In this book, leading international thinkers take up the demanding challenge to rethink our understanding of social justice at work and our means for achieving it - at a time when global forces are tearing the familiar fabric of our working lives and the laws regulating them. When fabric is torn we can see deeply into it, understand its structural weaknesses, and imagine alterations in the name of resilience and sustainability. Seizing that opportunity, the authoritative commentators examine the lessons revealed by the pandemic and other global shocks for our ideas about justice at work, and how to advance that cause in the world as we now find it. The chapters deliver critical re-assessments of our goals, explore our new challenges, and creatively re-imagine trajectories for progress on two global fronts - via international institutions and by a myriad of other transnational techniques. These forward-looking essays are in honour of Francis Maupain, whose international career and scholarly writing are inspiring models for those who, in a changing world, seize opportunities for creativity in the pursuit of global justice at work.

Labour law has always been preoccupied with boundaries. One can either be an 'employee' or not, an 'employer' or not, and the answer dictates who comes within the scope of labour law, for better or worse. But such divisions have always been difficult, and in recent years their shortcomings have become ever more pronounced. The proliferation of new work arrangements and heightened global competition have exposed a world-wide crisis in the regulation of work. It is therefore timely to re-assess the idea of labour law, and the concepts, in particular the age-old distinctions - that are used to delimit the field. This collection of essays, by leading experts from around the world, explores the frontiers of our understanding of labour law itself. Contributors: Harry Arthurs, Paul Benjamin, Hugh Collins, Guy Davidov, Paul Davies, Simon Deakin, Mark Freedland, Judy Fudge, Adrin Goldin, Alan Hyde, Jean-Claude Javillier, Csilla Kollonay Lehoczky, Brian Langille, Enrique Marin, Kamala Sankaran, Silvana Sciarra, Katherine Stone and Anne Trebilcock.

Labor law is widely considered to be in crisis by scholars of the field. This crisis has an obvious external dimension - labor law is attacked for impeding efficiency, flexibility, and development; vilified for reducing employment and for favoring already well placed employees over less fortunate ones; and discredited for failing to cover the most vulnerable workers and workers in the "informal sector." These are just some of the external challenges to labor law. There is also an internal challenge, as labor lawyers themselves increasingly question whether their discipline is conceptually coherent, relevant to the new empirical realities of the world of work, and normatively salient in the world as we now know it.
This book responds to such fundamental challenges by asking the most fundamental questions: What is labor law for? How can it be justified? And what are the normative premises on which reforms should be based? There has been growing interest in such questions in recent years. In this volume the contributors seek to take this body of scholarship seriously and also to move it forward. Its aim is to provide, if not answers which satisfy everyone, intellectually nourishing food for thought for those interested in understanding, explaining and interpreting labor laws - whether they are scholars, practitioners, judges, policy-makers, or workers and employers.

Labour law is widely considered to be in crisis by scholars of the field. This crisis has an obvious external dimension - labour law is attacked for impeding efficiency, flexibility, and development; vilified for reducing employment and for favouring already well placed employees over less fortunate ones; and discredited for failing to cover the most vulnerable workers and workers in the "informal sector". These are just some of the external challenges to labour law. There is also an internal challenge, as labour lawyers themselves increasingly question whether their discipline is conceptually coherent, relevant to the new empirical realities of the world of work, and normatively salient in the world as we now know it. This book responds to such fundamental challenges by asking the most fundamental questions: What is labour law for? How can it be justified? And what are the normative premises on which reforms should be based? There has been growing interest in such questions in recent years. In this volume the contributors seek to take this body of scholarship seriously and also to move it forward. Its aim is to provide, if not answers which satisfy everyone, intellectually nourishing food for thought for those interested in understanding, explaining and interpreting labour laws - whether they are scholars, practitioners, judges, policy-makers, or workers and employers.

Forty years ago Amartya Sen introduced to the world a novel approach to the idea of equality: the notion of 'basic capability' as 'a morally relevant dimension' and the claim that we should focus upon equality of basic capabilities ('a person being able to do certain basic things'). These ideas, as developed by Sen and Martha C. Nussbaum, have launched an academic armada now proceeding under the flag of the 'capability approach' (CA). While that flag has ventured far and wide and engaged many areas of inquiry, this volume of essays is the first to explore how CA might shed light upon labour law. The capabilities approach can illuminate our understanding of labour law across three dimensions. Part I looks at the nature of the basic relationship between CA and labour law-do they share common ground or disagree about what is important? Can the CA provide a normative 'foundation' for labour law? Part II goes further by examining the relationship of the CA and other well-established perspectives on labour law, including economics, history, critical theory, restorative justice, and human rights. Part III examines the possible relevance of the CA to a range of specific labour law issues, such as freedom of association, age discrimination in the workplace, trade, employment policy, and sweatshop goods.

In Europe, work has long been a symbol of full citizenship and today work is a fundamental goal of European social policy. However, although every person has the 'right' to work, it is becoming clearer all the time that unemployment is not due merely to a lack of encouragement to exercise this right, but (at least in part) to some deeper defects in the implementation of effective employment policies. As a contribution to defining the nature of these problems, this important collection of essays targets the phenomena of multilevel governance, both vertical (European, national, regional, local) and horizontal (administrative institutions, trade unions, business representatives, NGOs), showing, with detailed analysis and data, how coordination or conflict between the various levels advances, or fails to advance, the goals of employment policy. Regarding the EU, five EU Member States are examined- plus, for comparative analysis, the parallel Canadian federal model - with the authors addressing such concrete issues as: - the impact of globalisation and Europeanisation on employment policies; - distribution of tasks in the Open Method of Coordination (OMC); - involvement of private and economic agents; - the increasing significance of international political agents; - flexicurity as an employment strategy; - the difficulty of integrating the excluded; - coordination with education and fiscal policies; - social inclusion from the point of view of international human rights; and - gender 'mainstreaming' as an essential element of the EU guarantee of gender equality. The essays originated in a research meeting held at the Instituto Internacional de Sociologia Juridica at Onati (Spain) in June of 2007. Some of the contributors, all employment law experts, discuss problematic aspects of the European Employment Strategy (EES) and its influence on the decentralization of employment policies and related elements of social protection. Other authors concentrate on 'built-in' multilevel problems resulting from existing constitutional and administrative structures, while a third group focuses on substantive approaches to employment policies within individual member states. The Bulletin contains updated versions of all papers. In this book the degree of administrative, legal, political, and cultural intricacy involved in a serious engagement with multilevel governance of employment on the European model is put on full view. As a deeply informed analysis of how the idea of multilevel governance has played out within the political and administrative reality of Member States, the book will prove of enormous value to labour and employment law professionals anywhere, as the problems identified here have a global reach.