Labor Rights

Shon Faye argues that trans justice is inseparable from healthcare, housing, work, sex work, prison, migration, class, and social justice.

Through transnational interviews, Sarah T. Roberts reveals commercial content moderation: the automation and safety visible on platforms rely on secret, quantified, and outsourced human judgment.

This anthology joins transgender studies with Marxist theory to analyze capitalism, social reproduction, labor, embodiment, and liberation.

Kate Crawford maps AI through minerals, energy, hidden labor, training data, classification, and state surveillance, revealing the extraction and concentrated power beneath machine intelligence.

Marie Hicks rewrites the history of British computerization by showing how women’s computing labor was demoted from core expertise into low-paid, low-status work.

Grace Chang traces how immigration policy, welfare reform, and global capital create a low-paid, stigmatized, yet socially essential workforce of immigrant women.

Directed by Chloé Zhao, 'Nomadland' tells the story of Fern, a 60-year-old woman who, after losing everything in the Great Recession, lives in a van and adopts a modern nomadic lifestyle in the American West. The film profoundly explores the impact of economic instability on women and the possibility of seeking dignity and freedom in capitalist society.

Rubaiyat Hossain follows a Dhaka garment worker organizing a union, connecting global fashion’s low prices to women’s labor, marital power, and the risks of collective action.

Written, directed, edited by, and starring Isabel Sandoval, this film brings trans identity, immigration status, care work, and intimacy into one fragile story of a Filipina caregiver in New York.

Lila Avilés's debut centers a hotel room attendant in Mexico City, using minimalist drama to show hidden cleaning labor, fantasies of mobility, and women's isolation.

This Brazilian drama uses the conflict between a live-in housekeeper, her daughter, and an employer's family to expose domestic labor, separated motherhood, class boundaries, and women's dignity.

Starting from billions of daily unpaid-care hours, Sharmi Surianarain argues that employers must design work around care rather than leaving employees to absorb it privately.

In this TEDWomen talk, Ai-jen Poo frames domestic workers, nannies, caregivers, and cleaners as invisible infrastructure and argues for rights, wages, and dignity.

This TED audio episode discusses why domestic workers, child care workers, caregivers, and household employment relationships should be treated as infrastructure and policy questions, not merely private arrangements.