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When Mexico declared independence in September 1821, Chiapas, along with the rest of Central America, joined the new nation. Then, in 1823, precipitated by the collapse of Iturbide's Mexican Empire, the other former Central American provinces broke away to form the Central American Union. Chiapas, though, chose permanent annexation to the Mexican republic the following year. This chapter is organized as follows. The first section reviews the historiography of other regions of Mexico and Central America during these years in order better to understand the way that history and geography may have influenced political and agrarian relations in Chiapas during the half-century after independence. The second section looks at politics and state-building in Chiapas between 1824 and 1855, focusing on the relationship between regional elites in the central valley and the central highlands, national governments, and Indian communities. The third section provides an overview of commercial agriculture, population, and labour, and analyzes the agrarian laws which were passed in the state in the post-independence period. The fourth section examines the process of land privatization in different regions of Chiapas and the relationship between the alienation of public and communal lands and the spread of agrarian servitude — both labour tenancy (known as baldiaje) and debt peonage. The fifth section addresses the question of why, despite the growing dispossession of communal land, no peasant rebellion emerged in Chiapas during these years, while the next section examines the Labour Tenancy Law of 1849, a short-lived attempt to regulate baldiaje and limit the role of servile labour in commercial agriculture. Finally, the last section looks at the impact in Chiapas of the laws of the Reform and civil conflict between liberals and conservatives in the period 1855–67, and highlights the way in which local political factionalism contributed to Chiapas's Caste War of 1869–70.

This chapter seeks to elucidate the role of ‘European law’ in the legal construction of personal work relations in European national legal systems in general, and in national labour law systems in particular. It begins by identifying the set of problems which beset the legal construction of personal work relations in European national labour law. It suggests that European law, and EU law in particular, has itself become deeply implicated in that complex set of issues. It then proceeds to suggest ways in which EU law could begin to provide solutions to these analytical problems for national labour law systems, to which EU law itself is, to a certain extent, a contributor. In particular, the chapter advances the notion of a European Common Legal Framework for the Law of Personal Work Relations.

In Switzerland, the participation in certain work programmes is an eligibility criterion to social assistance benefits and the constitutionally granted right to the financial means required for a decent standard of living. This chapter examines whether the implementation of these programmes is in accordance with fundamental rights and more precisely, whether they respect the normative framework elaborated in Chapter 4. As will be shown, the right to financial assistance when in need has close links to human dignity. Therefore, the evaluation of the mentioned work programmes against the human rights background leads to some critical conclusions on their compatibility with international human rights law in general and human dignity in particular. Especially, the authors argue that the Swiss Federal Supreme Court’s case law lacks a comprehensive approach for the evaluation of human rights infringements in this context.

Basic labour laws were introduced into Japan after the Second World War from the US. A new law—Labour Contract Law—was enacted in 2007. This law more or less codifies the existing case law. A new alternative dispute resolution (ADR) system for employment disputes was introduced.

Chapter two examines Kenyan orature and revolutionary performance in relationship to the history of colonial labour law, which became increasingly oppressive through emergency regulations. Among the most important responses to this history is that offered by novelist, activist, and playwright Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. Recognizing that the state and the oral artist are “rivals” in articulating and disseminating the law and, further, that orature played “the most important role” in anti-colonial struggles, Ngũgĩ draws heavily on Kikuyu and other Kenyan oral traditions in addressing the history of exceptionalized labour law and its lasting effects in the postcolonial period. Through workers’ songs, revolutionary hymns, proverbs, and myths, Ngũgĩ’s theatre draws on the performative force of oral jurisprudence to challenge the temporal foundations of colonial labour law and also explore alternative models of democratic work that embody a vision of Kenya’s future. Specifically, I argue that through oratorical strategies (including formal open-endedness) in The Trial of Dedan Kimathi (1976) and “Mother, Sing for Me” (1983), Ngũgĩ and his co-authors “[break] the barrier between formal and infinite time,” constellating (in the Benjaminian sense) past moments of revolution with both the present and possible revolutionary futures.

Labour law and social policy are sometimes perceived as somewhat peripheral areas of the European integration project, areas that do ‘not enjoy the same status as the economic strand of internal market law’. Armstrong, elaborating on the scholarship of Scharpf, and Joerges and Rödl, recalls that the original constitutional ‘social deficit’ ‘was not … a design flaw as such but rather an understanding of the relative roles of the EU and nation states’. As argued by Giubboni, in the eyes of its founders, the EU/EEC was to have been primarily tasked with the (liberal) economic and market integration of the participating states, so as to increase their overall economic prosperity and endow the national welfare states with the resources necessary to perform their key redistributive tasks. Almost without fail, specialist textbooks recall the paucity and lack of enforceability of the social policy provisions contained in the Treaty of Rome, often noting that ‘the first steps to European Labour’ occurred ‘in spite of the Treaty’, that is to say in the absence of clear law-making powers, that only started emerging with the Treaty of Maastricht and, more markedly, with the Treaty of Amsterdam. To this day, political scientists add to this,

Chapter 8 provides a critical analysis of some of the difficulties experienced in attempting to promote the development of universal social and economic rights. It discusses the importance of ideology, human agency and power in the historical development of concepts of socio-economic rights in nation-states and then in international human rights mechanisms such as the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR). It also discusses contemporary attempts by NGOs and other campaigning organisations to develop internationally agreed sustainable development goals (SDGs) and to promote the recognition and realisation of universal socio-economic rights globally.