing access to better paid work submerges two other longstanding elements of critical feminist analysis of care work. These are particularly pertinent to LPE conversations about the political-economic centrality of markets. First, feminist accounts of social reproduction have long highlighted the extensive, essential, but systematically devalued or outright ignored work performed outside conventional labor markets in families and communities. This includes especially direct care work and housework or other household production, but also broader forms of civic participation often denoted “volunteering.” Second, attaching economic resources to nonmarket social reproductive labor starts to loosen paid work’s iron grip on household income more generally. That grip creates a legitimated dependency on labor markets that undergirds power relations both between labor and capital and, within families, between market “breadwinners” and those more conventionally labelled “dependents.” Valuing care thus could facilitate both reimagining work and decentering markets.
LPE Originals

The Neglect of Long-Term Care

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This post is part of a series on Care Work. Read the rest of the series here.  ** ** ** 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…
LPE Originals

Making Care Work Green

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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…
LPE Originals

The Constitutional Role of Economic Coordination Rights

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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…
LPE Originals

A Law and Political Economy Agenda for Labor and the Constitution

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At the end of September, labor law scholars gathered at a conference focused on “Labor and the Constitution: Past, Present, and Future.”  There, a group of us considered the problem of “Political Economy and the Constitution”—and the extent to which the Law and Political Economy (LPE) analytical frame can be useful in building a more…
LPE Originals

A Political Economy the Constitution Requires

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“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 is old is new again. Political economy is coming back. Economics sidelines the distribution of wealth…
LPE Originals

Zarda, Just Work, and the Limits of Antidiscrimination Law

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Today, the Supreme Court will hear oral argument on the question of whether Title VII’s prohibition on sex discrimination includes sexual orientation and gender identity discrimination. To provide context to this case, the LPE Blog asked two scholars for contributions that detail the history of sex discrimination protections and address how law should redress gender hierarchies…
LPE Originals

Looking Beyond the Law: The Movement for LGBTQ Rights at Work

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LGBTQ workers have never turned solely to the law to define or protect their rights. In years when many feminists and workers of color were narrowing their focus to pursuing individual advancement under antidiscrimination provisions like Title VII, LGBTQ workers articulated a new kind of right: to be fully oneself at work. They argued that sexuality and gender were irrelevant to job performance, as the older “homophile” gay rights movement had claimed. But they also denied that anyone could—or should—shed a piece of their identity at the office, factory, or schoolhouse door.
LPE Originals

AB5: Regulating the Gig Economy is Good for Workers and Democracy

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Poverty is not a suspect classification under our Constitution, but it is an affront to life and dignity and to democracy more broadly.  With the evisceration of the U.S. welfare state and the judiciary’s deference to political outcomes in the area of “economics and social welfare,” employment is the primary legal and political means to address economic inequality. In turn,…
LPE Originals

A New Sex Positivity Dichotomy

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Though feminists and queer theorists love the subversiveness of proclaiming “hoe is life,” they are also married to the idea that eventually they will be monogamous. While it is perfectly natural and okay for them to have sex with anyone they want and to extoll “safer kinky sex,” many still believe that paying for sex sullies the interaction, or removes from it any possibility of true “consent.
LPE Originals

Sex, Markets, and Political Economy

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Among the various perspectives utilized to understand sex work, a political economy approach directs attention to the fundamentally political and moralized nature of markets. Markets are not abstract spaces for economic transactions but rather politically contested terrains of societal struggle where competing actors wield technical legal tools and moralized beliefs in attempts to shape structures of societal governance.

LPE Originals

The Law and Political Economy of Sex Work: Symposium

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People interested in law and political economy have a particular reason to listen to people in the sex trades. The conversations that sex workers are having are about markets, work, and coercion under neoliberalism. They are critiques of a legal system that implements policing to keep the “sacred” out of markets while enabling corporations to profit on the caging of human beings.