Tanya Goldman and David Weil
Who’s Responsible Here? Establishing Legal Responsibility in the Fissured Workplace
Many businesses have restructured to treat workers like employees (specifying behaviors and then closely monitoring the outcomes that are crucial to their consumers and investors) but to classify workers as independent contractors (engaging them at an arms-length and cutting them off from rights and benefits tied to employment). These arrangements continue to blur the boundaries of what marks “employment.” This paper offers a new proposal to improve access to workers’ civil, labor, and employment rights given the current realities of work. The “Concentric Circle framework” posits an inner core set of rights for workers that are not tethered to an employment relationship, but to work itself; a middle circle rebuttable presumption of employment to address those rights that remain exclusive to employees (and not available to independent contractors); and an outer ring of additional mechanisms to give workers access to and incentivize companies to fund core workplace benefits that promote worker mobility and social welfare.
Sanjukta Paul and Marshall Steinbaum
Antitrust and the Reallocation of Economic Coordination Rights
What would a worker-friendly program for antitrust law reform look like? It ought to focus on re-allocating coordination rights from powerful firms to both workers and to smaller and non-dominant firms, through reform of the legal treatment of horizontal and vertical restraints.
John Irons
Reversing the Decline in the Labor Share of National Income
This memo briefly reviews some of the common explanations for the decline in the labor share of national income in the U.S. (and the corresponding rise in the capital share) — assuming such a shift is reflective of more permanent underlying forces — and then asks what forces might swim against this tide, or, alternatively, what might be done to turn the tide around.
Sharon Block
Clean Slate for Worker Power: Building a Just Economy and Democracy
In the Clean Slate for Worker Power report, we offer an intervention that aims to help stop the self-reinforcing cycle of economic and political inequality that currently prevails in the U.S. Our project is grounded in two related beliefs: (1) that we cannot fix our crises of inequality, either economic or political, without a strong labor movement and (2) that we cannot have a strong labor movement without reforming labor law. By proposing a fundamental redesign of labor law, our aspiration is to enable all working people – including those who have been excluded by systemic racism and sexism – to create the collective economic and political power necessary to countervail the corporate power that precludes an equitable economy and politics.
Anton Korinek
Designing Policy to Steer Progress in Artificial Intelligence
I analyze how to guide future progress in artificial intelligence so as to increase labor demand and create better-paying jobs rather than replacing workers. I will first discuss what factors make an innovation desirable from the perspective of workers and then present specific examples of technologies that augment human labor. Finally, I will delineate policy measures to steer progress in AI in that direction, ranging from nudges for entrepreneurs and changes in tax, labor market and intellectual property policies, to direct subsidies and taxes on innovation.
Bill Lazonick
Corporate Governance for the Common Good: Economic Equality Requires Investment in Productive Capabilities
A prosperous economy requires investment in productive capabilities by households, governments, and businesses. I lay out an “innovative enterprise” perspective on how business firms can generate productivity and share its gains in ways that contribute to stable and equitable economic growth. I then describe how a firm can transition from innovation to financialization, characterized by “predatory value extraction” that results in unstable employment, inequitable income, and sagging productivity—as has indeed become the business norm in the United States. I conclude with five measures related to corporate governance that can help restore sustainable prosperity to the U.S. economy.
Nathan Schneider
EXIT TO COMMUNITY: A NEW OPTION FOR STARTUPS?
Currently, the goal of tech startups is an “exit”—either an acquisition by a larger company or a public offering on stock markets. This talk will outline an emerging new model, “exit to community,” in which entrepreneurs, investors, activists, and others are creating a pathway toward turning successful startups into stakeholder assets.
Lance Taylor
WAGE REPRESSION, ASSET PRICE INFLATION, AND STRUCTURAL CHANGE CAUSED RISING MACROECONOMIC INEQUALITY FOR FIFTY YEARS FROM REAGAN TO TRUMP
At least three macroeconomic developments have played an important role in the increase of income inequality. Wage repression was the principal driving force; capital gains due to rising asset prices have been a major contributor to top incomes, and a dual economic structure has emerged, with jobs destroyed in manufacturing and other activities in which high wages combine with rising profits and productivity. Labor has been thereby shunted to low end occupations. These trends resulted from the ways in which micro level changes interacted to produce macro outcomes. Micro details such as monopoly power, “superstar” firms and fissured labor markets matter but do not by themselves determine macro outcomes.
Joel Rogers
Some good news for a change
The left needs a popular public philosophy and approach to governing, different from traditional Social Democracy but alternative to neoliberalism and its corporate-led successors. This memo suggests “Productive Democracy,” which would be a more open, decentralized, locally-rooted, egalitarian democracy, supported by leaner and more flexible government(s), as joined by a more capable public that its politics would explicitly aim at generating. It argues that Productive Democracy’s policies and institutions cohere and mutually support each other in driving up social learning and productivity, visibly benefitting citizens via a better democratic order. It both satisfies democracy’s “survival criterion” of giving citizens respect and results, and reopens its egalitarian future.