Chapter 1 introduces the main issues raised in Labour Law and its social and economic significance in regulating workplace relations. The chapter introduces the principal sources of labour law in the UK, which include statutes, the common law and European law and the difficulties in securing compliance by employers with those laws. It describes the system of employment tribunals and ordinary courts where disputes are resolved. Finally the chapter introduces some contemporary themes concerning precarious work, work/life balance and human rights at work.

Circumstances for labor after the pandemic resemble those of the early 1920s: fragmented, labor-unfriendly law has severely curbed the growth of unions under economic conditions and a climate of public opinion remarkably favorable to new organizing. Supreme Court rulings on contracts, employment, unions, and administrative power are restoring many features of law to the conditions before the New Deal. States are the most promising governmental level for protecting organizing and widening its reach in the immediate future; reformers of the 1920s provide a model for an engaged approach to scholarship that can shape state policy. Revisiting the state legal and policy history of the early twentieth century is urgently needed to prepare for foreseeable effects of further Supreme Court reaction, and to explore the era’s remarkable diversity of policy design, which may bring to light both ideas and dormant law useful in addressing labor’s contemporary challenges.

The difference in the relative bargaining power of musicians and their corporate partners not only has consequences for the negotiation and formation phase of the contract, but also for its performance, consisting of the exploitation of protected content and the ensuing remuneration. Unfair situations may arise in both respects. This chapter analyses to what extent the legal framework intervenes – and should intervene. First, it reviews exploitation obligations, both in terms of the existence and scope of a duty to exploit and the possible limitations to the content of exploitation activities. Subsequently, the requirement of ‘fair’ remuneration, the available tools for ex post contract adjustment and legislative measures seeking to enhance transparency in the music value chain are scrutinised. The chapter then moves on the performance stage of contracts in secondary relationships, before making a case for a harmonised residual remuneration right for digital exploitation, and concluding.

Chapter 6 shows that workers’ wages and employment relations were, until the 2008 crisis, shaped by horizontal market pressures rather than direct political vertical EU interventions in the labour policy area. That changed radically after the EU’s shift to its new economic governance (NEG) regime. We found that the EU’s NEG prescriptions on wage levels, collective bargaining, and hiring and firing mechanisms followed a consistent trajectory that furthered the commodification of labour in Italy, Ireland, and Romania, but less so in Germany. Instead, Germany received decommodifying NEG prescriptions on wage policy that were linked to a rebalance-the-EU-economy policy rationale. Although this policy rationale was still compatible with NEG’s overarching commodifying script, the diverging policy orientation of prescriptions in this area across countries made it hard for unions to challenge NEG transnationally.

This chapter shows how the bottom-up organization of CTERA was crucial for movementism. The mark of the activist base on protests is reflected in the fact that protests were organized primarily at the provincial and municipal levels, were widespread across provinces, and recurred over time. The chapter then examines the union’s role in electoral politics. While some union leaders became politicians, the union was not beholden to any political party and it lacked a coherent partisan identity. The last section analyzes the policy dynamics that ensued from movementism and the extent to which the creation of a new national institution of collective bargaining for teachers transformed the union’s political repertoire. It is shown that movementism remained largely in place.

For paid military service to constitute wage labour, soldiers’ labour power ought to be acquired on a labour market. Such a market develops when multiple employers compete over the labour of the same pool of workers and workers can negotiate their terms of service. As argued in this chapter, during the campaign of Alexander soldiers not only leveraged their collective voice to improve their conditions of service but were also promoted up the ranks when their skill set warranted it. These phenomena laid the foundations for the development of a market for labour during the Wars of the Successors, when multiple employers had to vie for the service of the same group of soldiers. Increasingly motivated by monetary gains and not restricted by political allegiance, these soldiers enlisted with the highest bidder, thereby driving the price of military labour upwards.

Access to Austrian employment law is dependent on whether an individual can be regarded as an ‘employee’. Essentially, the idiosyncratic protection provided by employment law is awarded based on a binary option: the subordinate ‘employee’ in contrast to the self-employed person. Intermediary categories – such as the ‘quasi-subordinate’ status – are mere exceptions, although with increasing importance.

Austrian law does not provide a given notion of the ‘employee’. The Austrian Civil Code came into force in 1812, when special protection for employees was not considered necessary.

Denmark is a Scandinavian country of 5.8 million inhabitants. It is a constitutional monarchy, and state powers are divided between the parliament (legislative), the government (executive), and the courts (judiciary). The rule of law is a fundamental principle in the Danish legal system. Denmark is one of the richest countries in the world, and presumably also among the happiest. In the area of digitalisation, Denmark is among the most digitalised countries in the EU as well as globally.

