Labor and Employment Law Commons^™

The Sharing Economy And The Edges Of Contract Law: Comparing U.S. And U.K. Approaches, Miriam A. Cherry

Faculty Publications

Technology and the rise of the on-demand or sharing economy have created new and diverse structures for how businesses operate and how work is conducted. Some of these matters are intermediated by contract, but in other situations, contract law may be unhelpful. For example, contract law does little to resolve worker classification problems on new platforms, such as ridesharing applications. Other forms of online work create even more complex problems, such as when work is disguised as an innocuous task like entering a code or answering a question, or when work is gamified and hidden as a leisure activity. Other …

People Analytics And Invisible Labor, Miriam A. Cherry

Faculty Publications

(Excerpt)

In recent years, I have been writing about two increasingly salient labor and employment law issues: the presence of invisible labor and the rise of people analytics.' First, invisible labor could include emotion work, such as being a colleague's "work wife," or could include "identity work" that is time and effort spent on making others feel comfortable with the worker. Invisible labor might also include uncompensated time spent in "looking good" and "sounding right." It could also include instances where technology obscures work that is being done through a website platform or mobile application. The second trend is …

Overcoming Our Global Disability In The Workforce: Mediating The Dream, Elayne E. Greenberg

Faculty Publications

The unparalleled global support for the 2008 United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities ("CRPD") highlights the global schism between the public extolling of human rights for individuals with disabilities and the private castigating of such individuals in their daily lives and in the workforce. The CRPD explicitly mandates that work is a right accorded to individuals with disabilities, and global employers are now being challenged to implement that right. Yet, in order to ensure meaningful, universal compliance with its directives, the CRPD imposes affirmative duties on Supporting States to develop a customized, workable plan that effectively …

Working For (Virtually) Minimum Wage: Applying The Fair Labor Standards Act In Cyberspace, Miriam A. Cherry

Faculty Publications

(Excerpt)

When Congress passed the Fair Labor Standards Act ("FLSA")' in 1938 to help relieve the downward spiral of wages in the Great Depression, America's workers commonly showed up to an employer's place of business, leaving little doubt if they were "working" and thus entitled to the statute's minimum wage. Times, and technologies, have changed. With modem computers, individuals often perform work on someone else's behalf while sitting at home, using not their employer's factory machinery, but rather a computer they purchased for themselves, as well as their own Internet connection. The work is often engaging and is far more …