This analytical book examines how the common law of the employment contract is likely to evolve. Tracing the radical evolution of this area over the last 40 years, it explores how many of the changes in common law have been triggered by the judicial ‘discovery’ of the key attributes of the relationship. The author concludes that these key attributes of the contract, including the imbalance of power between employee and employer, are likely to remain the key driver for change.
This collection draws together contributions from leading Australian and international labour law scholars, based on papers delivered at a conference to mark the 21st birthday of the Centre for Employment and Labour Relations Law at the University of Melbourne. Collectively, the contributions provide an account and exploration of labour law scholarship's evolution over the last two decades, and its future trajectory. They explore a number of enduring and emerging themes in labour law, including:The Foundations of Labour Law ScholarshipFrom Labour Law to Labour Market RegulationLabour Law, Equality and Human RightsEffectiveness and Enforcement in Labour LawSidestepping the Law Through Legal StructuresInternational and Comparative Labour Law PerspectivesThe Future of Work and Labour LawThe book offers conclusions about the progress that labour law scholarship has made in facing fundamental changes in the organisation of capital, work and labour markets, as well as suggesting ideas for how labour law might continue to evolve to meet new challenges.
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.
How are national and international labour laws responding to the challenge of globalization as it re-shapes the workplaces of the world? This collection of essays by leading legal scholars and lawyers from Europe and the Americas was first published in 2006. It addresses the implications of globalization for the legal regulation of the workplace. It examines the role of international labour standards and the contribution of the International Labour Organization, and assesses the success of the European experiment with continental employment standards. It explores the prospects for hemispheric co-operation on labour standards in the Americas, and deals with the impact of international labour standards on the rights of women and migrant workers. As the nature and organization of work around the world is being decisively transformed, new regional and international institutions are emerging that may provide the platform for new labour standards, and for protecting existing ones.
This book employs a variety of perspectives such as Institutional, Social Democratic, Marxist, Gender and Informal, Biblical and Dalit, to critically examine the impact of neo-liberal globalisation on both formal and informal sectors of the labour market and the industrial relations system. The narratives not only interrogate current institutions and paradigms, but also outline future developments.
Labor lawyer Paul Weiler examines the social and economic changes that have profoundly altered the legal framework of the employment relationship. He not only discusses a wide range of issues, from wrongful dismissal to mandatory drug testing and pay equity, but he also develops a blueprint for the reconstruction of the law of the workplace, especially designed to give American workers more effective representation.
This provocative book by the leading historian of the National Labor Relations Board offers a reexamination of the NLRB and the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) by applying internationally accepted human rights principles as standards for judgment. These new standards challenge every orthodoxy in U.S. labor law and labor relations. James A. Gross argues that the NLRA was and remains at its core a workers’ rights statute. Gross shows how value clashes and choices between those who interpret the NLRA as a workers’ rights statute and those who contend that the NLRA seeks only a "balance" between the economic interests of labor and management have been major influences in the evolution of the board and the law. Gross contends, contrary to many who would write its obituary, that the NLRA is not dead. Instead he concludes with a call for visionary thinking, which would include, for example, considering the U.S. Constitution as a source of workers’ rights. Rights, Not Interests will appeal to labor activists and those who are trying to reform our labor laws as well as scholars and students of management, human resources, and industrial relations.
Comparativism is no longer a purely academic exercise but has in creasingly become an urgent necessity for industrial relations and legal practitioners due to the growth of multinational enterprises and the impact of international and regional organisations aspiring to harmonise rules. The growing need for comprehensive, up-to-date and readily available information on labour law and industrial relations in different countries led to the publication of the International Encyclo paedia for Labour Law and Industrial Relations, in which more than 40 international and national monographs have thus far been published. This book on Comparative Labour Law and Industrial Relations goes a step further than the Encyclopaedia: some 15 of the 21 chapters pro vide comparative and integrated thematic treatment. They aim to describe the salient characteristics and trends in labour law and in dustrial relations in the contemporary world. Our work is, however, more than a set of papers written by individual authors. Twelve of the nineteen contributors, the associate editor, and the publisher were able to meet to discuss the chapters, carefully evaluating, reviewing and co-ordinating our collaborative efforts. The meeting was exceptionally informative and productive. It was sponsored by and took place at Insead (Fontainebleau) with the additional support of the Catholic University of Leuven and Kluwer Publishers. I thank them for their courtesy and assistance. The book is obviously not exhaustive so far as countries and topics are concerned.
