Law

The present book examines the developing legal regimes and regulation of public services in the UK and other European countries. Public services are examined though a case-study of the complex area of public employment services. These are job-placement and vocational training services which aim to maximize employment and minimize unemployment within EU member States' Active Labour Market policies. Employment services are seen as being at the centre of a complex web of rules in both hard and soft forms of law deriving from the EU, national public law and from private, and at times contractual, agreements. The analysis also suggests that they also lie at the crossroads of a series of trends in regulation, and priorities have been inspired by an array of conflicting policy rationales. These policy rationales include the establishment of an open and competitive European internal market, the establishment of an efficient welfare state, the scaling down of state administrative machinery, the fulfillment of core public service responsibilities, and the creation of public private entities for the discharge of essential social services. The investigation also proved that public employment services provide a highly informative and novel case study of the interaction and conflict between the economic and social aims of the EU and between regulation at national and supranational levels, and the changing forms which this regulation has taken.

The regulation of ‘flexible’ or ‘non-standard’ forms of work is among the key challenges in adapting labour laws to the needs of the contemporary workforce. In recent decades, labour laws have been exposed to be designed around the ‘standard’ model of the full-time permanent employee. In response, efforts have been made to identify techniques of regulating working arrangements that diverge from this paradigm and extend protection to workers engaged in what can be highly precarious forms of work. This book contributes to that endeavour by examining the evolution in the treatment of non-standard workers under United Kingdom labour law. To do this, it focuses on a number of the most prominent of these forms of work, including part-time, fixed-term, casual, and temporary agency work. It examines how the divergence of these working arrangements from the standard model has precluded or tempered the protection of the workers engaged in them. It also evaluates the more recent set of legislative reforms tailored towards enhancing the protection of non-standard workers. The central concern of the book is the articulation of these measures within a policy discourse centred on the need for a flexible labour market. It recognizes that non-standard workers have gained visibility and protection through being recognised as distinct subjects of labour law. It is argued, however, that the regulation of non-standard work within the context of an overarching quest for labour market flexibility has reduced the level of protection afforded to the workers involved.

The reconciliation of unpaid care and paid work is arguably the most pressing and difficult problem currently facing employment law. In all of its forms, unpaid care is predominantly provided by women so that its intersection with paid work is severely gendered. In recent years, European integration has focused on increasing employment rates whilst maintaining labour market flexibility. Many workers who seek to combine unpaid care with paid employment find themselves engaged in increasingly precarious forms of work, yet legal and policy responses have, to date, been reactive and incremental resulting in a framework which is operationally ineffective in certain respects. This book aims to explore the potential for the development of a specific right to care within European employment law which would facilitate the reconciliation of these two central aspects of an individual's life and assist in the rebalancing of paid and unpaid work between men and women. The central premise is that the current constitutional and regulatory framework is sufficiently flexible to take account of the diverse circumstances and resulting needs of working carers and that the European Court of Justice has the competence and capability to provide the necessary creativity to give effect to such a right. What is needed to instil coherence and consistency is a specific focus on the caring rights of employees.

The right to strike in Britain is one of the most important, albeit neglected, issues of modern labour law. It is also one of the most controversial, particularly since the dismissal of 5,500 workers at Wapping, which led not only to calls for law reform (and with it a greater degree of positive state intervention in industrial relations) but also to condemnation of the British government by the ILO. This book concentrates on the hitherto neglected issue of the liability of union members and their families. It examines the effect of strikes and other industrial action on the contract of employment, the question of the payment of wages to those engaged in industrial action, and the social security implications of unemployment caused by trade disputes. The study also examines the position of striking workers under international law (focusing on the ILO and European Social Charter) and concludes by offering proposals for law reform.

This book deals with the development of employment legislation and policy in the United Kingdom during the period from the early 1990s until 2006. The core of the work consists of a critical analysis of the policy and legislation of the ‘New Labour’ governments headed by Tony Blair, and considers both domestically-driven initiatives and those governments' responses to employment initiatives stemming from the social policy of the European Community. The book constitutes a successor volume to the same authors' Labour Legislation and Public Policy (OUP, 1992), which covered the period from the end of the Second World War to the early 1990s, but it is also a free-standing book in its own right. The work argues for an understanding of this body of legislation and regulatory activity as being directed towards the realisation of a flexible labour market. It shows how the flexibility objective has been pursued in three intersecting areas: regulating personal employment relations; promoting a collective ‘voice’ for employees at work; and maximising levels of employment. The book assesses how far the goal of flexibility has been achieved and also analyses the regulatory techniques generated by this policy and the strengths and limitations of making labour market flexibility the cornerstone of employment legislation and policy.

This book examines welfare-to-work programmes in the United States and Britain, and develops a normative perspective to analyse and critique the theoretical and doctrinal justifications for welfare-to-work programmes. The book sheds light on the contractual paradigm that is advanced both as a new interpretation of citizenship, and as a jurisprudential mold for the configuration of the relationship between rights and responsibilities. Viewing rights as demanding responsibilities carries the threat that rights will lose their strategic role in practical reasoning. When this conceptualization is couched in social contract rhetoric that implies a continuous contract between citizens and the state, many conditions on welfare are supposedly legitimated. These include workfare, the obligation to accept any job offer, and several moral and social preconditions, based on a vague notion of reciprocity. This phenomenon has exacerbated over the last decade in social discourse in general, and in the field of welfare unemployment in particular. Following a critique of the prominence of the contractual conceptualization, the book suggests a structure of legitimate conditions on welfare benefits. This takes account of the contemporary appeal of personal responsibility, and reconciles it with the traditional fidelity that is owed to equality in the welfare state ideal. It is shown that equality's concern for the worst-off supports a recognition of a strong legal right to welfare. It concludes by showing that rather than undermining social inclusion and labour market integration, strengthening welfare rights and relaxing preconditions on entitlement would serve the very objectives that welfare-to-work programmes are supposed to advance.

Women's pay still lags significantly behind that of men; and women continue to congregate in low status, low paid jobs. Yet men and women are now formally equal before the law. Indeed, legislation positively outlawing discrimination has been in force for over two decades both in the UK and in the European Union. The key question asked by the author is: Why has the law had so little impact? The answer, she argues, lies in the structure of the law itself. In a wide-ranging examination of sources drawn from political theory, social history and law, the first part of the book develops a critical framework to illuminate the limitations of the law in addressing women's disadvantaged status. Part II of the book applies this critique to a detailed examination of key legal issues in the UK and EU, with illuminating references to the law in North America and Australia. The book locates women's role in the family as a key contributory factor to their continued disadvantage within the paid workforce. Yet, in signalling the way forward, the author rejects the notion that the aim is simply to slot more women into existing structures. Instead of expecting women to conform to structures which exclude and devalue caring responsibilities, she argues, real change will only occur if paid work is restructured so that both men and women can be active participants in family life as well as in the paid workforce.