Professor William Forbath contributes “Workers’ Rights and the Distributive Constitution” to Dissent
Professor William Forbath, Lloyd M. Bentsen Chair in Law
Professor William Forbath wrote “Workers’ Rights and the Distributive Constitution,” which was published in the Spring issue of the journal Dissent.
“Progressives have forgotten how to think about the constitutional dimensions of economic life. Work, livelihood, and opportunity; material security and insecurity; poverty and dependency; union organizing, collective bargaining, and workplace democracy: for generations of American reformers, the constitutional importance of these subjects was self-evident. Laissez-faire, unchecked corporate power, and the deprivations and inequalities they bred were not just bad public policy—they were constitutional infirmities. Today, with the exception of employment discrimination, such concerns have vanished from progressives’ constitutional landscape.”
The balance of the article can be found here.
Tags: Constitutional Law, Dissent, Labor Law, William Forbath
July 6th, 2012 at 2:13 pm
I just read your article in the N.Y. Times of 7/6. Thank you – I said to myself “at last, at last”. The Constitutional interpretation which denies gov’t attention to economic inequities and the despair that results will be evident in the coming election arguments. In 2008 I registered citizens in Cleveland’s central city. For perhaps the first time, many had a sense of hope that “engaging in the affairs of their community” (your words) might make a difference and that community standing and self respect were possible. We must remind ourselves that the Constitution speaks to
us affirmatively about such obligations in a democracy and those of us who believe this need not apologize.