This chapter explores the gendered biopolitics of the COVID-19 pandemic through an analysis of the UK’s marketized higher education sector. Theoretically, we combine feminist political economy with labour market segmentation theory to develop a novel meso-level biopolitical analysis. We use this framework to compare how major labour market institutions – employers, the trade union, and the Government – responded to the pandemic. The analysis reveals that, as a consequence of the actions and interactions of these labour market institutions, different segments of the higher education labour market experienced the pandemic precarities in different ways, resulting in gendered outcomes. The analysis extends our understanding of the genesis of gendered pandemic precarities within the marketized employment system studied.

This chapter examines how precarity affects the experiences of low skilled dirty workers – a group characterised by stigma and devaluation. Utilising Axel Honneth’s ideas of mutual recognition and the normative significance of work for identity, we explore how precarious working conditions affect self-understanding at the intersection of class and gender. Drawing on ethnographic data from street cleaners and refuse workers across four London boroughs, our findings demonstrate lack of secure employment has resulted in experiences of self-doubt and diminished sense of self-worth. Additionally, our findings highlight how secure employment and the ability to provide for one’s family is imperative to these workers, due to the heavy reliance on working class masculinity norms for affirming identity. Thus, we argue the centrality of work for a positive sense of self remains classed and gendered. We also show how the increasingly precarious nature of work is perpetuating feelings of vulnerability and therefore undermining opportunities for class solidarity through collective action in the face of moral injury for working class men.

The chapter explores the experience of late career self-employment. We adopt an intersectional perspective to theorise the precarity experienced by older self-employed women and provide insights into the societal and organizational structures and norms that shape ageing in employment and everyday life. We illustrate our arguments through three biographical cases of older self-employed women in the United Kingdom. Finally, we discuss the implications of age, gender, and self-employment and conclude with a call for inclusive policy to tackle precarity in self-employment.

The meteoric growth of the platform economy, its economic underpinnings as well as the accompanying human practices, have provoked academic debates as well as shone a light on its praxis. In this gig economy, the conditions of work have significantly changed from what used to be relatively stable markets, moored self- and work identities, with predictable technological cycles, established jobs in which individuals were ‘tied’ into roles and their organisations-of-employ, sufficient income during work and non-work periods, and with substantive protections through employment rights and social protection – also known as the standard employment relationship (SER). The gig economy has introduced efficiencies in engaging customer segments and supply chains, however its non-standard forms of employment (NSFE) which includes part-time, temporary, and zero-hour contracts and dependent self-employment, has brought with it: low pay, insufficient and variable hours, short-term contracts, and limited social protection rights (Rubery, Grimshaw, Keizer & Johnson, ). The majority of employees, migrants and foreigners, remain dependent on in-country structures to grant them SER rights – in many countries, though, they do not have the power to engage with those structures and no way to build on and improve their rights. The emerging story of the gig economy divides scholars, particularly in relation to the distribution of the economic and social benefits of this ‘new economy’, as well as international relations (IR) scholars in that race and indigeneity, and its intersections, have been missing in many of the debates. The challenge remains to upend the coloniality and neoliberal nature of work, and create a more democratic and inclusive labour market, in which more of the economic benefits are fairly distributed among those who participate in the gig economy and not just for indigenous citizens exclusively.

Much of our discussion to this point has been fairly abstract—especially for a book about antitrust and competition law, which would usually be consumed with the fine minutiae of legislative politics, corporate history, and judicial opinions. So it might be helpful at this point to look at how the philosophical conception of rights that we outlined in Chapter 4 apply to the most significant violations of antitrust or competition law, allowing us to see how a rights-focused approach differs from the standard economic one (and the Neo-Brandeisian one when appropriate).

