In recent decades, the U.S. labor market has shifted from a prevalence of long-term, single-employer careers to more contingent work or work disguised as entrepreneurship. These attenuated relations between worker and firm reflect the “fissuring” of work, in which firms have utilized laws that permit them to offload costs and risks though outsourcing, subcontracting, and franchising out their labor needs. Some firms now go beyond fissuring work: they treat the workers themselves as consumers by offering them services and credit products. Workers, in short, are also consumers in some contexts. And when firms expand employment contracts to extend services and credit products to workers, workers are entitled to consumer law protections.

This Article calls for an integrated work law that includes consumer law to more adequately counter worker exploitation. Some favor a return to earlier industrial relations through traditional employment law, by fortifying the statuses of employer and employee and the principle of compensation for work. But those laws have proved inadequate, and as the conventional relations break down, so too will law have to re-situate to provide adequate worker protections. By using consumer law, such as unfair or deceptive acts or practices laws, along with established employment law, workers can gain leverage. Combining consumer law and employment law approaches would also allow the doctrines to inform and strengthen one another. Ultimately, this paired doctrinal evolution could support workers’ collective action to resolve asymmetries in bargaining power.