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LPE Originals

Exploitation Entrepreneurialism

NB: This post is part of a series in our Race for Profit symposium. Read all posts here. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor’s Race for Profit is an essential read not just for anyone interested in racism, housing segregation and post-Civil Rights era racial politics, but for anyone interested in understanding the American economy. It is impossible to understand contracts, property…

LPE Originals

Addressing Race and Gender Inequities at the Root of Housing Injustice

NB: This post is part of a series in our Race for Profit symposium. Read all posts here. As Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor demonstrates in Race for Profit, housing exclusion, instability, and segregation are all racialized in nature, and sewn into the very fabric of American institutions, policies, and value systems. During the height of redlining in the mid-20th century,…

LPE Originals

Predatory Inclusion: A Long View of the Race for Profit

NB: This post is part of a series in our Race for Profit symposium. Read all posts here. The ascending slope of our current housing crisis is a good vantage point from which to think about Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor’s new history of the federal response to an earlier point of crisis: she gives us reason to reconsider the role…

LPE Originals

How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership

This post is part of our Race for Profit symposium. Read all posts here. In Houston’s upscale Galleria-Uptown neighborhood, the mall known simply as “TheGalleria” is, according to its website, “Texas’ largest and most luxurious shopping destination.” A local real estate website confirmed the value of the location, pointing out that housing values in the neighborhood…

LPE Originals

How Finance Structures Global Value Chains

NB: This post is part of a symposium on law and global value chains co-convened with the Institute for Global Law and Policy’s Law and Global Production Working Group. The Law-in-Global-Value-Chains perspective adopted in the Research Manifesto and introduced the initial blog of this series is based on the recognition that law is endogenous to…

LPE Originals

On Law and Value

NB: This post is part of a symposium on law and global value chains co-convened with the Institute for Global Law and Policy’s Law and Global Production Working Group. We are witnessing a new moment in economic development: what Richard Baldwin calls the global value chain (GVC) revolution. As our symposium suggests, critical legal realist…

LPE Originals

Cracking the Code of Global Value Chains

NB: This post is part of a symposium on law and global value chains co-convened with the Institute for Global Law and Policy’s Law and Global Production Working Group. Global Value Chains (GVCs) form a backbone of our global economy that eludes easy characterization. In media or policy reports, corporate brochures or academic publications, the…

LPE Originals

Global Value Chains as a Legal Concept

NB: This post is part of a symposium on law and global value chains co-convened with the Institute for Global Law and Policy’s Law and Global Production Working Group. In the first blog post of this symposium Dan Danielsen and Jennifer Bair argue that law can open up a window into understanding global political economy,…

LPE Originals

Labor Law and Economic Governance in the EU

This post comes out of the early career workshop ‘Law and Political Economy in Europe’, which took place at the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies, at the University of Oxford, on the 7th of October 2019. For all the posts this series, click here. At the Oxford Workshop, I explored the relationship between the EU economic governance and labor…

LPE Originals

Care Work In & Beyond the Labor Market

Focusing on universalizing access to better paid work submerges two other longstanding elements of critical feminist analysis of care work. These are particularly pertinent to LPE conversations about the political-economic centrality of markets. First, feminist accounts of social reproduction have long highlighted the extensive, essential, but systematically devalued or outright ignored work performed outside conventional labor markets in families and communities. This includes especially direct care work and housework or other household production, but also broader forms of civic participation often denoted “volunteering.” Second, attaching economic resources to nonmarket social reproductive labor starts to loosen paid work’s iron grip on household income more generally. That grip creates a legitimated dependency on labor markets that undergirds power relations both between labor and capital and, within families, between market “breadwinners” and those more conventionally labelled “dependents.” Valuing care thus could facilitate both reimagining work and decentering markets.

LPE Originals

The Neglect of Long-Term Care

This post is part of a series on Care Work. Read the rest of the series here.  ** ** ** Caregiving has long been shunted aside and undervalued in the United States. Long-term care (LTC) is no exception. Sometimes called “long term services and supports,” LTC is the help that over 40 million Americans who are sick or…

LPE Originals

Service Workers or Servile Workers? Migrant Reproductive Labor and Contemporary Global Racial Capitalism

This post is part of a series on Care Work. Read the rest of the series here.  Grassroots migrant worker activists, particularly those working as domestic workers or care workers, have characterized their labor experiences as “servitude,” “modern-day slavery,” and “bondage.” They use these terms to describe both their workplace conditions and the power dynamics…