Collusion and price-fixing

Let's start with what is probably the most obvious antitrust violation: collusive price-fixing. Firms cannot, by law, conspire to maintain prices above where they would if the firms set them independently and competitively. Even in industries that are less competitive to begin with, in which firms earn significant profits, they can increase their total profits by collectively agreeing to raise their prices. In effect, they would be acting as if they were a monopoly, splitting its higher profit among different divisions or departments. If successful, the higher prices lower output and consumer surplus, and despite the higher profits, total welfare falls, as we saw in Chapter 2. There is nothing special or unique about price-fixing: any instance of collusion between firms competing in the same industry is considered anticompetitive and therefore potentially illegal. But price-fixing is most clearly and directly related to consumer surplus and overall welfare, given the role that prices play in the market analysis.

If we look at price-fixing from the perspective of rights, however, the matter becomes much less clear and hardly obvious. The rights of disposal included in most common-sense conceptions of property rights would include the right to set the terms at which a seller offers a good or service. Firms are free to lower or raise their price as they choose, and consumers are free to respond by buying more or less as they choose. Consumers have the right to use their resources to make the purchases they want, and can accept or reject the offers made by sellers, but they have no right to a particular price (absent a previous guarantee or contract from the seller, such as a raincheck).

As we discussed in Chapter 6, antitrust enforcement is a case of the government using legal and regulatory means to address a nonwrongful externality. To this end, authorities try to reduce harm that results from anticompetitive behavior even though it violates no rights. However, this type of externality is not addressed by subtly adjusting incentives with Pigouvian taxes or acknowledging property rights to enable the application of the Coase theorem. Instead, the force of law in the form of injunctions or criminal penalties is brought down on firms who conduct their business in ways that fail to maximize welfare.

Looked at another way, the enforcement of antitrust law implies that firms have a responsibility to contribute to, if not maximize, consumer surplus or total welfare. From the perspective of antitrust advocates and enforcers, firms exist not to further the interests of their owners but to benefit society. If they fail to do this to a significant extent, they are breaking the law and can be sanctioned. This may be the most controversial but least appreciated aspect of the nature of antitrust and competition law in general. In this chapter we’ll explore several dimensions of this unique obligation, including why it's such a problem, how it can possibly be justified, and what its enforcement implies about the status of prosecuted firms under the law.

To what lengths?

To be sure, increasing welfare or well-being is a good thing, and not just according to utilitarians. All else the same, nearly everyone believes that making society better off is ethically good, even if it is not necessarily everyone's primary moral focus. But that qualification, “all else the same,” is doing a lot of work—the devil, as they say, is in the details.

The literature on utilitarianism is full of “nightmare examples” of people doing horrible things in the interest of maximizing welfare. A common one has a dictator facing a violent popular revolt, so he picks one person out of the crowd and executes them to calm the crowd, saving not only his own neck but also the many lives that would likely have been lost in the uprising. Other examples similarly lean into supervillain territory, such as Ozymandias from the graphic novel Watchmen, who fakes an alien invasion to unite the hostile nations of the world against a common enemy.

Existing research on the rise of precarious forms of employment has paid little attention to gender and diversity challenges. Yet precarious work has damaging effects for vulnerable demographics, with women, ethnic minorities, and people with disabilities more considerably affected. This volume unpacks this research and offers insights into the role of organisations in fostering inclusive change.

In liberal democracies, we are accustomed to a wide range and degree of freedom, limited only by the equally valid freedom of others. In other words, individuals are presumed to have the right to pursue their interests, whatever they may be, provided they do not wrongfully interfere with others doing the same.

The word “wrongfully” is crucial here. The five people ahead of me in the line for coffee in the morning are definitely interfering with my interests, but they are not acting wrongfully if they simply arrived there before I did. However, if someone arrives after me and cuts in front of me, that person is acting wrongfully, violating an important social norm, even if not a legal one. If I manage to procure my treasured beverage and then, upon leaving the coffee shop, someone attacks me and steals my coffee, that person has violated a clear legal norm, and I can marshal the powers of the state to my side to pursue justice. (My sole recourse to the person who cut in line is to express scorn and hope my fellow patrons do the same.)

