Search Results

This chapter examines the research literature on the inclusionary and exclusionary potentials of various forms of work. It provides a review on studies addressing the effects of active social policies in terms of inclusion and exclusion. It explores the participation in ‘standard’ work, part-time work and flexi-work, employment programmes and training, unpaid work and informal paid work. It evaluates the issues that should be the focus of research on the inclusionary and exclusionary potentials of forms of work, as well as the social policies promoting them.

This chapter discusses the rise of non-standard forms of employment since the 1980s. The authors describe how non-standard employment produces economic vulnerability in a variety of ways: low and irregular earnings, underemployment, frequent unemployment or unstable labour market participation. They note that non-standard arrangements particularly affect women workers as a whole and also disproportionately touch racial/ethnic minorities, primarily African-American workers and Hispanics. The authors emphasise the importance of a rights-based approach to employment to combat these trends.

The phenomenon of ‘non-standard’ working poses significant challenges from the perspective of collective organization and representation: unions may find it harder to reach ‘non-standard’ workers and such workers may be reluctant to join unions or participate in union activities. Although the problems with giving ‘non-standard’ or atypical workers a collective voice at work are primarily practical in nature, there are also some legal obstacles. I will explore three such issues in English law: the law on freedom of association for ‘non-standard’ workers, the treatment of ‘non-standard’ workers when calculating firm size thresholds for the purposes of the law on collective bargaining and consultation, and worker representatives’ entitlement to information about ‘non-standard’ workers for the purposes of collective bargaining or consultation.

This volume investigates the relationship between labour market flexibility and worker security in advanced capitalist countries. This is done with reference to the Italian case put against the backdrop provided by Germany, Spain and Japan. These four countries have undergone massive changes in their labour markets in the past decades, witnessing substantial deregulation and the spread of non-standard work. This is defined by variation from the standard way of regulating a work relationship during the mature phase of industrial capitalism, that is, through a full-time open-ended dependent work contract. For those who hold a work contract, deviations may concern four dimensions: 1. the amount of working hours (part time versus full time); 2. the duration of the contract (fixed-term versus open-ended); 3. the overlap between the worker's counterpart in the employment contract and the user, supervisor and director of his or her work (direct-hire versus temporary agency work); and 4. the autonomy of the worker vis-à-vis the directive power of the employer (lower versus higher degrees of subordination to the employer).

This chapter outlines the evolution of labour flexibility policies in Italy, Germany, Spain and Japan. All four countries have introduced labour market reforms as a strategy to respond to high (or what is perceived as high, for example, in Japan) unemployment rates and to accommodate productive necessities that could no longer be satisfied with existing instruments. In doing so, they generally sought to shelter the core workforce from regulatory changes, shifting the burden of functional adjustment on to mostly new entrants in the labour market.

This chapter begins by discussing labour law and its ‘relational’ scope in a number of different legal systems. It then analyses the notion of the ‘personal work relation’ as the domain of labour law, and by a functional definition of this novel concept. Subsequently, the chapter moves on to describe a number of kinds of work, described in terminologies which are not necessarily established legal categories, whose place in the firmament of labour law is either denied or contested, and analyses their relationship with the broad concept of ‘personal work relation’. Finally, this discussion is contextualised in the English and European law approach to defining the scope of labour law, broadly understood.

This introductory chapter begins by telling the story of Elena, a Bulgarian women who found herself without employment following the privatization of the garment factory she had worked in her whole adult life. It explains how she survived the transition to a market economy by scrounging together informal work of various types. This book is centrally concerned with what regulatory strategies can best improve the working standards and lives of Elena and workers like her around the world. It goes without saying that employment creation policies and those that foster industrial growth are crucially important for improving Elena’s well-being. This book is not aimed at addressing these types of policies, however. It is concerned with the realm of regulation—hard laws, soft initiatives and other institutions that shape behaviour and set incentives in particular directions. The chapter describes the prevalence of informal, low paid work worldwide and defines core terms. It concludes by summarizing the outcome of the global search conducted in this book for realizable policy responses to this persistent problem.

Chapter 2 explores how regulation might help to alleviate the burden on poor workers and reduce the incidence of informal work. Informal work is understood in this study as a regulatory problem or conundrum. The chapter explores insights and concepts from the regulatory literature in order reflect upon the reason why labour regulation is failing so many workers around the world, leaving them stranded in a state of informality. The chapter proposes, first, that traditional state-based labour law is not responding to the various forms of work that have proliferated in recent years. Second, it is not responding to advances in the structures of production and relations of distribution that work occurs within. Third, it is not employing tools that are appropriate to or effective in regulating new working relationships. And fourth, it is not creating incentives for compliance which overcome the countervailing disincentives which arise from private and informal regulation, culture, and informal institutions. Having established the problem, it then draws on various literatures to set up the conceptual framework for examining how institutional change could occur so that a more responsive labour regulation could be generated.

Chapter 8 compares the four innovations described in the case study chapters (Chapters 4–7) and draws out lessons about the way that institutional change occurs. None of the models entail comprehensive reform of the way work is regulated in a nation. Nor do they fundamentally challenge the international institutional arrangements, which have altered and undermined the power of national institutions to regulate work, and which were seen to be at play in each of the case studies. They have instead sought solutions which were politically feasible and improved the conditions of a specific group of workers—homeworkers, head-load workers, and garment workers. They arose out of particular political moments and institutional trajectories. The initiatives have in common that they (a) expand or sidestep the employment relationship so as to encompass broader forms of work (with the exception of the Cambodian initiative); and (b) increase the strength of regulation in order to push against countervailing pressures which lower working conditions. However, each initiative has achieved this in different ways and to different extents. This chapter compares these different methods and explores why some levers are stronger than others.