Abstract
Noelle is a labor attorney. Two decades of helping corporations skirt labor laws—lawfully skirt, she assured me—had taken its toll. “Got to the point where I couldn’t take it anymore,” she confided. “I wasn’t making the world any better; I certainly wasn’t helping my fellow man. My job was to enrich companies, even if that meant pulling the rug out from under hardworking families.” She did not want to disclose what rugs precisely she pulled. She is an attorney, let’s not forget—a population that knows better than most how not to self-incriminate. Whatever happened had led her down a road to starting her own practice. Her days are now devoted to, in her own words, “helping people share.”
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Notes
- 1.
In Tony and Susan Alamo Foundation v. Secretary of Labor, 471 U.S. 290, 302 (1985), the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that even those who “vehemently protest coverage under the Act” must be treated to the same legal tests as everyone else on the question of what labor projections apply to them.
- 2.
See the U.S. Supreme Court case Tennessee Coal Co. v. Muscoda Local No. 123, 321 U.S. 590 (1944). The Court ruled as follows: “The Act [Fair Labor Standards Act] thus requires that appropriate compensation be paid for such work. Any other conclusion would deprive the iron ore miners of the just remuneration guaranteed them by the Act for contributing their time, liberty, and strength primarily for the benefit of others” (my emphasis).
- 3.
The question of entrepreneurial control is also important. See, e.g., Restatement of Employment Law § 1.01(b) (Am. Law Inst. 2015): “An individual renders services as an independent businessperson and not as an employee when the individual in his or her own interest exercises entrepreneurial control over important business decisions, including whether to hire and where to assign assistants, whether to purchase and where to deploy equipment, and whether and when to provide service to other customers.” And yet, for example, members of a cooperative, who collectively own a business, never have individual entrepreneurial control over their actions.
- 4.
The Court, with this quote, was interpreting the Fair Labor Standards Act. Tony and Susan Alamo Foundation v. Secretary of Labor.
- 5.
Environmental Working Group, “USDA Subsidies in the United States Totaled $322.7Billion from 1995–2014,” n.d., https://farm.ewg.org/progdetail.php?fips=00000&progcode=total&page=conc, accessed October 3, 2016.
- 6.
Bobilin v. Board of Education, State of Hawaii, 403 F. Supp. 1095 (D. Haw. 1975), http://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/FSupp/403/1095/1568389/, accessed October 3, 2016.
- 7.
See, e.g., Janelle Orsi, Practicing Law in the Sharing Economy: Helping People Build Cooperatives, Social Enterprise, and Local Sustainable Economies (Chicago: ABA Publishing, 2012), p. 377.
- 8.
29 U.S.C. § 203(e)(1).
- 9.
Sarah Han, “Oakland Food Startup Josephine Announces It Will Shut Down Operations,” Berkeleyside, February 2, 2018, www.berkeleyside.com/2018/02/02/josephine-announces-it-will-close/.
- 10.
Cotter v. Lyft, Inc., 60 F. Supp. 3d 1067, 1081 (N.D. Cal. 2015).
- 11.
Ibid.
- 12.
In legal theory as well as in common law, most exchanges, loosely defined, can be placed within one of two boxes: commercial and private. See, e.g., Adolf A. Berle, “Property, Production, and Revolution,” Columbia Law Review 65, no. 1 (January 1965): 1–20, doi:10.2307/1120512.
- 13.
Aaron Smith, “Shared, Collaborative, and On Demand: The New Digital Economy,” Pew Research Center, May 19, 2016, www.pewinternet.org/2016/05/19/the-new-digital-economy/, accessed December 1, 2016.
- 14.
Marcel Mauss, The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies, trans. W. D. Halls (New York: Martino Fine Books, 2011).
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© 2018 Michael S. Carolan
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Carolan, M.S. (2018). When Sharing Is Illegal. In: The Food Sharing Revolution. Island Press, Washington, DC. https://doi.org/10.5822/978-1-61091-887-9_3
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