Jean-Christian Vinel. The Employee

Corporate executives have found myriad ways of undermining the power of American workers and their unions. In this well-researched book, Jean-Christian Vinel shows that one of management's most successful strategies for disempowering labor has been to classify workers as “supervisors” rather than “employees,” thus making them ineligible for union membership. The rise of conservative majorities on the Supreme Court and National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) has encouraged employers to pursue such strategies. As Vinel explains, recent labor disputes involving the legal definition of employees bode poorly for workers in our age of expanding global markets and economic inequalities in which so many Americans want and need the right to challenge business practices. This study of politics and law begins in the nineteenth century, when the legal categories of “master” and “servant” still defined many employment relationships. Rapid industrial change after the Civil War reshaped the national economy in ways that raised basic questions about the freedom of wage earners and even the future of American democracy. In the age of big business, courts began to define workers as “employees” with distinct rights and obligations. “Employee” had an oblique, malleable meaning that obscured class relations and probably kept some Americans from developing a sense of class-consciousness. In the language of poststructuralists, both liberals and conservatives could “read” the word according to their own circumstances and outlooks, and with different views of what constituted economic realities and the social good.

Democracy · Economics · Labor relations · Labour economics · Labour law · New Deal · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Power (physics) · Servant · Sociology · Supreme court · Trade union · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · Law