Labor Law

For close to ten years, the gig economy has dazzled with its seeming powers of disaggregation.

Professor Lee Fennell’s groundbreaking Slices and Lumps incisively reconceptualizes how the gig—or “slicing”—economy impacts the structuring of work. But it goes even further to alert us to how “delumping the working experience” (p 6) can transform the infrastructure of work, from an individual’s task design to the agglomeration costs and benefits of untying and retying workers to desks, work to benefits, and worksites to surrounding communities.

A debate over tips and tipped employees, centered on a few provisions of the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), has arisen among the circuits. Despite turning on only a few phrases in the FLSA, this judicial divide has massive implications for the restaurant and hospitality industries.