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Hand-picked for you from around the web + original articles published just on the Moral Markets site
The Unbearable Insecurity of Housing and Jobs
In a recent dialogue sociologist Isabelle Ferreras and economist Josh Ryan-Collins discussed housing and work as two key areas in which people experience the effects of contemporary capitalism on their everyday life. Ilse Oosterlaken reports on the key points.
Riding for Deliveroo: Resistance in the New Economy
“In Riding for Deliveroo, Resistance in the New Economy, Callum Cant offers a new study of the labour processes and resistance dynamics of Deliveroo couriers in Brighton, drawing on his work as a Deliveroo rider for eight months, helping to organise strikes and taking part in unionising efforts. Elisa Pannini recommends this enjoyable and accessible book to anyone interested in understanding the mechanisms behind the platform economy and the issues related to organising platform workers.”
Equality in the U.S. Starts with Better Jobs
“Americans are demanding a reckoning. Incidents of police brutality and structural inequities that have caused the pandemic to hit people of color especially hard are sparking calls for racial justice. The precarious conditions endured by poorly paid frontline workers who have continued to stay on the job during the pandemic have generated calls for economic justice. Each of these forms of injustice has distinct drivers, but they amplify each other and often fall hardest on the same people. As Martin Luther King, Jr. reminded us, economic and racial justice are inexorably linked.”
Universal Unions
“Being an employee is a threat to your liberty. But while firms exist, compulsory unions are a basic safeguard of freedom”, argues Mark Reiff, political / legal / moral philosopher and author of In the Name of Liberty: The Argument for Universal Unionization (Cambridge University Press, 2020).
International Trade Has Cost Americans Millions of Jobs. Investing in Communities Might Offset Those Losses
“Economists generally support ‘people-based’ over ‘place-based’ policies and investments. The rationale is that it’s more important to invest in workers rather than bolster a place where workers live. Economists would argue that directing public funds into regions doing poorly is akin to wasting money. The logical outcome of such policies is that towns that have lost their economic base are allowed to shrink while other economies take their place.”
The Gig Economy: A Critical Introduction
“In The Gig Economy: A Critical Introduction, Jamie Woodcock and Mark Graham unpack the ‘how’ of the gig economy through quantative datasets and ethnographic vignettes from countries including the UK, Ghana, South Africa and India. As the study doubles up as a manifesto for the gig economy’s reconstruction, this is an important contribution to the existing literature that provides an excellent summary of existing research and builds on it using extensive fieldwork, writes Krishna Akhil Kumar Adavi.”
