This Essay offers a new argument for the minimum wage as a contribution to a symposium on “Civil Rights Law and the Low-Wage Worker.” The minimum wage debate has been excessively focused on disputes over its efficacy as antipoverty policy, often by comparison to tax-and-transfer programs...

This Essay is based on the 37th Annual Kenneth M. Piper Lecture. It offers a new perspective on the much-discussed “future of work.” That discussion typically highlights changes within the labor market that undermine the employment relationship's role as the bedrock for work regulation. But...

According to a familiar and influential analysis, antipoverty programs are structured by distinctions between the deserving and undeserving poor. Through techniques like behavioral conditions on benefit eligibility, these moral distinctions divide the poor and interfere with providing assistance...

This book chapter critically examines the prospects for expanding "employment law" into "work law." Efforts in this direction too often assume that all "work" takes places within labor markets. Yet their failure to incorporate nonmarket work is inconsistent with such efforts’ expansive...

This short essay on the labor law status of independent contractors was written for the NLRB/George Washington University Law School symposium "The National Labor Relations Act at 75: Its Legacy and Its Future." It argues that attempts to fine tune the employee/independent contractor distinction...

Work requirements in welfare programs often are interpreted as enforcing cross-class parity in work-family balance; premised on the idea that most mothers are now working in the labor market, such requirements force welfare recipients to do the same. However, this class-parity analysis...