Defining the employment relationship in the United States is not an endeavor for timid souls. The hallmark of American work law, especially its classification of employees and employers, is confusion. And that confusion has only intensified as emerging technologies have changed both the way that many people work and their relationship to the companies that profit from that work. The result of this trend has been an amplification of a long-existing problem: the exclusion of workers from workplace protections because they fall outside statutory definitions of the employment relationship.

Since the Dutch debate about the digitisation of labour is often reduced to a debate about how to qualify a contract between a worker and the platform they work through, or work for, the definition of the term ‘employment contract’ deserves a lengthy discussion. This approach means that the other effects of technological changes, such as changes in the organisation of work owing to changing structures of authority, receive far less attention. In Section II, I examine the definition of an employment contract and the obligations associated with employment contracts, partly to distinguish them from contracts for services. I also discuss the incentives for avoiding employment contracts or the associated obligations. As a result, Section II also includes discussions of flexible employment relationships, domestic work, and, of course, contracts for services, each – to the extent possible – in light of technological developments.

Technological innovation has disrupted standard forms of employment and fragmented the world of work, creating new digital sites of work and new modes of work organised around digital platforms. The arrangements for platform work, which vary in form and substance, defy classification in terms of the traditional configuration of employment and bypass the boundaries of South African labour law. Even the net of protection designed to provide labour rights for atypical (non-standard) forms of work is inadequate and excludes vulnerable workers in the digital economy from its scope. As such, work in the digital economy is largely ‘characterised by an absence of effective labour regulation’.

In 1969, David A. Morse received the Nobel Peace Prize on behalf of the International Labour Organization (ILO). In his Nobel Lecture, the then Director-General (DG) explained how the organization contributes to ‘an infrastructure of peace’ by providing Member States with ‘a meeting ground’ for cooperation and dialogue. This meeting ground is characterized by tripartism and universalism, two qualities that make the ILO stand out. Tripartism, in which governments and workers’ and employers’ representatives discuss and decide on all ILO action, ‘was both the most daring and the most valuable innovation of the Peace Conference’. By setting up the ILO in tripartite fashion, the social dialogue between trade unions, employers’ organizations, and governments was presented as a viable approach to resolving social conflict. As Morse suggested, if tripartism ‘could be accepted and applied in Geneva, why not at home?’.

The fourth industrial revolution, the economy 4.0, the digital economy … all these terms refer to the profound processes of transformation that are changing the lives of people all over the world. Despite there being no consensus on the founding principles of the digital economy, some basic common points are frequently mentioned in all research studies: the key role played by platforms, robotization, and digital intelligence; the importance of network effects and the use of big data; the emerging model of Industry 4.0; and the increasing profitability of technological investments. Digitalization is changing the economy, our societies, our daily lives, and it is having an especially significant impact on employment, working, and social conditions. In fact, it is one of the major concerns and study targets in the framework of the initiative and activities promoted by the International Labour Organization (ILO) regarding ‘The Future of Work’.

In 2019, the report of the Global Commission on the Future of Work of the International Labour Organization (ILO), Work for a Brighter Future, called for ‘technology in support of decent work’. Affirming that ‘labour is not a commodity; nor is it a robot’, the report insisted on the necessity of making sure that technology is ‘human-centred’ and that a ‘human-in-command’ approach to technology prevails. Whether labour law, as it stands, is sufficiently equipped to reach this goal is a difficult question.

The Republic of Korea (Korea) is known to be a country that is dynamic in many ways. At a glance, this may be true in relation to its labour law. In a relatively short span, it has made and revised a number of labour law statutes and case-law in response to political, economic, and social changes. It is, however, not certain that its labour law, aged almost seventy, remains a still adequate regulatory tool to address the changes in, and challenges to, the world of work caused by recent technological developments. This chapter sees the life of Korea’s modern labour law coming to an end, but does not necessarily see the dawn of a new labour law era. Hoping to contribute to finding this new path, this chapter will lead the reader through where we are now and where we are heading at this crossroads.

The Covid-19 crisis has shaken Israel’s labor market. Many Israeli workers lost their jobs temporarily or permanently. Workers in several sectors, such as teachers and hi-tech workers, have moved to working at home using technology tools such as Zoom. Others, such as healthcare workers, workers at grocery stores, and other types of essential worker, continued to go to work facing health risks. Workers with children, who have been studying at home through virtual learning, needed to find a new balance between work and taking care of family members.

As is the case in many other legal systems, Italian labour law (widely intended) has been traditionally structured around the employment and self-employment divide, taking the standard employment relationship, that is, the open-ended, full-time contract of employment, as a reference.

The summa divisio between employees and the self-employed provided the distinction between those covered by – and benefitting from – labour law regulation and those falling outside its scope of application. This distinction was enshrined in the Civil Code (henceforth: c.c.) of 1942 through the definition of prestatore di lavoro subordinato (employee, Art. 2094 c.c.) and contratto d’opera (contract for services, Art. 2222 c.c.).