Taboo Trades
Taboo Trades
Survival Labor with Yvette Butler
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
When does crime become work—and why does the legal system recognize some harmful activities as legitimate labor while criminalizing other activities undertaken to secure food, shelter, safety, or family survival?
Yvette Butler, Professor of Law at Indiana University’s Maurer School of Law, joins Kim Krawiec and UVA Law student cohosts Virginia Pillion and Sahanya Bhaktaram to discuss Butler’s article, Survival Labor.
The conversation explores the line between survival crime and survival labor; sex work, trafficking, and nonfinancial forms of necessity; what counts as a realistic alternative for someone acting under severe economic pressure; and whether the constitutional “right to earn a living” can protect marginalized workers without undermining labor regulation. Butler also discusses epistemic exclusion from lawmaking, remedies for people harmed by survival labor, the limits of universal basic income, and the unsettling contrast between criminalized workers and state-paid executioners.
Reading discussed in or especially relevant to the episode
- Yvette Butler, Survival Labor, 112 California Law Review 403 (2024).
- Yvette Butler, Silencing the Sex Worker, 71 UCLA Law Review 726 (2024).
- Yvette Butler, Traditionally Suspect: Common Occupations and the Right to Earn a Living.
- Kimberly D. Krawiec, Repugnant Work, in The Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Work (2026).
- Yvette Butler, Epistemic Appropriation, Critical Defanging, and Lessons for a Responsive New Reconstruction, 105 Boston University Law Review 1239 (2025).
- Yvette Butler, Academic Freedom, Knowledge Erasure, and the Right to Earn a Living.
- William E. Forbath, The Ambiguities of Free Labor: Labor and the Law in the Gilded Age, 1985 Wisconsin Law Review 767.
I don't know, man. Like, we have literal executioners paid by the state, and so I'm like, okay, if that is a job that, you know, people, you know, receive W2s or whatever. Yeah. I mean, like, why wouldn't other. Like, why wouldn't analogous roles also be considered a form of labor, even if we do ultimately end up criminalizing them or prohibiting them or maintaining the state's monopoly?
Kim Krawiec:Hey. Hey, everybody. Welcome to the Taboo Trades podcast, a show about stuff we aren't supposed to sell but do anyway. I'm your host, Kim Kravik. Today we're joined by Yvette Butler, professor of law at Indiana University's Mars School of Law. Her scholarship examines how law and constitutional law in particular, protects or constrains the survival and resistance strategies of marginalized communities. Before entering academia, Yvette practiced civil rights law and worked alongside sex workers and survivors of trafficking on individual representation, policy reform, and economic security. Her recent scholarship explores survival, labor, epistemic injustice, criminalization, and the constitutional right to earn a living. Yvette, welcome to Taboo Trades. Hey, Virginia, thanks for joining me.
Virginia Pillion:Hi. Thanks for having me.
Kim Krawiec:Why don't we start by just having you introduce yourself to our audience?
Virginia Pillion:Sure. My name is Virginia pillion. I'm a 2L here at UVA Law, and I'm from southwest Virginia. And I'm super excited to be in this class this semester.
Kim Krawiec:Great. Well, and I'm excited that you and everybody else is in the class this semester. You specifically chose this particular episode to be the host of. So what was it about this topic or author or paper that spoke to you and made you want to engage with it a little more deeply?
Virginia Pillion:Yeah, I think as we entered this new era of sex work, this one kind of caught my eye, just as a topic and then reading more about survival labor and how you qualify. It definitely caught my eye. In undergrad, I studied media studies, and we talked a lot about gig economy and sex work kind of falls into that same framework. So I was interested in learning more about how survival labor affects the gig economy and how it's perpetuating that market and changing the job market and industry as we know it.
Kim Krawiec:Yeah, I actually. I like your idea of looking at these types of labor through the lens of the gig economy. Right. I think there are some useful analogies there that we can. Well, we talked about a little bit in class, so we can talk more about later. What do you expect or hope to learn from Yvette today? You have a bunch of questions. Your classmates have a bunch of Questions. So what is it? What direction are you hoping to be able to take the conversation and learn more about from her?
Virginia Pillion:I think a lot of our questions kind of center around what survival labor really is defined as. Her paper explores it in a lot of different categories. So I think understanding it at a deeper level and getting to kind of get a firsthand word from her about it rather than just reading it is what I'm most excited about.
Kim Krawiec:Yeah. So I think everybody, as we were discussing the paper, wanted to sort of know, I think, a little bit more about the definition, which I'm sure she'll tell us about today, but also about the purpose of the definition. Right. Like, sort of what are the implications of redefining this in this way? And I'm also looking forward to hearing her talk a little bit more about that. Anything else that you're hoping to get from her?
