This book challenges dominant understandings of both economic inequality and the future of work. Leading scholars in law, social sciences, and the humanities consider the production and reproduction of global hierarchies by revisiting and deploying three critical approaches that emerged in the late twentieth century: racial capitalism, world-systems theory, and critical legal distributional analysis. They demonstrate that these methods—especially when brought together—offer new insights into the forces that entrench the asymmetries of power and wealth that are too often shorthanded as inequality. They also uncover elisions and erasures of the past and present in prevailing technological-determinist narratives about the future of work.

Hierarchies at Work features powerful, grounded studies of the dynamics of work and livelihood in sites ranging from garment factories in Jordan and palm oil fields in Colombia to dairy farms in the United States. These studies underscore the necessity of thinking about the future of work and livelihoods through their racialized past and present and recognizing the systemic role of law in unequal distribution. Highlighting alternative imaginaries that contest systems of domination and subordination, this timely book offers resources to spur more just futures across local and global levels.

Karen Engle is Minerva House Drysdale Regents Chair in Law and codirector of the Bernard and Audre Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Justice at the University of Texas at Austin. Her books include The Grip of Sexual Violence in Conflict: Feminist Interventions in International Law (2020) and The Elusive Promise of Indigenous Development: Rights, Culture, Strategy (2010).

Neville Hoad is associate professor of English and codirector of the Bernard and Audre Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Justice at the University of Texas at Austin. His books include Pandemic Genres: Imagining Politics in a Time of AIDS (2025) and African Intimacies: Race, Homosexuality, and Globalization (2007).