Although we may resent those who have a negative impact on our lives, we should also recognize when they had every right to their actions. Each of us interacts with countless other people in myriad ways every day, inevitably leading to blameless conflict, due only to scarcity of time and space (and coffee shops). It is only when people violate social or legal norms, implying rights held by others, do those actions become wrongful—and it is only when actions are wrongful that we feel justified in addressing them in some way, whether by scorn (in the case of social norms) or state action (in the case of legal norms).

This idea applies not only to individual actions, but to those of businesses as well. Firms take many actions that affect individuals (and other firms) in positive and negative ways, but even the latter is not of concern to the state unless they violate recognized rights. Businesses can increase prices, stop producing certain products, or close locations, all of them possibly setting back the interests of individuals who enjoyed or relied on them.

Despite the central role of employment for integration, refugees are particularly vulnerable to under- and unemployment, and are more likely to find themselves in precarious working conditions compared to host country residents. Frequently discussed reasons for this are, for example, legal restrictions, health issues, and non-recognition of qualifications. We draw on the concept of intersectionality and the psychology of working theory and use data that we have collected with women and men refugees in Turkey and in the Netherlands. We use narrative accounts of four refugees to show how refugees’ gender relates to their vulnerability towards precarious work and how this relationship is further complicated by refugees’ economic status in their home country as well as by the societal expectations and protection in the host environment. By discussing these relationships and their relevance in the larger context of economic and societal upheaval, we suggest several avenues for future research.

In arguing against the entire field of antitrust and competition law, I have set myself quite the task. After all, antitrust is a largely unquestioned part of law and regulation in most developed countries around the world. In the United States, antitrust law has been raised to a level of importance normally reserved for the seminal documents of liberal democracy itself. For example, in 1972 the Supreme Court pronounced that

Earlier, the Court called the Sherman Act “a comprehensive charter of economic liberty aimed at preserving free and unfettered competition as the rule of trade.” Indeed, according to political scientist Marc Allen Eisner, “antitrust was often referred to as a constitution for the American economy,” reflecting the centrality it has come to occupy in the firmament of economic regulation.

Although liberals and conservatives maintain their own unique focus and emphasis for antitrust, most scholars and policymakers across the political spectrum support some degree of antitrust enforcement. As economists Kenneth Elzinga and William Breit wrote, antitrust is “one of those rare issues that cuts across even the most formidable of ideological barriers.” Democratic U.S. Senator Howard Metzenbaum, writing in the Antitrust Law Journal in 1987, asserted that “if you are for free enterprise, then you must be for antitrust. You can't be for one and against the other.” By the same token, economist George Stigler of the University of Chicago—a school famous for a restrained approach to competition law—claimed that antitrust is “public interest law in the same sense in which … having private property, enforcement of contracts, and suppression of crime are public-interest phenomena.”

Regardless of the approach taken to antitrust—whether traditional, structuralist, Chicago, Harvard, post-Chicago, or Neo-Brandeisian— most all scholars and policymakers today agree that antitrust is an essential aspect of the legal system regulating the economy.

In the previous chapter (and throughout this book), I argued that, by penalizing anticompetitive behavior, antitrust law holds business owners legally responsible for promoting consumer surplus or total welfare. This runs counter to the appropriate conception of free trade in a liberal society, in which commercial transactions should be treated no differently from any other type of human activity—which is to say they should be permitted as long as they do not infringe the rights of others to do the same. The behavior considered to be anticompetitive under antitrust law falls squarely within the business owners’ property rights understood in a moderate, mainstream way, and does not violate any rights of other parties (including consumers and competitors). Nonetheless, such behavior is prohibited, indeed criminalized, because it does not sufficiently contribute to consumer surplus or total welfare.