Virginia Pillion:Not off the top of my head. I don't think so. Just excited.
Kim Krawiec:Okay, great. Well, let's join the others. Hi, Yvette. Thanks for joining us.
Yvette Butler:Yeah, thanks for having me.
Kim Krawiec:We're very excited to have you and very excited to talk to you more about this great paper that you've got, Survival Labor. Can you tell us a little bit about how you got interested in this topic and sort of what motivated you to tackle this issue?
Virginia Pillion:Absolutely.
Yvette Butler:It was a couple of things. One, I was writing this post, 2020 Murder of George Floyd COVID Pandemic, and there was a lot of political and social energy around decriminalization and addressing, you know, systemic harm. Entering into academia, I came from practice working with sex workers and victims of trafficking on both individual case representation as well as criminal system reform and the like. And so it was really a combination of seeing sort of firsthand how a lot of people are really kind of working upstream and against criminal laws in order to sort of cobble together an ability to earn a living because of things like systemic exclusion, which keeps them out of more formal legitimized labor. Plus that energy from 2020, that made me think like, okay, what are other avenues to really protecting people who do not have a lot of social power? And so the right to earn a living. Now, I've studied it a lot more, and I have even more thoughts about how it could be useful. But this was really the entry point of, okay, there is this legal theory regarding the right to earn a living. And so, you know, what would it mean for people who are often so locked out of our formal labor, our formal economy, able to potentially use that.
Kim Krawiec:Thank you. Well, I am going to introduce you to your host for today, Virginia and Sahanya. And I'm also going to turn the rest of the show over to them. They're going to be in charge from here.
Yvette Butler:Sounds good.
Virginia Pillion:Thanks so much for being here. Yvette.
Sahanya Bhaktaram:Hi, Eva. Nice to meet you.
Yvette Butler:Nice to meet you too.
Virginia Pillion:I can kick it off with our first question. So in Turner, you suggest that leaving the children in the car might be too attenuated from a parent's formal employment to count as survival labor. But in Ratliff, by contrast, the alleged offense arose directly from working while receiving welfare benefits. What principle determines whether criminalized conduct is sufficiently connected to work to qualify as survival labor? Does it matter whether the state is punishing work itself a substitute for work or conduct that enables work?
Yvette Butler:Yeah, it's such a good question. Thank you. So I guess first I'll say survival labor. I'm really kind of looking at, okay, what activities might we be able to consider? Labor, of course, I end up at sort of this three part framework of is it a market based transaction? Is someone pursuing self sufficiency? Is someone meeting their socially defined caretaking or provider roles? And I think in sort of looking at these various cases in you mentioned Turner and Ratliff. In Ratliff, she had custody of her three children and was supposed to receive child support. And she had visited four attorneys trying to recover child support, which would have allowed her obviously to have the financial ability to provide for her kids in that way. And she wasn't able to recover child support. And so she was convicted for writing a bad check and stealing welfare benefits. And so the way that I look at that one is these are very clear efforts to acquire money in order to also acquire food, primarily like food, shelter, et cetera. Turner, the parents there, you know, like they had formal employment, they were working at a newspaper, and then they didn't have childcare and left their kids in the car and then were charged for that. And so like, I definitely see where your question is coming from in terms of, you know, how do we draw a line around both sets of people seem to be obviously trying to meet certain needs. But I think as I was looking at Turner, it ended up being hard for me to kind of justify, seeing as how my entry point was what kinds of things do people do to make their living that are criminalized? It really seemed like them leaving their kids in the car ended up being far enough removed because they had formal employment. And so of course they're being penalized for not having childcare. Which is also problematic. And so I also mentioned, you know, just because I don't think it qualifies as labor to keep your kids in the car doesn't mean that we don't need some other kind of social intervention. Whether it's decriminalizing certain offenses or part of the road to decriminalization is often making sure that we have other forms of social supports. And so, like, what would it look like to make sure that everybody has a safe place that they can take or leave their children to sort of facilitate that laboratory? And so I ended up drawing that line because I don't think they were engaged in labor. But I, you know, still mentioned that I'm concerned that we don't have something better to help facilitate them going to work and keeping their kids safe at the same time.
Virginia Pillion:Awesome. Thank you so much. I'll pass to Sahanya.
Sahanya Bhaktaram:Hi, Yvette. My question for you today is that you distinguish survival labor from other criminalized labor. Sex work by a financially secure person may still be labor, but not survival labor. Does reserving the survival labor term for people facing extreme financial hardship risk create a hierarchy among sex workers or reinforce the idea that the bodies of low income women, women of color, and transgender women are especially available for exchange? How would your framework avoid reproducing that objectification?
