This coauthored book traces the history of clinical labor by situating it against one hundred years of change in labor law and industrial relations in advanced economies. Melinda Cooper and Catherine Waldby, both specialists in sociology and social policy, pursue the theme of how wider dynamics in labor law, welfare regimes, and (de)industrialization influence the condition of clinical labor. In terms of method. the authors focus on discourses and practices in the life sciences as a means to generate narratives, organized by theme and chapter, that explore how ideas found in legal rulings as well as those in scholarly works on law, economics, and ethics have (de)legitimized particular sets of practices in the biomedical industry, and vice versa, over time.
Of particular significance to understanding today's condition of labor in the biomedical industry is the legal principle volenti non fit injuria, or "to the willing person no injury is done." which exempted employers from liability for compensating workers for employment-related injuries in nineteenth-century Britain (21). Despite challenges to this principle, and the eventual overturning of laws applying it, during rising unionism and organized labor unrest in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the authors argue that the same legal notion continues to underlie today' ethical constructs of informed consent in clinical trials and reproductive labor, because the notion gradually returned following the 1970s decline of the welfare state and was endorsed by the Chicago School of neoliberal economics. By viewing employees in the labor market and experimental subjects in clinical trials as private independent contractors who bear noncontestable risks, this legal notion transfers uninsurable risks to the bodies of both general and clinical labor, and spares commercial enterprises from managing them (32).
