Skip to content
LPE Originals

Putting Rural Communities on the (Broadband) Map

By

Broadband access in rural areas in the United States is not only a market failure, but a market disaster, as private providers have little interest in serving expensive, hard-to-reach places. In its most recent attempt to bridge the rural-urban digital divide, Congress allocated $42.5 billion for broadband deployment, the distribution of which is to be determined by the FCC’s national broadband maps. Yet these maps, which themselves have been outsourced to private actors, have consistently exaggerated broadband availability, depriving many rural communities of much-needed funding and a voice in this critical infrastructural issue.
LPE Originals

Rural and Racialized: How Property Law Perpetuates Racial Disparities

By ,

Research on racial disparities tends to focus on the urban, constructing an important story of race-based segregation and inequality that takes place on the city block or the suburban cul-de-sac. But with nearly all farmland in America (98%) owned by white people, these same racial dynamics are just as important to contemporary generational wealth disparities for rural people. It is thus critical to understand not only how property law has historically constructed these patterns of racial difference but also the role that property law continues to play in maintaining these disparities.
LPE Originals

Regulation’s Role in Geographic Inequality

By , ,

For decades now, we have been in an era of geographic divergence, with “superstar” cities and certain regions capturing growth, while others fall behind. Dominant explanations for this phenomenon focus largely on inexorable economic forces, such as globalization or the benefits of concentrating talent. Yet these explanations leave out a critical factor: the effects of specific regulatory choices on economic geography. From the Progressive and New Deal Eras through roughly the 1970s, the United States had a system of structural regulation in transportation, energy, communications, and banking that was designed to disperse economic activity. Deregulation naturally had the opposite effect: it concentrated economic activity and growth.
LPE Originals

The Law and Political Economy of Rural America

By

If you read the New York Times or listen to certain economists, you’ve probably heard the following story: rural regions in America are economically unsustainable, irrationally resentful, and increasingly obsolete. An LPE lens can help us see why this narrative is mistaken. If we want to understand the story of rural America, we need to begin by examining the governing choices — the laws and institutions — that have disadvantaged rural communities. By revealing the human agency that shapes our collective fates, we can see that new and better possibilities remain within our collective control.
LPE Originals

Development for Some, Disaster for Others: The Case for Reparations

By

Central to Táíwò’s case for reparations is the idea of inertia. This is a useful message for economists, particularly of the mainstream bent, to hear. Without significant changes in the social provisioning processes, wealth and advantage, along with poverty and disadvantage, will continue to accumulate. No marginal change in a tax code or behavioral nudge will induce the radical change that is necessary for those accumulations to reverse course. Instead, we must be guided by a “worldmaking” philosophy, one that seeks to build a just world on a global scale.
LPE Originals

What Will Worldmaking Require?

By

Building on Adom Getachew’s account of anticolonial “worldmaking,” Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò defends reparations as a worldmaking project aimed at creating a world free from domination. Yet given this ambition, his targets for climate justice seem, if anything, too modest: why stop with eliminating tax havens or endowing the Global Climate Fund? Why not aim at the reorganization of the global economy itself, as many anti-colonial leaders once did? And if we accept these broader ambitions, what political formations might plausibly advance the project of anticolonial climate reparations?
LPE Originals

Reconsidering the Future

By

Reconsidering Reparations offers several sound policy proposals about how to pursue reparations and climate justice. Yet its main contribution to the realm of climate politics has little to do with policy. Rather, it’s about a way of situating oneself in historical time. Unlike ordinary philosophical parables that freeze time and abstract away from specific places (think of the “trolley problem” or the “veil of ignorance”), Táíwò is arguing that the big picture is always historical, and always spatially complex. This shift in orientation will change how we see environmental or climate issues, but it will also change how we see much else.
LPE Originals

Reconsidering Reparations

By

For better or worse, our world stands on the precipice of major changes. Our current energy system is driving a rapidly unfolding climate crisis, and the need for total transformation “at every level of society” is now the prevailing scientific opinion. Given this context, Reconsidering Reparations argues for two things. First, reparations for trans-Atlantic slavery and colonialism should be seen as a future-oriented project engaged in building a just social order. Second, if we accept that view, then reparations and the struggle for racial justice should be directly linked to the struggle for climate justice.
LPE Originals

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

By

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

By

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

By

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

By

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

By

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

By

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

Recovering Emergence: A Nation Within What?

By

In the sci-fi short, The Sixth World, filmmaker Nanobah Becker poses the unthinkable: Diné people on a space mission to colonize Mars. Yet, in Becker’s telling, colonizing Mars is not a linear journey into a post-apocalyptic future, but is instead part of a genre of indigenous futurism and “decolonizing encounters.” Ezra Rosser’s A Nation Within follows a different temporality. Moving from “past to present to future,” Rosser offers a rich history of a Nation that emerges in relation to perhaps the most central, kindred actor for Diné futurism: the land itself.