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LPE Originals

Can Wage Boards Work in America?

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In recent years, labor activists have tried to summon one of labor’s legendary creatures — the wage board — to aid their cause. Unfortunately, reinvigorating tripartite institutions like wage boards is an uphill battle in the United States, given structural economic forces and institutional arrangements that constrain worker power. But two recent wage board iterations in Seattle and California may stand a fighting chance, both because of the organizational conditions that prevail in these jurisdictions, and because of board structures that provide workers the opportunity to exercise their voice and authority more meaningfully.
LPE Originals

What to Watch: The Thirteen Best Panels Streaming This Weekend

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Forget Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon. Over the next three days, you’ll want to turn that dial to Law and Political Economy: Labor, Social Control, and Counterpower. From the comfort of your own home, stream panels on the legal regulation of data and technology, socialist constitutionalism, decarcerating the welfare state, and so much more. Zoom links for the various panels can be found within this post, along with some paired blog posts from our (vast) archive.
LPE Originals

How Free Trade Threatens Global Democracy

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As we debate matters of near-shoring, friend-shoring, and globalization, we must not forget the lessons of the recent past: from Argentina to India, the pursuit of open economies involved a brutal crack down on labor union resistance. In the process, many governments unleashed dynamics that now threaten the survival of democracy itself. Hope, though, can be found in the recent strengthening of labor movements globally, as well as the potential to bolster unions through industrial policy and the transition to a green economy.
LPE Originals

Can Consumer Law Protect Workers?

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A growing number of employers are relying on Training Repayment Agreement Provisions to discourage workers from quitting. Courts, meanwhile, have routinely rejected legal challenges that claim these agreements violate employment laws, such as wage-and-hour laws and non-compete limitations. There is, however, another legal mechanism to stop this harmful and mobility-restricting practice: consumer law. When firms treat workers as their consumers by selling them services and credit products, the workers become worker-consumers and consumer law becomes work law.
LPE Originals

Knitting Together Patchwork Privacy and Labor Law Frameworks to Protect Workers from Corporate Surveillance

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To protect low-wage workers from invasive digital surveillance that follows them home, Congress needs to adopt a comprehensive framework that protects both worker and consumer data. In the absence of such Congressional action, regulatory action such as the FTC’s advanced notice of proposed rulemaking and the National Labor Relations Board’s recent focus on surveillance can be used to improve the situation. Finally, labor law doctrines should venture even further to address the impacts of surveillance: for instance, the NLRB should hold that evidence of surveillance is an essential term or condition of employment for determining whether two companies are a worker’s joint employer under its newly proposed joint employer rule. 
LPE Originals

Beyond Privacy: Changing the Data Power Dynamics in the Workplace

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By generating huge data sets to feed increasingly sophisticated algorithms, workplace surveillance allows employers to extract even more value from their employees. Greater data protection rights provide one possible avenue to change these power dynamics. But if employees truly want to participate in the management of their data and tap into it as a source of value, they need to wield power over data collection systems through collective bargaining and shared workplace governance.

LPE Originals

Electronic Surveillance Is Short-Circuiting Employment and Labor Law

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Electronic surveillance and automated management should not be understood as merely imposing some new, discrete set of harms on workers. Rather, pervasive employee monitoring should be seen as fundamentally altering the employment context in a way that threatens a wide range of employment and labor law protections. From worker safety, compensation, and classification to workplace discrimination and disability policy, policymakers and regulators must ensure that longstanding protections remain effective in the face of new technology.
LPE Originals

Surveillance and Resistance in Amazon’s Growing Platform Ecosystem

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Platforms differ markedly in how they use technology to mediate and oversee the labor process. By comparing Amazon’s e-commerce platform, where workers are gathered in warehouses, with MTurk, it’s distributed digital labor platform, we can see how both the nature of the platform and nature of the work give rise to distinct modes of surveillance, as well as their own possibilities for resistance.
LPE Originals

Labor Under Many Eyes: Tracking the Long-Haul Trucker

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In 2017, the United States government required that all long-haul truck drivers install electronic logging devices. While this mandate had only limited success in making the roads safer and reducing trucker fatigue, it provided a foundation for additional surveillance by employers and other profit-seeking companies. This layering of government, employer, and commercial surveillance into one apparatus stacked the deck against the workers and may be a bellwether of things to come in other workplaces.
LPE Originals

Workplace Surveillance, Collective Resistance: A Symposium

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Employers increasingly track what workers do during their shifts, during breaks, and at home. Over the next few weeks, this symposium will consider how workplace surveillance threatens workers individually and collectively, as well as how legal and non-legal strategies can combat invasive employer monitoring.
LPE Originals

The House Always Wins: The Algorithmic Gamblification of Work

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Recent technological developments are transforming the basic terms of worker compensation. Rather than receive a salary or predictable hourly wage, workers in the on-demand economy are often paid using opaque and constantly fluctuating formulas, allowing firms to personalize and differentiate wages in order to influence worker behavior. These payment schemes violate long-established norms of fairness, undermine economic stability, and make it nearly impossible for workers to predict or understand their compensation. As a result, many workers now experience their jobs as a form of gambling, in which they are being tricked into working longer for less.
LPE Originals

On Being Essentially Dispossessed

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During the pandemic, many workers deemed “essential” were nevertheless denied access to even the most rudimentary social safety net. How did this cruel paradox become possible? And how should we make sense of the antagonistic terms of the law in the lives of workers during this moment of extreme crisis?
LPE Originals

Disability and the Cisgender State

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In the escalating wave of anti-trans legislation and administrative violence sweeping the United States over the past several years, the credo on the left has often been that political violence against trans people is mere pretense: a right wing culture war meant to distract from issues more properly political-economic, or a cynical ploy to motivate a conservative voting base. This superficial reading is as naïve as it is dismissive of trans people’s material circumstances. What we need, instead, is a materialist critique that identifies state transphobia as dedicated to the broader neoliberal goal of dismantling public goods and modes of care in the name of cost reduction.