Yvette Butler:Yeah, thanks for that question. So I think two things. One, well, so I'll separate kind of the hierarchy question from the objectification question. So taking first the objectification question, I mean, I think like a lot of feminist theorists or any theorists who thinks about sort of social media systemic inequalities, there's always this question of how do we avoid potentially reproducing a stereotype, for example? And like, the way that I'm approaching this is kind of like, so, you know, in the affirmative action context, how sort of responses to affirmative action, whether the Justice Thomas school or like slightly more moderate, is like, well, isn't there going to be a stigma attached to anybody receiving on the receiving end of affirmative action? I think there's one of the greatest critiques of that is kind of like, okay, well, affirmative action has a purpose, which is repair. And, well, okay, affirmative action has like four plus possible justifications.
Kim Krawiec:1.
Yvette Butler:One of the main ones is repairing historic discrimination. The one that the court ended up adopting until students were fair admissions was diversity. And so, like, anyway, sorry, I have a whole tangent that I could go on about that, but I think the point that I just wanted to make is something that I've been thinking about a lot is like, how do we contextualize the questions such that we're not losing sort of like the reason that we end up at like a particular conclusion. So affirmative action for me isn't off the table just because some people argue that it's stigmatizing. Like, I actually argue that like a lot of those stigmatizing arguments are really, I don't know, distracting from like the point of what the thing is trying to accomplish. And so like, I really, I really appreciate your question because I think this comes up a lot, of course, in feminist discussions of sex work. Sex trafficking is like, are we just encouraging some kind of like objectification by allowing sex work at all? So since I'm coming at this from the perspective that there is already exploitation, people are already vulnerable. There are great arguments that people who are on the margins are already the ones being preyed on anyway, that continuing to criminalize the work that vulnerable people engage in does nothing to help them get out of sort of that vulnerable place and if anything makes them more vulnerable to exploitation and abuse. I have this other article, Silencing the Sex Worker, where I get much more into the weeds kind of on this in, oh gosh, what year was it? Like 20? I might butcher this, but I think it was 2019 that the D.C. council considered decriminalizing sex work. And there was like a 14 hour long hearing with all sorts of advocates arguing about why it should or shouldn't be decriminalized. I went through sort of like the written testimony to say, okay, where you're usually really, really, really willing to listen to victims of trafficking. And so like, what is it that sex workers are saying? And really everybody here is saying pretty much the same thing, that there's violence from the state, violence from private individuals, a lot of folks who are disabled and aren't able to get enough benefits to like make ends meet and that a lot of people are looking for support. And yeah, and so it's sort of like, okay, how can we kind of facilitate getting everybody to a place where they can self actualize their lives on relatively equal terms to avoid sort of like this end game of there are people being exploited and objectified? So I hope, you know, you could let me know if that, if that made sense. I'm happy to kind of reframe that if it would be helpful.
Kim Krawiec:Yvette, can I just follow in? So would your response then be sort of aversion? Are you worried that this will contribute to ongoing objectification or a hierarchy among sex workers? Your response might be, hmm, Maybe, but we can't allow those types of expressive conjectured harms to take precedence over the actual harms to actual people that whatever legal reform is designed to address. Is that a version of your answer?
Yvette Butler:Yeah, I think so. I think so, yeah.
Kim Krawiec:Because I agree with that. Okay.
Yvette Butler:Yeah, yeah. And I mean, I think as far as the hierarchy goes, I don't know, I guess I'd have to think about that some more, how to kind of break down hierarchy. Sorry, that gets into, like a whole thing that would probably take up most of our time here. But I just really wanted to, you know, at least address the objectification question, which I think is great.
Sahanya Bhaktaram:Thank you. I'm definitely going to keep an eye out. I'm going to search for that article that you mentioned. I'm now going to pass it over to Angelica.
Kim Krawiec:Hi.
Speaker F:Hello.
Speaker G:My question is that in your paper you define survival labor largely through extreme financial hardship and the need to obtain basic necessities. But people may also perform criminalized work to secure safety, healthcare, legal status, or freedom from abuse, needs that may be essential to survival without being reducible to financial hardship. I think you mentioned before like someone lacking a social power. So take someone who isn't poor by your definition. They have a steady income, but they're doing sex work to escape a violent partner who controls their access to money or to pay for a medical treatment their insurance won't cover and no amount of budgeting will solve. That's not poverty in the sense you describe in your paper, but it seems like genuine necessity to me. So should that work also count as survival labor? And if not, why should economic necessity qualify while these other forms of necessities do not?
