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1 - A New Labor Law for Deep Democracy

From Social Democracy to Democratic Socialism

from Part I - Labor and Democracy: Theory and Practice

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 January 2022

By
Mark Barenberg
Edited by
Angela B. Cornell  and
Mark Barenberg
Angela B. Cornell
Affiliation:
Cornell University, New York
Mark Barenberg
Affiliation:
Columbia University, New York
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Summary

Conventional workplace law includes the law of collective bargaining and employment contracts. This chapter argues that, to fully understand how law constructs worker power, industrial democracy, and political democracy, workplace law should greatly broaden in scope. The “new labor law” should encompass components of many fields of law that influence worker power and democracy as much as many components of conventional labor law. These additional components are lodged in domestic and international finance law, social wage law, constitutional law, communication law, tax law, and many more fields. The chapter applies the new labor law to critique and offer proposals to reconstruct existing law in the service of empowering workers in the workplace and polity, within both capitalist economies and imagined democratic socialist regimes.

Keywords

wage laborcapitalismdemocratic socialismlabor lawfinance lawsocial wagesconstitutional lawconsumption law
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Handbook of Labor and Democracy , pp. 13 - 35
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

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