How Cultural Norms Help Companies Exploit Unpaid Workers
Eric Posner is Kirkland and Ellis Distinguished Service Professor of Law, University of Chicago. His research interests include financial regulation, antitrust law, and constitutional law. He has written a dozen books and more than a hundred academic articles on law and legal theory. His most recent books are How Antitrust Failed Workers (Oxford University Press, 2021), Radical Markets (Princeton) (with Glen Weyl), which was named a best book for 2018 by The Economist; Last Resort: The Financial Crisis and the Future of Bailouts (Chicago), which was named a best book for 2018 by The Financial Times; and The Twilight of Human Rights Law (Oxford). He is of counsel at MoloLamken LLP, a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a member of the American Law Institute.
Eric Posner examines how businesses exploit cultural expectations to frame certain activities as non-work, creating a form of monopsony power that allows them to extract labor without compensation in areas ranging from college athletics to digital content creation. He argues that properly classifying these “invisible” forms of work as compensable labor would benefit society, challenging anti-commodification concerns and highlighting the law’s struggle to define work in these blurred contexts.