Yvette Butler:Yeah, I think that would absolutely qualify. And so what I'm hearing in your question is this person is effectively in extreme financial need because they do not have access to the funds because of the abuse that they're suffering. And so. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So that would still qualify for me. Because at first I think when I was considering your question, I was thinking maybe it was going to go down the line of, well, you have, for example, a sex worker who's doing really, really well and just wants to continue engaging in sex work. And, you know, sort of, as I address in my article, I think something like that, like where somebody is actually pretty okay financially and they're able to, you know, cover their basic needs, but they're like, this is what I want to continue doing for work, but it's criminal. I mean, that's what I would put under the heading of okay, then this isn't necessarily about survival for you. And so we're kind of getting out of the realm of survival labor and what I'm trying to talk about. But this still certainly qualifies under sort of like a penal abolitionist, transformative justice version of the world. Like what is it that we're criminalizing and why that conversation is still 100% open. But yeah, like the focus here is really and I, and I talk about sort of as I'm listing different survival crimes before we get into the labor portion. You know, like I mentioned all sorts of things that people might do, like for example, like health care supply theft, like they are trying to obviously facilitate their, you know, like having their basic necessities met and then assuming that is accompanied by that need, which I think can obviously, like you mentioned, show up in various ways, abuse being one of them. And I also talk about that a little bit more in silencing the sex worker, where I spend more time talking about survivor centered interventions. Survivor centered both from the domestic and sexual violence movements as well as the anti trafficking movement and sort of how like those contribute to why people might engage in various activities, whether survival crime, survival labor or just self defense kind of stuff.
Speaker G:So you really take into account the context of this person that makes up essentially extreme financial hardship. Like another example I thought of then is let's say someone is doing quite well with sex work, but let's say that maybe because they've been spending a lot of time doing sex work, they haven't really worked on transferable skills for maybe a job that isn't necessarily criminalized. And let's say like they're in a horrible job market and they can't really find another job, would that also equate to extreme financial hardship that would make this survival labor still.
Yvette Butler:Good question. So I'm writing down a couple of things just so that I can make sure that I'm addressing each part of your hypo. So I have the transferable skills part, which I was like, oh, they're actually, I mean, depending upon what jobs they're looking for. I mean sex work prepares you to do all sorts of things. So like once you take the sex out of it, it's marketing, it's networking, there are so many skills already built into that. But in your hypo, does that person want to leave sex work and they're looking for something that's considered more legitimate? Yeah. Can you clarify?
Speaker G:Yeah, I want to clarify if all these sorts of things like we have to take in all these factors to make up extreme financial hardship to make it survival labor, if that makes sense. Like, regardless if this person wants to leave or not, if they feel like they can't pay their bills on time, they think it's tied to whether they work in sex work or not, it does that make it extreme financial hardship?
Yvette Butler:If I'm understanding your question correctly, the extreme financial hardship, yes, can appear in a variety of ways. It doesn't have to be tied to sex work. I guess, like, this sex work comes in as, like, the criminalized form of labor. But that there are all sorts of people who also engage in more legitimated forms of labor, who also cannot pay their bills, who also end up doing illegal things to make their ends meet. And so I would see them as also engaged in survival labor, at least in. In so far as they are essentially committing crimes to, like, make up the difference.
Speaker G:Okay, thank you. Yeah, I think that answers my question. It was really just if extreme financial hardship was really the most important qualifier of what makes survival labor.
Yvette Butler:Well, and yeah, so, like, I think in exploring survival labor to the right to earn a living, which has taken me to, like, social histories of enclosure of the commons and rights to subsistence, and even like, rights to subsistence embedded in the Magna Carta, you know, shout out to Peter Linebaugh, historian who wrote the Magna Carta manifesto, the focus on survival. Ultimately, I'm kind of going in this direction of most people want to live lawful lives. A lot of people find it hard to do so. We do not currently have a lot of ways that people can subsist without engaging in wage labor. So going down that path has gotten me to thinking about, obviously, class and, you know, our conception, our conceptions of the underclass and who makes up the underclass. I ended up kind of leaning into extreme financial need because I think, like, that's a very. It's an easier justification for people to swallow. And also a lot of the privilege conversations that I think we've had as a society over the last, like, five, ten years also makes me think about some of the point of that is that if somebody has every chance to succeed, and every chance to succeed as in, hi, I'm sitting on a million dollars and I am just choosing to do crimes because they make my life exciting. Like, that's not who I'm trying to talk about here because, you know, I'm sort of trying to conceptualize, like, okay, if we're saying that coming from a crit perspective, we obviously critique very, very, very heavily desert and merit and things like that. And at the same time, those things seem to be grounded in something real, which is, yeah, I mean, if you have every opportunity to succeed without harming somebody else, why should we give you, quote unquote, like a pass for harming anybody else? And so as I'm sort of thinking about like class and sort of who the underclass is, who the underclass could or should be, whether there should be an underclass, I think, like, I'm making room for the idea that obviously, like, it's not the Epstein's of the world that I'm trying to help here. And if you are an Epstein at all, you don't deserve, I suppose, like this kind of critical intervention because not only do you have a lot of social and political power and economic power to like, help shape law, help shape, I don't know, avoid a lot of the quandaries that everyday people find themselves in. This isn't the right to earn shouldn't be for you in this way, or, you know, rights to subsistence aren't really about you. Hopefully that helps a little bit in thinking about that bar of extreme financial hardship. Ultimately that's not really like the final word or. But at least for this, like, for this project, that seemed like a decent way to kind of place a limit on who we're talking about.
