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LPE Originals

The Reactive Model of Reasonable Accommodation

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The concept of reasonable accommodations at the heart of the ADA severely undercuts the efficacy of the law. Employers, public entities, and private businesses are allowed to ignore the inaccessible nature of their programs or activities until an individual with a disability seeks (or begs) for access. This reactive, individualized model does little to prevent mass-produced inaccessibility.

LPE Originals

Labour Law and Political Economy

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As a field of law, labour law draws it legitimacy from its capacity to impose a stable order on a conflictual relationship of power and exploitation, and to institutionalize such order as one of justice between classes. Because of this function, labour law is and must be open to contestation and change by those affected by it, responsive to pressures not just for internal dogmatic consistency or external economic efficiency but also for human interests and demands for non-commercial social justice.
LPE Originals

When Labor Law Protects Corporate Interests Better than Corporate Law Does

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The prevailing joint employer standard requires a showing of greater control than state-based corporate law requires when applying traditional concepts of agency law to parent-subsidiary and franchisor-franchisee relationships. As a result, the current standard leaves millions of workers without meaningful collective bargaining rights because companies that “call the shots” avoid getting called to the bargaining table. Thankfully, this past week, the Board issued a notice of proposed rulemaking that signals the NLRB’s desire to return to a more protective standard.

LPE Originals

Status Coercion in the Context of Human Trafficking and Forced Labor

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Anti-trafficking laws and policies in the United States — in particular, the Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA) — define certain types of coerced work as unlawful forced labor. Paradoxically, the TVPA’s operation also enables status coercion by casting trafficked workers as either “victims” or “criminals” once they are removed from involuntary servitude. The prevailing anti-trafficking legal regime subjects these workers, especially immigrant workers of color, to coercive conditions that persist in the criminal and immigration enforcement systems.
LPE Originals

Who’s Afraid of Public Ownership?

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Despite growing interest in public ownership at the municipal and even national level, LPE scholars have expressed relatively little interest in the topic. This is a mistake: proposals for public ownership can unite the left by achieving multiple policy goals at once and provide an alternative vision of what society should look like.
LPE Originals

Just Do It: Sport, the Culture of Punishment, and Status Coercion

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Playing through pain or while injured is a common practice in college athletics, as players fear losing access to the social mobility that their position makes available. Players are coerced to “just do it,” surrendering their agency to practices that border on deviant, both physically and psychologically.
LPE Originals

Status As Sword

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While employers have long conflated status with vulnerability, workers are starting to show how status itself can also be as a source of power — one that the courts, co-workers, and the public increasingly see as justification for broad-based change.
LPE Originals

Labor Coercion and the Status/Economy Distinction

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Employers wield power over workers by virtue of control over their institutional status and not solely, or even principally, by virtue of the power to cut off wages. Yet, in attempting to distinguish “status” and “economic” coercion, we must avoid the idea that status is implicitly non-economic and the economy operates apart from the social.
LPE Originals

Coerced: Work Under Threat of Punishment

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Economic coercion is not the only power dynamic that shapes labor relations. In a range of cases – including prison laborers, welfare workers, college athletes, and graduate students – employers exercise power over workers by controlling their “status” and all of the rights, privileges, and opportunities that such status confers.