Vanderbilt Law Review Volume 61 Issue 3 Issue 3 - April 2008 Article 3 4-2008 Working at the Boundaries of Markets: Prison Labor and the Economic Dimension of Employment Relationships Noah D. Zatz Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarship.law.vanderbilt.edu/vlr Part of the Labor and Employment Law Commons Recommended Citation Noah D. Zatz, Working at the Boundaries of Markets: Prison Labor and the Economic Dimension of Employment Relationships, 61 Vanderbilt Law Review 857 (2008) Available at: https://scholarship.law.vanderbilt.edu/vlr/vol61/iss3/3 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by Scholarship@Vanderbilt Law. It has been accepted for inclusion in Vanderbilt Law Review by an authorized editor of Scholarship@Vanderbilt Law. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Working at the Boundaries of Markets: Prison Labor and the Economic Dimension of Employment Relationships Noah D. Zatz* IN TRODU CTION ............................................................................... 859 I. PRISON LABOR AND CONVENTIONAL EMPLOYMENT LAW A N A LY SIS ............................................................................. 867 A. The Basic Contours of Contemporary P rison L abor ............................................................ 868 B. Prison Labor and the Control Dimension of Employment ....................................... 871 C. Prison Labor and Statutory Exclusions .................. 875 D. Moving Beyond Control and Exclusions.................. 879 II. EMPLOYMENT'S DISPUTED ECONOMIC DIMENSION .................... 882 A. Prison Labor as Noneconomic: The Exclusive Market Approach..................................... 884 1. Involuntariness ............................................ 886 2. E xchange ...................................................... 888 3. B argain ......................................................... 890 B. Prison Labor as Economic: The Productive Work Approach ........................................................ 892 Acting Professor of Law, UCLA School of Law. For helpful conversations and comments on prior or related drafts, I am grateful to Rick Abel, Kathryn Abrams, Mark Barenberg, Devon Carbado, Jessica Cattelino, Sharon Dolovich, Cynthia Estlund, Robert Goldstein, Risa Goluboff, Lisa Griffin, Bernard Harcourt, Gia Lee, Gillian Lester, Christine Littleton, Jennifer Mnookin, Steve Munzer, Frances Olsen, Russell Robinson, Catherine Ruckelshaus, Katherine Stone, Christopher Tomlins, Steven Willborn, Joan Williams, and Viviana Zelizer, as well as to audiences and discussants at the American Bar Foundation, Law and Society Association 2006 Annual Meeting, Seton Hall Employment & Labor Law Scholars' Forum, UCLA School of Law, UCLA School of Law Junior Group, University of California, Berkeley School of Law, University of Chicago Crime & Punishment Workshop, and University of Wisconsin Law School. Thanks as well to Andrew Brunsden, Sara Dooley, Daniel Koontz, Kristin Greer Love, Keemin Ngiam, Nicole Perez, and Sergio Vazquez for their valuable research assistance. 857 858 VANDERBILT LAW REVIEW [Vol. 61:3:857 C. Generalizing From PrisonLabor to Paid N onm arket Work ...................................................... 897 1. Employment as Productive Work ................. 897 2. Employment as Exclusively Market Work.. 900 III. How BOTH ACCOUNTS OF THE ECONOMIC D IM EN SION FAIL .................................................................. 903 A. The Impossibly Restrictive Exclusive M arket Standard ..................................................... 904 1. The Embeddedness Critique of the Exclusive M arket .......................................... 905 2. Employment's Embeddedness in Systems of Punishment ................................ 907 3. The Embeddedness of Employment M ore G enerally ............................................. 910 4. A Mostly Market Standard? ............. .. .... ..... 913 B. The Indiscriminately Expansive Productive Work Standard ........................................................ 914 1. Locating Economic Activity Outside M arket Institutions ...................................... 915 2. Productive Work Without Exchange: The Volunteer Problem ................................ 918 3. Differentiating Among Forms of E xchange .................................................. 921 IV. How LAW CONSTITUTES EMPLOYMENT AS ECONOMIC ....... 925 A. Employment as a Relational Package ..................... 925 1. Relational Packages and Relational W ork ............................................ 926 2. Prison Labor's Employment Status as an Object of Relational Work .................. 929 a. Free Labor, Independence, and Competence ........................................ 