Speaker G:That makes much more sense to me and I apologize if my follow up questions weren't as clear cut.
Speaker H:No, no.
Yvette Butler:So good.
Virginia Pillion:Okay. I think Liz is up next with a question that goes back to Ratliff, actually.
Speaker H:Hi, Yvette, thanks for being here. My question kind of asks about this definition of necessity. So you define survival crime and survival labor as conduct made necessary by extreme financial hardship. In Ratliff, the court identified a legal alternative, submitting the paperwork to the child support agency. But you still say that her conduct was likely survival labor. So what makes an alternative meaningful enough to defeat necessity? In your framework, must the criminalized act be the only realistic option, the most practical option, or is it something broader? Where would you draw the line between a difficult choice and a truly necessary one?
Yvette Butler:Yeah, what a good question. I don't really have an answer for this because part of me. Because part of me says, like, okay, any test that we have in law, whether we're talking negligence, recklessness, whatever, I think there's a lot of argument around what qualifies. And I think we often leave those determinations to a fact finder, like a jury, a judge, and it's up to people's attorneys to try and bring their context forward. And argue as to why it fits under one of those headings. And so I think my intervention here is really saying there wasn't an opportunity before at all. Like, if we're not considering economic necessity as a defense, then there's just not an opportunity to get any of this context in, in order to make this kind of defense at all. And so. But, like, I think it's a good question, realistic versus practical or something broader. I think maybe I would, at least for now, if you. If gun to my head, somebody were here earning their livelihood with a gun to my head right now, I guess I would say realistic. And part of why I choose realistic is because I think throughout the article, I end up asking this question, like, I'm sorry, what else was this person supposed to do? Because it's really not clear to me at all. But I don't think it's clear to them either what their alternatives were. And part of why I also choose realistic is because when you dig into the right to earning, earn a living literature, like, what's in my draft traditionally suspect common occupations and the right to earn a living, there's this whole discussion of, like, rational basis review because obviously, you know, when you're making a constitutional argument, the Court is going to use some level of review. For economic and social legislation the Court right now typically uses, is this law rationally related to a legitimate state interest? The right to earn a living is being promoted primarily by libertarian and conservative groups right now who are challenging occupational licensing statutes. And a big part of their argument is, you know, like these statutes, for example, for cosmetology regulations, they don't have a rational fit. And so, you know, the court should strike them down. And so I think I'm sort of attracted to the idea of realistic both from that kind of doctrinal perspective of, like, what is rational at least, like, what is rational from the state's perspective, why did they adopt this piece of legislation? But also because I think, you know, again, just like realistically looking at people's lives, what exactly were they supposed to do if, for example, they're being turned away from a food, like three different food pantries? But honestly, I think I am kind of of the opinion that like any. Not that. Not that law is useless. Law obviously has a lot of uses, and it will always have a lot of uses. I'm not sure that I'm convinced that any particular term will ever do everything we want it to do and avoid doing everything we don't want it to do.
Speaker H:Thank you very much. That Was great.
Sahanya Bhaktaram:Okay, Yvette, we're now going to pass it over to Damon with another doctrinal concept of right to earn a living.
Speaker I:Hi, Yvette. First off, thanks for being here. I thought the paper was really thought provoking and it's just a pleasure to be able to ask you these kinds of questions.
Sahanya Bhaktaram:Yeah, thank you.
Speaker I:So you suggest using the right to earn a living to protect survival labor, but you also discuss how economic liberty arguments have been used to strike down laws protecting workers in the past. How could courts strengthen that right for people engaged in survival labor without giving employers a basis to kind of challenge work pay safety laws? I'm curious how you would keep this strategy from weakening the protections that help people avoid needing survival labor in the first place.
