Eric Posner examines how businesses exploit cultural expectations to frame certain activities as non-work, creating a form of monopsony power that allows them to extract labor without compensation in areas ranging from college athletics to digital content creation. He argues that properly classifying these “invisible” forms of work as compensable labor would benefit society, challenging anti-commodification concerns and highlighting the law’s struggle to define work in these blurred contexts.
In his novel The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Mark Twain tells the story of Tom tricking his friends into whitewashing a fence, a chore assigned to him by his Aunt Polly, by portraying the task as play rather than work. Later he reflects “that Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do, and that Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do.”
This tale illustrates an often overlooked phenomenon of our economic life—that the same activity can be regarded as leisure or work, consumption or production. Businesses, like Tom, understand that certain types of labor often go unrecognized or uncompensated as a result of cultural understandings that frame them as something other than “Work”—and exploit this confusion.
Take the nonprofit National Collegiate Athletics Association (NCAA), which organizes and regulates university athletics in the United States. NCAA athletes, particularly in high-revenue sports like men’s football and basketball, produce enormous value for...
Patricia White, 70, of Old Greenwich, received a nine-month prison sentence for submitting false claims for unclaimed properties to around 30 state treasuries. HARRISBURG, Pa. — Months after her br...