In the middle of things: the political economy of labour beyond the market.

While legal analyses of political economy typically centre on events and processes within the market, this discussion argues that contemporary dilemmas requires attention to labour and productive activity at its edges and beyond. Questions surrounding labour provide an unparalleled vantage point from which to assess how groups are differentially situated within the economy, especially at moments of economic crisis and transformation. The constitutive role of law in market relations, in turn, makes legal analysis fundamental to understanding how risks and rewards at work are distributed. Reflecting on the role of macroeconomic governance to work, evident in times of crisis in particular, and drawing upon concepts and tools developed within critical legal thought, this paper analyses two sites of labour, unpaid household care work and informal labour, that are at the centre of distributive struggles around work now. As the historical separation of the household and market labour discloses, transformations of legal form, and classification played a critical role in the simultaneous production of waged labour and valueless care. Similar processes are underway in labour markets now; thus, understanding the legal constitution of value and of work itself remains central to questions of inequality now. Bargaining analysis as well as taxonomies of family law suggest the significance of a wide range of legal rules and their interaction to labour market outcomes and the position of workers. The analysis of informal work points in a similar direction, as contract, competition, and corporate law and beyond are all implicated in the growth of informality and precarity at work. Finally, uncovering the legal foundations of racial fragmentation at work requires attention to multiple legal regimes as well as the conceptual and ideological commitments that sustain them. All engage questions about the role, and transformation, of legal form, classification and consciousness within contemporary political economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]