American Labor and the Law: Dormant, Resurgent, and Emergent Problems

In the United States and worldwide, the “labor question” has recrudesced. Old issues have resurged, sometimes in altered guise. New issues have emerged. Both test the twentieth century’s solutions. This work explores the arc of labor law in the United States up to the changes that have reordered business and employment at the century’s turn—the resurgence of old issues in new dress and the emergence of new issues, of which the deployment of technologies—roboticization and computerization—has been the catalyst. It closes on the issues labor law is facing in the twenty-first century, including the imponderable of yet a new need to address the definition of citizenship.

The author’s thorough coverage of the relevant terrain draws on social and legal history, and also on the current wealth of economic studies across the range of such pressing issues as the following:

• wages;
• precarity of work;
• employee representation;  
• health and safety;
• job discrimination;
• employee mobility;
• privacy;
• job displacement;
• anti-retaliation;
• wrongful dismissal;
• accelerating use of automation, robotization, and computerization;
• segmentation and polarization of the labor market;
• fissurization of jobs;
• labor segmentation and polarization;
• union implosion; and
• privatization of law.

At a critical moment when the various strands of all these issues are becoming intertwined, this hugely informative book elucidates how labor law stands today in the United States, and by extension in many other countries.

This book provides a necessary background for comparative engagement with economic change. Because the developments it deals with are global, this is critical reading for policy makers, academics, students, and an enlightened public to put what is happening in larger historical context as seen from the paradigm neoliberal economy and its legal institutions.