930 b. The State as a Nonmarket Entity ...... 934 c. The Labor Market as Public Space ... 935 B. Employment Law's Role in Packaging E m p loym ent ............................................................. 937 1. Law's Facilitative, Regulatory, and Constitutive Roles ........................................ 938 2. A Constitutive Analysis of Law and Em ploym ent .................................................. 942 a. Regulatory Mandates as Relational M arkers............................ 943 20081 PRISON LABOR 859 b. Indirect Influence of Regulatory Mandates on Relational Markers...... 946 c. Normative and Cognitive Influences of Legal Classification..... 947 d. Institutionalizingand DifferentiatingEmployment as a Package...................................... 949 C O N CLU SIO N S ................................................................................. 95 1 A. The Employment Status of Paid N onm arket W ork ...................................................... 952 B. Revisiting the Market Character of Ordinary Employment ........................................ 954 C. Rethinking the Significance of Pay in the Analysis of Nonmarket Work ....................... 956 Prisonersare essentially taken out of the national economy upon incarceration. 1 -Vanskike v. Peters Let the prisonerspick the fruits. We can do it without bringing in millions of foreigners. 2 -U.S. Rep. Dana Rohrabacher INTRODUCTION The "who" question is prominent in recent legal scholarship about work: Who is recognized as a worker, and who is left out? Roughly speaking, two distinct conversations pursue this question. One analyzes the centrality of market work and questions whether other activities-nonmarket work-should be incorporated into legal regimes of worker support and protection. This inquiry emerges from feminist scholarship, focuses on families and caregiving, and primarily considers reforms in who counts as a worker for the purposes of family, welfare, social insurance, and tax law. 3 The 1. 974 F.2d 806, 810 (7th Cir. 1992). 2. Carl Hulse & Rachel L. Swarns, Conservatives Stand Firm on Immigration,N.Y. TIMES, Mar. 31, 2006, at A12. 3. See generally MARTHA ALBERTSON FINEMAN, THE AUTONOMY MYTH (2004) [hereinafter FINEMAN, THE AUTONOMY MYTH]; MARTHA ALBERTSON FINEMAN, THE NEUTERED MOTHER, THE SEXUAL FAMILY, AND OTHER TWENTIETH CENTURY TRAGEDIES (1995); Kathryn Abrams, The Second Coming of Care, 76 CHI.-KENT L. REV. 1605 (2001); Martha M. Ertman, Commercializing Marriage:A Proposal for Valuing Women's Work Through Premarital Security Agreements, 77 TEX. L. REV. 17 (1998); Martha Albertson Fineman, Contract and Care, 76 CHI.-KENT L. REV. 1403 (2001); Jill Elaine Hasday, Intimacy and Economic Exchange, 119 HARV. L. REV. 491 (2005); Gillian Lester, A Defense of Paid Family Leave, 28 HARV. J.L. & GENDER 1 (2005); Gillian Lester, Unemployment Insurance and Wealth Distribution, 49 UCLA L. REV. 335 (2001) 860 VANDERBILT LAW REVIEW [Vol. 61:3:857 boundaries of employment largely are taken for granted, and the problem is whether to go beyond employment and recognize unpaid work performed outside the market's boundaries. 4 A second conversation responds to the proliferation of contingent work, outsourcing, and workforce intermediaries like temporary staffing agencies, and it proceeds to question how yesterday's employment statutes engage today's restructured labor market. This inquiry emerges from labor and employment relations scholarship, focuses on firms in conventional labor markets, and primarily considers reforming the employee/independent contractor distinction or reconfiguring labor protections to be less dependent on a single, or even any, employer. 5 In this second case, the restriction of work to the [hereinafter Lester, Unemployment Insurance]; Goodwin Liu, Social Security and the Treatment of Marriage: Spousal Benefits, Earnings Sharing, and the Challenge of Reform, 1999 WIS. L. REV. 1, 61; Dorothy E. Roberts, The Value of Black Mothers' Work, 26 CONN. L. REV. 871 (1994); Vicki Schultz, Life's Work, 100 COLUM. L. REV. 1881 (2000); Reva B. Siegel, Home as Work: The First Woman's Rights Claims Concerning Wives' Household Labor, 1850-1880, 103 YALE L.J. 1073 (1994); Katherine Silbaugh, Turning Labor into Love: Housework and the Law, 91 NW. U. L. REV. 1 (1996); Nancy C. Staudt, Taxing Housework, 84 GEO. L.J. 1571 (1996); Joan Williams, From Difference to Dominance to Domesticity: Care as Work, Gender as Tradition, 76 CHI.-KENT L. REV. 1441 (2001) [hereinafter Williams, From Difference to Dominance]; Joan Williams, Is Coverture Dead? Beyond a New Theory of Alimony, 82 GEO. L.J. 2227 (1994); Noah D. Zatz, What Welfare Requires From Work, 54 UCLA L. REV. 373 (2006) [hereinafter Zatz, What Welfare Requires]. For important work in a similar vein