The Legal Tragedy of Exploitation

The article argues that labor litigation helps to sustain, rather than interrupt, the process of worker exploitation. Using legal claims raised by Uber drivers and Deliveroo riders in the UK as a backdrop, it focuses on undue exploitation—exploitation beyond the limits set by law—as a mechanism that facilitates capital accumulation while hedging against the liability this mode of exploitation imposes. While assuming this outcome is socially undesirable and ideally curtailed by law, the article shows that the legal framework of labor litigation produces two complementary effects that reinforce exploitation through the embeddedness of irresponsibility. First, it disassembles the reciprocity between exploitation and liability, enabling extraordinary profit flows for exploiters. Second, it normalizes residual profits that persist beyond court awards. These effects frame exploitation as a gamble that will generally pay off, all the while embedding its social effects at a level no longer retrievable by law

Bad faith · Causation · Complicity · Embeddedness · Jurisprudence · Liability · Profit (economics) · Reciprocity (cultural anthropology) · Digital Economy and Work Transformation · Global trade, sustainability, and social impact · Labor Movements and Unions