Yvette Butler:Yeah, thanks. So this is again where I think my more recent piece is going to speak to this a bit more. I guess the long story short is whether or not economic liberty is fundamental is going to have an impact on what level of review a court uses to assess legislation. I don't think that whether or not economic liberty is fundamental is ultimately the dangerous question for the communities I'm most interested in. I think honestly, since courts have said that you only have a right to earn a living in, for example, a common occupation. And what my new draft is talking about is, okay, what does that mean? Essentially, you can only, you only have a protected liberty interest if your occupation is common, which means it's not traditionally suspect, which means we're looking at history and tradition. And so I'm like, great, cool. So what is the context of that history and tradition? Because I think right now we're living through a moment that I think I would argue is dripping with animus in just like so many areas. And equal protection is supposed to get at animus. And I think the use and misuse of history, particularly like the history of Reconstruction, the history of black people's experience in the US with economic liberty really supports like, yes, sure, economic liberty is great for us all, but also we are in an era of wage labor. And you know, shout out to, for example, William Forbath, who wrote the Ambiguities of Free labor is a great paper talking about like traditional Republicanism as supporting, you know, this idea of co ops. And mainstream labor organizations at the time were like, yeah, wage labor is about dependence. And this doesn't get us closer to liberty at all. And so I think there's a way to use the right to earn a living, especially if we're acknowledging that there are limitations to economic liberty. Especially if it interferes with other people's ability to subsist and with. And with most people engaged in wage labor. Like, I think there's a great argument that there has to be a limit, that economic security is a part of economic liberty.
Speaker I:Got it. Yeah. Thank you very much.
Virginia Pillion:Okay, Linnaeus up next.
Speaker H:Hi. Thank you so much for being here today. This is really wonderful. So my question is a bit more niche. You argue that the dominant hermeneutical resources get embedded in law, and then the alternative ones, such as those of marginalized communities, get excluded. So sexual harassment is your example of an alternative resource that eventually crossed over and became dominant and is now legally cognizable. And you also point out that to shift from convict to a person with a conviction has a similar or deliberate relabeling, one that you explicitly, explicitly linked to your move from crime to survival labor. So is survival labor meant to make that same crossing, to go from alternative to dominant? And if it succeeds, meaning if it gets absorbed into how courts and sentencing actually work, does the underlying epistemic injustice go away or does it just draw sort of like a new line?
Yvette Butler:So I think, if I'm understanding your question correctly, I think by using survival labor, I'm trying to give at least more credence to alternate and subjugated resources that could then be useful for helping to shape law in a more equitable way. So I think by acknowledging, okay, there are these reasons why we should question why certain crime, why certain activities have been criminalized in the first place, it also gives us reason to ask, well, why are some legal things, which are incredibly harmful, actually legal? So it's less. So I think it's less about, like, okay, the law needs to now have somewhere survival labor. And it's more like the framework as a tool to better excavate, why do we allow some jobs and not others? Like, especially as we're thinking about data centers and all of the harm that they do to people in the environment and all the water they use, or particularly extractive or polluting industries, which also cause massive amounts of harm. Why are we so hyper focused on people who are struggling to make a living in the first place, as opposed to putting this amount of energy and critique on wartime industries, for example, Or I was just at a conference recently, I wish I could credit this person, but I'm blanking right now on names. But like colonial industries, or I think there's just a lot of questions to ask about to really get into some of that history and like, what should stay history and what should remain? Tradition.
Sahanya Bhaktaram:Gotcha.
Speaker H:That makes a lot of sense. Thank you so much.
Sahanya Bhaktaram:Thank you. Katherine, do you want to give us our next question?
Speaker F:Yeah. Kind of building off of what Linnea was talking about with the paper discussing how societal views shape the law and that the law can shape our perspectives on labor. In some ways, this seems like a chicken or the egg problem, because on one hand, many people believe that our law should encode the majority societal and moral values. But the law also shapes our societal values by encoding a specific set of dominant hermeneutical resources. And so if we want to encode these minority hermeneutical resources into law as a matter of transformative justice, should that be done by changing the law and hoping that that changes the dominant moral perspective and deal with whatever societal pushback comes in the meantime, or by focusing on widespread societal education and change that can eventually make its way into the laws by shifting the dominant perspective? Is one of those approaches more likely to be successful either short term or long term?
