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LPE Originals

The Latest US Export to Brazil? Legalized Labor Exploitation

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Multinational platform companies, including Uber, iFood, Rappi, and 99, are currently pushing to export the United States’ most exploitative new labor laws to Brazil. Lawmakers should reject these attempts. As empirical evidence from the U.S. context shows, adopting a new “intermediate” worker category would be disastrous for low-income workers, and as Courts around the world have found, platform companies exert high levels of control over their workers and thus should be subject to standard labor and employment regulations.
LPE Originals

How to Protect Federal Agencies through Collaborative Bargaining

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Collective bargaining agreements offer the chance to proactively build in protections for federal workers that will be vital if a dangerously anti-administrative candidate like Trump or DeSantis takes office. But to take advantage of this opportunity, agency leadership must be conciliatory and collaborative in negotiations.
LPE Originals

The Care Bureaucracy

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In response to an expanding need for at home care, the state has established a highly bureaucratic system for delivering and compensating such assistance. This rigid approach to valuing care, in which needs are fragmented into easily quantifiable units, imposes under-recognized yet significant costs on workers and recipients alike.
LPE Originals

Cemex and the Right to Organize: Three Theories of the Case

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The NLRB’s recent Cemex decision should discourage employers from resisting unionization and therefore make it easier for workers to gain bargaining rights. But how should we understand the basis of this decision? Brishen Rogers considers the case from three theoretical perspectives: the liberal legalist, the progressive functionalist, and the low-key Marxist.
LPE Originals

Why Should Tenant Unions Look to Labor Law?

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With tenant organizing on the rise across the United States, legal scholars have been drawn to the idea that tenant unions, backed by the right legislative framework, could serve a function akin to labor unions. But labor and tenancy serve different functions for capitalism. Housing is a commodity that tenants consume rather than produce, so tenants would be better served by universal protections, such as price controls and possessory rights, than by the right to good faith negotiation.
LPE Originals

A Wagner Act for Tenant Unions

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One often overlooked reason for the current rental housing crisis is the imbalance in bargaining power between landlords and tenants. To address this imbalance, Duncan Kennedy, Karl Klare, and Michael Turk argue that we must empower tenant organizing and sketch the architecture of a legislative package that would entitle tenants to organize into unions with specified rights, powers, and protections against retaliation.
LPE Originals

From Work in Prison to Carcerality at Work

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How might organized labor be engaged in ending mass incarceration? One approach is to emphasize how carceral labor is exploited as a substitute for rights-bearing “free labor.” But the mere threat of substitution does not ensure solidarity. A more promising avenue is to consider how carcerality itself extends into so-called “free” labor markets. Under this “carceral labor continuum,” anti-carceral unionism emerges not from broad concerns over economic substitution but instead from the practical demands of workplace organizing.
LPE Originals

Strategic Lessons from Abolitionist Labor Struggle In Immigration Detention

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Since last summer, immigrants detained in California’s Mesa Verde and Golden State Annex detention centers have been on strike, demanding fair treatment as workers. Meanwhile, legal advocates have engaged in strategic policy campaigns and wage-and-hour litigation to support the strike from the outside. This partnership offers a valuable model for how solidarity and empowerment can blaze a path toward abolition.
LPE Originals

Untangling the Nineteenth-Century Roots of Mass Incarceration

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Popular historical narratives often trace the origins of penal labor to the post-Civil War South. Yet as insightful and politically useful as this familiar story may be, it overlooks the vast system of forced penal servitude that took shape in the antebellum North. Untangling the nineteenth-century roots of mass incarceration and forced labor can help clarify the shifting dynamics of expropriation, exploitation, and racialization across the long history of the U.S. carceral state.
LPE Originals

Not Worker, But Chattel

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In this essay, the author draws on his experiences as an incarcerated organizer to argue for the importance of a Black abolitionist politic that resists both “work” and the adoption of the “worker” identity. Instead, the category of the slave-in-revolt is better suited to the project of abolitionist organizing.
LPE Originals

Labor and the Carceral State

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How can we understand mass incarceration as a system of labor governance? This post introduces our new symposium on “carceral labor” by offering an empirical and conceptual overview of the different ways in which the carceral state structures and compels work, both in and beyond the prison.
LPE Originals

Labor Rights and the U.S.-China Relationship: From Neoliberal Consensus to Imperial Rivalry

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From the 1990s until the Trump presidency, political and economic elites on both sides of the Pacific held a largely uncomplicated enthusiasm for the re-centering of global supply chains within the borders of the People’s Republic of China. More recently, however, the U.S. federal government has resorted to a range of interventions to try to derail China’s ascendance, including, improbably, a newfound commitment to labor rights in China. By examining this trajectory, we can see why efforts to address labor exploitation will not succeed unless they transcend the narrow political vision engendered by the increasingly hostile U.S.-China rivalry.