In this final chapter, we pull back from the fine details to get a general and abstract view of the market, competition, and the government, as it is ideally considered in a liberal democracy that takes the rights of all seriously. As we shall soon see, this view is antithetical to the utilitarian worldview reflected in the economics-oriented and Neo-Brandeisian approaches to antitrust, and in that sense this chapter brings us back to where we began on the first page of this book.

The nature of the market and the role of government

The critique of antitrust law I’ve presented reflects a particular understanding of the purpose of the market and the role of the government in it, which is very different from how economists and antitrust advocates understand them. So we need to ask the question: what is the purpose of the market? (By “the market,” I mean the institutions of commerce, including firms, consumers, and the context in which they trade, whether a physical marketplace or online websites.)

There are two general answers to this question, which reflect different perspectives on how the economy, government, and society interact. The first answer is that the market serves society through generating wealth and well-being: supplying goods and services, employing labor, and creating returns on investment. In other words, the market is an instrument to benefit the members of society, and as such it can and should be regulated to ensure that it creates the most benefit possible.

The central problem that I identify in antitrust is that it punishes actions that, although they may create harm, do not involve any wrongdoing. For instance, Raju Parakkal and Sherry Bartz-Marvez write that antitrust law “is primarily intended to restrain large firms from engaging in anticompetitive behavior that is not only detrimental to other firms but for the most part deleterious to the interests of consumers across the economy.” Like similar statements quoted earlier, this addresses the negative consequences of anticompetitive behavior, but makes no reference to any moral wrongdoing. The underlying idea is that all harm is equally problematic and needs to be minimized (or optimized with respect to benefit), regardless of any consideration of whether the actions that brought them about are wrongful in the sense of violating rights.

This is an intrinsic, pervasive, but largely unacknowledged problem with mainstream economics in general—and ultimately a legacy of its roots in the moral philosophy known as utilitarianism, with which we begin this chapter examining the ethical foundations of economics. After introducing the basic tenets of utilitarianism and explaining how they relate to economics, I’ll discuss the implications of their neglect of meaningful rights, turning to another school of ethics to fill that gap before we discuss rights in more detail in the next chapter.

Utilitarianism

The basic concept of utilitarianism can be traced back to antiquity, but its most well-known and modern presentation is due to the philosopher Jeremy Bentham, with important elaboration done by philosopher and economist John Stuart Mill. Both men were reformers who recommended utilitarianism as a tool for social betterment through government policy and law, as well as a way of individuals to live an ethical life. In its most basic form, utilitarianism focuses on maximizing the total happiness, well-being, or utility of the members of a group or society. As such, it is a specific form of consequentialism, the general term for any ethical system that places moral value on the results or outcomes of actions, rather than those that focus on the moral status of actions themselves (such as deontology) or the character of the persons performing them (such as virtue ethics).

This chapter presents three empirical studies on disabled individuals who use their disability strategically as they navigate the labour market. In our first case, we reveal that disabled employees in France reflect on factors on societal, organizational, and individual levels. More specifically, they determine whether the quota system can be used to their own advantage, decreasing their precarious position in the labour market. In the second case study, we draw on 257 qualitative surveys with individuals with mental health conditions in a variety of countries and outline how these individuals make their career choices. More specifically, we show how they self-select into sectors in which the characteristics related to their mental illness can be turned into an advantage. The third case presented highlights that disabled individuals use social comparison based on the characteristics of their disability when determining how they compare with other disabled workers. When they feel their disability characteristics are less stigmatizing than that of others, they tend to use this strategically, enhancing their own employability, securing less precarious employment. Through these three cases, we show the inequalities that exist within the population of disabled workers. More specifically, individuals with a disability in countries with less constraining disability legislation and individuals whose disability is more stigmatizing in nature are more likely to end up in employment that is characterized by low wages, few career development opportunities, little autonomy, and unstable or hazardous working conditions. Practical implications and avenues for future research are provided.