Yvette Butler:Good question. Yeah. So I think this. I think ultimately what I'm looking for is a constitution that can really hold epistemic justice. And again, I guess I'll mention silencing the sex worker here. One of the things that I talk about there is like this cycle of epistemic oppression whereby subjugated sources and their hermeneutical resources do not get to influence lawmaking and do not get to influence legal interpretation. And so I think especially going back to sort of history and tradition, and we're all kind of stuck with this method, if you can call it that, of constitutional interpretation, is like, okay, well, does that in Dobbs, for example, like the main critique of the dissent was we can't look to our older sources for how abortion was treated because women weren't a part of the polity such that they could have their interests embedded in law. So by maintaining a position to look at 1789 or 1868 or even 1920, whatever, there are inevitably contributions that we leaving out as a matter of practice and not even considering whether they are meritorious at all. So I think it's really that it's not that the dominant moral perspective is per se wrong. It's just that when that perspective is made by very purposefully excluding challenges, I would argue it is not a meritorious dominant perspective at all because it hasn't been challenged. It hasn't been considered alongside other things that should. Other positions, positions that should be considered. So I think as far as your question about societal education and change, and does that shift the dominant perspective, or should the law do that? I mean, it is kind of a chicken and egg vicious cycle situation. But I think we can't get out of it if we're not looking for an epistemically just procedure that makes a lot of sense.
Virginia Pillion:Thank you. Okay, I think Joe is up next, and he's a question about remedies for victims of survivor crime. Hi, thanks for being here. So when survival labor causes direct harm, what remedy should the victim have? As you argue, persuasively punishment for its own sake or even for the sake of deterrence is often unproductive in the criminal context. But imposing monetary damages on survival laborers also seems equally unproductive since the reason they engaged in the activity was a lack of financial resources. So who should bear the cost of survival crime, and what would accountability look like in your framework?
Yvette Butler:Yeah, good question. I'm still working on this, honestly. So when I wrote survival labor, I mentioned that it was like the first of probably about three pieces. The second one is the one that's in draft form now, and the third one is really TBD on that harm question, because I think in order to answer that question, I have to talk to all sorts of people and wade into things that I just have not, but, you know, have not yet. I think the sort of what remedy should the victim have? I mean, I think our restorative justice practices, like we have, I think more courts that are doing restorative justice now. And like, I think the one of the things about how should we attend to the victim's harm? Is in part asking, well, what would make this person feel whole outside of money? Because we are very, very focused on money as the one way that, you know, the one and only way. But, like, I think the primary way that law tends to try to make up for people's losses. And, you know, that's a good question. I think this proposal is really trying to join that conversation of as we're trying to build a bridge from society A, where we currently live, to society B, the one that we want to live in. Getting into exactly these questions on what are all of the different ways that we do compensate people, and in what ways are those all fair or unfair, and what exactly do they accomplish? And so I haven't gotten in depth on that question yet.
Speaker I:Thank you.
Sahanya Bhaktaram:Okay, Jake, are you ready?
Speaker I:Definitely. Thanks so much for being here. So my question, I might try to rephrase it a little bit because I think actually you kind of answered parts of it already today, but it seems central to Your argument that like characterizing an activity as work or labor isn't just like this semantic difference, it really matters. You say that like dominant understandings of work associated with dignity, social standing and concrete legal benefits. But you later also say that respect isn't really the right sentiment because some survival labor, and it seems like also some non survival labor, like some things we just think of as regular labor, can cause serious harm and that not all labor does deserve equal respect. So I guess I'm kind of curious. What is the principal normative benefit of calling an activity labor? And this is the part that I think you already answered a little bit. But why not define labor to exclude actions that impose third party harm, such as like in an extreme case, something like being a hitman.
Yvette Butler:Yeah, so I think, you know, this is where my. Yeah, you're right. Like I do sort of put aside in this piece for now. We can have all sorts of arguments about some, some things like moral or harmful or immoral qualities, but that doesn't mean it's not work. And this is where, you know, some of my research is going to go, like getting into whenever I want to say this, I feel like somebody's going to think I'm being obstinate, but I'm not. I'm like, I don't know, man. Like we have like literal executioners paid by the state. And so of course, yes, we can get into like, I think all the theoretical arguments on like why the state has a monopoly on violence, but the state, in having a monopoly on violence, literally pays people to kill other people. And so I'm like, okay, if that is a job that, you know, people, you know, receive W2s or whatever. Yeah, I mean, like, why wouldn't other, like why wouldn't analogous roles also be considered a form of labor, even if we do ultimately end up criminalizing them or prohibiting them or maintaining the state's monopoly. So I think sort of along those lines is also why I say like it's not that we're saying all labor deserves respect because I think what's very clear through so many people advocate, for example, getting rid of our capital punishment systems, that it's like, yeah, we probably don't, a lot of people probably don't respect what executioners do, but we also have things like that are incredibly socially valuable, like custodians and people who pick up our trash and like make sure we don't get like raided by bears every day. Which by the way. Sorry, tangent, I, I was listening to Taboo Traits the other day. And heard that reference to that. That town with the libertarians and the bears. Anyway, I love that book, but that's why I'm trying to complicate this line between crime and labor, because I think it hides a lot that we should be much more critical of. And I think maybe going back to Joe's question about what remedy should victims have, I think there are a lot of folks who have that question about state imposed harm as well, and that a lot of the remedies are incredibly unsatisfying. So really what I hear is that a lot of us are really unsatisfied with how the system's operating for a lot of different constituencies. And I'm just trying to move us toward, like a much more honest conversation.
