Skip to content
LPE Originals

Janus in Appalachia

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

LPE Originals

The Uneasy Case Against Occupational Licensing (Part 2)

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…

LPE Originals

The Uneasy Case Against Occupational Licensing (Part 1)

Obama-era technocrats and Trump cronies may not agree on much, but they have made common cause against occupational licensing. That focus undermines important social objectives while obscuring far more important problems in the labor market. In this post, we cover the basics of licensing, and then reframe current attacks on it. In our next post,…

LPE Originals

Racism is at the Heart of the Platform Economy

This post argues that race and racism are segmenting the new “on demand” labor markets, in ways that facilitate the transition to this new sector of the economy.  Scholars of racial capitalism have argued that modern capitalism could never have gotten off the ground without the violence of slave labor in the cotton economy. Violent…

LPE Originals

“Hey Google, What’s a Strike?”

Yesterday morning, tens of thousands of 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…

LPE Originals

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 economic and political power are wildly out of balance, with dire consequences for the vast majority of Americans who find themselves on the losing end of this imbalance. Wherever we live, and however we…

LPE Originals

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. Technologies like these can erode workplace privacy and encourage discrimination. Without disregarding the importance of those effects, I want to focus in this post on how employers can use new monitoring technologies to drive down wages or otherwise disempower workers as a class.

LPE Originals

Inequality and Political Economy in Constitutional Doctrine

Recently on this blog, Sabeel Rahman and Ganesh Sitaraman detailed the growing interest among public law scholars in questions of power, inequality, and political economy. One feature of the emerging scholarship, they correctly note, is that it directs its attention not primarily to courts, but to legislators and social movements; it focuses not primarily on…

LPE Originals

Colorblindness and Liberal Racial Paternalism in Bailey v. Alabama

Anyone familiar with Bailey v. Alabama understands that it was a case about racial domination in the Jim Crow South. Lonzo Bailey was a Black agricultural laborer who quit his job with a white farmer. For that, a white legal system convicted him of a crime. The prosecution was characteristic of an effort throughout the…

LPE Originals

The Real Barriers to Access to Justice: A Labor Market Perspective

There is a vast literature on access to justice in the United States. In what Sameer Asher has diagnosed as a broadly neoliberal discourse, the legal profession itself stars as the key barrier to access to justice: It is slow to adopt technology, restricts entry with excessive licensure requirements, and bogs down in technicalities. Let’s…