A contextual, rigorous treatment of employment law, featuring a running case example to show exactly how the law works, and including extracts from key cases and source materials.
This book deals with international labor and employment law in the East Asia Region (EA), particularly dealing with China, South Korea and Japan. It explores and explains the effects of globalization and discusses the role played by international labor law as it affects lawyers, business, labor, labor unions and human resource management, and the labor issues that can arise in dealing in EA trade and investment. The text, and the readings (from area experts), are organized and written to provide the reader with, first, a broad understanding and insight into the global dimensions of the fast-emerging area of labor and employment issues (e.g., global legal standards and their interplay with domestic and foreign laws); and second, to show how these laws and approaches play out in specific EA countries (comparing global approaches with the specific laws of each country on four common agenda items: regulatory administration, workers' rights, trade unions and dispute resolution).
Very Short Introductions: Brilliant, Sharp, Inspiring In today's society, work takes up a vast proportion of the time and energy of ordinary people. Although use of the phrase 'work-life balance' is now commonplace in the media and ordinary conversation, people work longer hours than ever before. However, rather than purely a means to an end in terms of supporting oneself financially, the workplace is a place to develop skills and talents and build lasting friendships. For these reasons, people want to know about their rights in the workplace. Issues of equal pay, discrimination, discharge/dismissal, and redundancy are prevalent within the media, and there is a growing public appetite for knowledge of the law governing the employment relationship. This Very Short Introduction provides an overview of the main kinds of employment rights and labour laws found in many countries. It unpicks and evaluates some of the assumptions underpinning contemporary attitudes to such rights and laws in order to measure whether they are warranted. Throughout it also considers the economic, political, sociological, and social justifications for employment rights and laws. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.
During the past few decades, industrialized countries have witnessed a progressive crisis of the regulatory framework sustaining the binary model of the employment relationship based on the subordinate employment/autonomous self-employment dichotomy. New atypical and hybrid working arrangements have emerged, challenging the traditional notions of, and divisions between, autonomy and subordination. This in turn has strained labour law systems across industrialized countries that were previously based on the notion of dependent and subordinate employment to cast their personal scope of application. Nicola Countouris advances ideas for a new dynamic equilibrium in employment law to accommodate this evolution, providing a comparative account of the development of the employment relationship in four key European countries - the UK, Germany, France and Italy.
This book serves as the perfect marriage between workers¿ compensation theory and practice. While the book covers most of the traditional areas of workers¿ compensation doctrine, it also dwells at strategic points to reflect upon the letter of the law. It dares to question doctrine and¿more importantly¿encourages even the beginning student of workers¿ compensation to do more than passively receive rules. The author draws on his real world experience as a former injured worker and workers¿ compensation attorney, and supplements that experience with his theoretical perspective as a teacher and scholar of administrative and employment law. The student is guided through cases by the use of probing introductory questions, reflection sections at the conclusion of many of the cases, and running commentary and ¿interrogation¿ by way of text boxes at critical junctures in the cases. The student becomes acquainted with a fictional injured worker, Ann Smith, early in the book and has the opportunity to reflect upon legally significant developments as her case becomes increasingly complex. In the final, problem-solving chapter titled ¿In the Law Office,¿ students are introduced to materials from actual cases, demonstrating even more concretely how the principles they are learning are applied in practice. The resulting product is a natural fit with other titles in the Context and Practice Series. Students are introduced to a body of law through explicit engagement with it, and through exercises and commentary meant to refine their understanding through contextual interaction with black letter rules.
Studies in Employment and Social Policy Volume 56 Digitalization, far from being solely a technological issue, has broad implications in the social, labour, and economic spheres. It leads to dangers as well as to new chances for the workforce, and thus labour law must develop effective ways to both protect workers and allow them to profit from new technological developments. The most thorough book of its kind, this collection of expert essays provides an abundance of well-thought-out material for understanding the consequences of digitalization for the labour market and industrial relations. Recognizing that only an international perspective can make it possible to face the challenges of the present (and the future), renowned authorities from the International Labour Organization and the International Society for Labour and Social Security Law, as well as outstanding labour law professors, examine in depth such salient issues as the following: transformation of production systems; the spread of artificial intelligence; precariousness and exploitation in the gig economy; lessons learned from COVID-19; employment status of platform workers; new cross-border issues; rights to trade union association and collective bargaining; role of the State in the new digital labour market; and blurred lines between work and private life. Thanks to the international team of contributors, the issues are dealt with from a variety of overlapping perspectives and points of view, combining aspects of labour law, commercial law, corporate governance, and international law. Highlighting the need to adapt, especially through the right to training, work, and professionalism with respect to the new technological landscape, the book draws on legislative, judicial, and theoretical initiatives suggesting ways of responding positively to the requests for protection that arise in the new forms of production. A uniquely valuable tool for study and reflection for policymakers and academics, the book is also sure to be valued by entrepreneurs, managers, consultants, corporate lawyers, judges, human rights experts, and trade unionists who are interested in the issues of labour, industrial relations, and social rights in European and international contexts.
Labour law has traditionally aimed to protect the employee under a hierarchy built on constitutional provisions, statutory law, collective agreements at various levels, and the employment contract, in that order. However, in employment regulation in recent years, ‘flexibility’ has come to dominate the world of work – a set of policies that reshuffle the relationship among the fundamental pillars of labour law and inevitably lead to degrading the protection of employees. This book, the first-ever to consider the sources of labour law from a comparative perspective, details the ways in which the traditional hierarchy of sources has been altered, presenting an international view on major cross-cutting issues followed by fifteen country reports. The authors’ analysis of the changing hierarchy of labour law sources in the light of recent trends includes such elements as the following: the constitutional dimension of labour rights; the normative intervention by the State; the regulatory function of collective bargaining and agreements; the hierarchical organization of labour law sources and the ‘principle of favour’; the role played by case law in both common law and civil law countries; the impact of the European Economic Governance; decentralization of collective bargaining; employment conditions as key components of global competitive strategies; statutory schemes that allow employees to sign away their rights. National reports – Australia, Brazil, China, Denmark, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Poland, Russia, Spain, Sweden, South Africa, the United Kingdom and the United States – describe the structure of labour law regulations in each legal system with emphasis on the current state of affairs. The authors, all distinguished labour law scholars in their countries, thus collectively provide a thorough and comprehensive commentary on labour law regulation and recent tendencies in national labour laws in various corners of the globe. With its definitive analysis of such crucial matters as the decentralization of collective bargaining and how individual employment contracts can deviate from collective agreements and statutory law, and its comparison of representative national labour law systems, this highly informative book will prove of inestimable value to all professionals concerned with employment relations, labour disputes, or labour market policy, especially in the context of multinational workforces.