ABSTRACT
Workers’ rights in the contract for work can be understood to depend for their protection upon a range of further obligations being met. The modern, large workplace cannot be properly understood, even in its legal dimensions, without paying attention to the hybrids of obligation and obedience which operate to determine the working conditions of employees and the unequal relations they engender and reproduce. Within the ecology of obligations, the compelling effects of hybrids of obligation and obedience established through the operation of property and corporate forms are thus essential to maintaining the differentials of power and inequalities of wealth both within and across societies in a global capitalist economy. Property law and constitutional guarantees in turn supplement and fix these through the formation, regularisation, and enforcement of legal rights and obligations in a way that contributes to the operation and impact of hybrids of obedience and obligation.
