Justice at Work

The research project, “Justice at Work: A Normative Analysis of Nonstandard Forms of Employment,” is funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science, the Spanish Research Agency, and the European Regional Development Fund (PGC2018-095917-A-I00) and led by Iñigo González-Ricoy (UB) and Jahel Queralt (UPF) within the remit of the UPF Law and Philosophy research group. The project, which runs 2019-2022, seeks to contribute to recent philosophical work on labor justice by extending its scope to nonstandard forms of employment. Even though temporary, part-time, multi-party work and dependent self-employment are on the rise in rich countries and informal self-employment accounts for half of the workforce in developing ones, nonstandard employment relations have often gone unnoticed in extant philosophical analyses. The project seeks to inspect the normative standing of these forms of employment, the kind of objectionable practices they may entail, and the appropriate institutional means to address them.

The project is divided into three blocks. The first will develop tools borrowed from relational accounts of labor justice, including recent theories of domination and exploitation, with a focus on structural variants of such theories. The second will inspect the normative status of nonstandard employment relations, the kind of injustices they may elicit, and how traditional means to address such injustices, like freedom to unionize, collective bargaining, or the right to strike, could be redefined to suitably address such injustices. The third block will focus on the self-employed, in particular those informally operating in poor countries, and will seek to identify the moral demands triggered by the circumstances these workers face and the wrongs they may be liable to. We also seek to examine the adequacy of various means, and the human rights framework in particular, to protect these workers’ interests.