Speaker I:That totally makes sense. Thank you so much, Yvette.
Kim Krawiec:I found that answer really helpful in trying to understand where you're coming from because I, throughout most of the paper had a similar reaction to Jake. But at the same time, now that you've invoked the state mandated executioner, I feel like I have a clearer sense of what you're trying to accomplish here. So that's a really clear, I think, example for you to use. But I also just want to say the new Mahershala Ali movie was made for you. And I don't know, I don't think it's opened yet, but I screened it for as part of the Virginia Film Festival. It's your mother, your mother, your mother. And he is a devout Muslim hitman who is just surviving, like putting a roof over the heads of the kids and other things. But in any event, the whole time I was watching it, I kept thinking of you and your paper.
Yvette Butler:Yeah, no, thanks. Thanks for that recommendation. I'll look out for it for sure. I mean, like, pop culture is one of my favorite ways to explore things like this. I don't know if you read all the footnotes, but, you know, like the Sims, I don't know how many of you played the Sims growing up or still do. Like the criminal career track is a literal thing, except, you know, you can find your job in a newspaper or on the computer and get paid on a regular basis. And yeah, I don't know, they're just like a million one examples of just people essentially engaging in survival labor. And we just don't use that language.
Virginia Pillion:Thanks for such a great answer. I think our last question goes to Tyler.
Speaker F:Hi, thank you. So great to meet you. My question is, you identify some examples such as universal basic income, regulation of basic necessity costs, investment in neglected communities, and stronger social supports as concrete measures to change the status quo. But I noticed that you do not rank them so beyond the narrative shift that you advocate for which policy intervention should come first to move from criminalized to non criminalized survivor labor. And why do you think that?
Yvette Butler:So speaking of pop culture, I don't know how many of you have seen the Expanse, but one of my so I'm usually not a fan of outer space, fictionalized outer space. I just usually find it really, really depressing and dark and that's not how I want to spend my time. But I really like the Expanse, which was adapted from a series of books that I did not read. I'll be honest, I'm not that cool. But like, one of the things I appreciate about the Expanse is, you know, it takes place in the future where, like the world is basically run by the United Nations. We've gotten to Mars. Mars is its own colony and also somewhat antagonistic to Earth. And there are the Belters who live in the asteroid belt and are all the laborers anyway, so it's been like generations that we've been living in space at this point. And on Earth there's a universal basic income, but there's clearly no regulation to stop everything from being exceedingly expensive. And so people have a basic income, but they actually, their lives are clearly not improved because if you give people enough money, then everything around you becomes like a million dollars and you still can't afford it. So like, I think I don't necessarily rank these because a, I, I still feel bad about Joe's question. Sort of like my answer to Joe's question. There's so much research on this stuff and I am one person and I just haven't gotten to it all. But like, I think some of these things have to be paired. And this is where I think that we get into sort of enduring arguments between people who are more progressive and libertarians who might otherwise be on board with certain interventions because they do not like, for example, rent caps or all sorts of regulations. And so the kinds of regulations that would be, I personally think, required for a basic income or a guaranteed income to even work, I think a lot of them would be opposed to. So my answer is just a lot of these things have to go together because we're dealing with something systemic and not individual.
Speaker F:That makes a lot of sense. Thank you so much for your answer.
Kim Krawiec:Well, thanks, Yvette. That was all of our questions. This was a lot of fun.
Yvette Butler:Yeah, thank you.
Kim Krawiec:Virginia Sahanya, any last minute thoughts? You got from you guys?
Sahanya Bhaktaram:I don't think so. You were great, Yvette, it was so nice to meet you over zoom.
Speaker H:Yeah.
Yvette Butler:Thank you. Thanks for all the really great questions. It was great meeting all of you. And honestly, class goals. One day, if I can get it together, I'm like, I should do this, too. This is fun.
Kim Krawiec:It is fun. It is fun. All right, well, thanks a lot. And it was good to quote, unquote, meet you.
Speaker H:Same.
Yvette Butler:All right, bye, everybody.
Kim Krawiec:Talk to you later. Bye.
Virginia Pillion:Thank you.
