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.
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.
I am an undocumented immigrant from Honduras. I crossed the Guatemalan, Mexican, and U.S. borders when I was 5 years old. I’m currently a sex worker and a 25-year-old DACA recipient. Like most sex workers, I want decriminalization, or the elimination of all criminal penalties for sex work.
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.
We agree with Dubal that winning collective bargaining power at Uber and Lyft will depend on the continuation of the kind of solidarity actions that Dubal describes. But in our view, a fundamental reshaping of labor law will also be necessary. Even if an “uncompromised” version of California AB5 passes, that won’t get us there.
I share Dubal’s worries about Uber and Lyft’s proposed “workers’ associations” and agree about the indispensable role played by independent, exclusive-representative unions. But I am more open to the possibility that we ought not necessarily reject workers’ associations of the sort being contemplated in the California debates.
The “gig economy” is one place where organizing outside of traditional trade unions is undoubtedly happening in surprising and perhaps unexpected ways. For example, on May 8, 2019, a group of independent app-based drivers in Los Angeles called the LA Rideshare Drivers United organized and launched an unprecedented international picket and work stoppage against Uber…
The CEOs of the two top-competing gig firms—Uber and Lyft—penned a June 12, 2019 OpEd in the San Francisco Chronicle in which they claim that after over six years of local, state, federal, and international law-breaking, ignoring the concerns of drivers, and viciously fighting any efforts to achieve living wage and benefits, they are ready…
This is Part III of a conversation between David H. Webber and Michael McCarthy on the prospect of combating neoliberal corporate governance through the shareholder activities of workers’ pension funds.
This is Part II of a conversation between David H. Webber and Michael McCarthy on the prospect of combating neoliberal corporate governance through the shareholder activities of workers’ pension funds.
This is Part I of a conversation between David H. Webber and Michael McCarthy on the prospect of combating neoliberal corporate governance through the shareholder activities of workers’ pension funds.
As has been widely reported, the U.S. Department of Labor issued an “opinion letter” yesterday concluding that an unnamed “virtual marketplace company” does not employ the workers who make the company viable. Instead, the letter finds that these workers are independent contractors. The letter is flawed in multiple ways. As Sharon will explain, deciding a major…
Anderson’s analysis is insufficiently attentive to the structural realities of the “fissured workplace.”
Concepts like “freedom” and “exploitation” are grounded in material reality–as historically embedded attempts to express attitudes about certain institutional arrangements
Three potential strategies the labor movement could adopt to combat private domination at work.
