Labour Commanded : Micro-Credit, the Employment Relation and the Property Rights Constraint

I explore the accounts which alternative philosophical and economic approaches (Conventionalism, Libertarianism, Welfarism, the Capabilities approach) may provide of one non-standard employment relation which, rather than in the labour market, is established via a debt-credit contract (as described by Yunus, the "poor people's banker", in his book Vers un monde sans pauvrete). The purpose is both to derive some insights into the nature of this relation, and to understand alternative positions in the light of their analytical and normative arguments. In the second part of the paper, I illustrate how the credit channel may be instrumental to a general project to overcome the "limited access problem", or "property rights constraint", which lies at the root of many employment relations