Roger Blanpain

Olga Rymkevich

Iacopo Senatori

William Bromwich

Now that the economic orthodoxy of 'light-touch' regulation has been widely discredited by recent events in the financial markets, and shareholder-oriented management has come under intense scrutiny, it is time to seriously consider the merits of stakeholder-oriented economies. In this far-reaching symposium on this aspect of comparative labour relations, 35 scholars examine case studies and evolving scenarios in a wide variety of countries, from leading economic powers such as the United States, the United Kingdom, and Germany to post-socialist states such as Poland, Hungary, and Bulgaria to the formidable global economic presences of Brazil, Russia, and India. With contributions from leading experts from all around the world in the fields of labour law, industrial relations, labour economics, labour statistics, human resources management, organization theory and other related subjects, the papers focus on the impact of the global economic crisis and its implications for the future of employment. Specific contexts covered include: ; adversarial versus strategic collective bargaining; transnational collective bargaining; long-term employees as the most valuable corporate stakeholders; workers' voice and participation in the restructuring of undertakings; privatization of state-owned companies; executive pay; investment in vocational training in times of economic crisis; the impact of the EU's Cross-Border Merger Directive; inherent dangers in the EMU one-size-fits-all monetary policy; and cases of large-scale corporate fraud. Of particular interest is the treatment of important developments in Singapore and Nigeria, as well as lessons to be learned from pitfalls encountered in South Africa and other countries. With its theoretical arguments and empirical data, this volume is certainly a major contribution to the debate over whether shareholder or stakeholder approaches to management yield the best results in terms of employment outcomes. As the world economic crisis continues to take its toll on employment, pension funds, public services, and living standards, the book is sure to find a wide audience among policymakers and lawyers worldwide concerned with the future of employment relations and their effect on both productivity and social stability. This volume includes a selection of papers from the Eighth International Conference in commemoration of Marco Biagi held at the Marco Biagi Foundation in Modena, Italy in March 2010.

From Shareholder Value to Stakeholder Value

Rethinking Corporate Governance

Frank Hendrickx

Sarah de Groof

Bulletin of Comparative Labour Relations Volume 98 Work-Life Balance in the Modern Workplace provides insights into labour law's challenges from a work-life balance perspective. The term 'work-life balance' refers to the relationship between paid work in all of its various forms and personal life, which includes family but is not limited to it. In addition, gender permeates every aspect of this relationship. This volume brings together a wide range of perspectives from a number of different disciplines, presenting research findings and their implications for policy at all levels (national, sectoral, enterprise, workplace). Collectively, the contributors seek to close the gap between research and policy with the intent of building a better work-life balance regime for workers across a variety of personal circumstances, needs and preferences. What's in this book: Among the issues and topics covered are the following: differences and similarities between men and women and particularly between mothers and fathers in their work choices; 'third shift' work (work at home at night or during weekends); effect of the extent to which employers perceive management of this process to be a 'burden'; employers' exploitation of the psychological interconnection between masculinity and breadwinning; organisational culture that is more available for supervisors than for rank-and-file workers; weak enforcement mechanisms and token penalties for non-compliance by employers; trade unions as the best hope for precarious workers to improve work-life balance; crowd-work (on-demand performance of tasks by persons selected remotely through online platforms from a large pool of potential and generic workers); an example of how to use work-life balance insights to evaluate the law; collective self-scheduling; employers' duty to accommodate; and financial hardship as a serious threat to work-life balance. How this will help you: This book encourages to think on how labour law and work and family research can cooperate and reinforce each other. This rich collection of chapters clearly shows that work-life conflict is associated with negative health outcomes, gender inequalities and many other concerns and thereby resonates particularly with concerned lawyers and legal academics who ask what work-life balance literature has to offer and how law should respond.

Interdisciplinary Perspectives from Work-family Research, Law and Policy

Work-life Balance in the Modern Workplace

Ulla Liukkunen

Yifeng Chen

Virginia Brás Gomes

Although China is not new to labour law - it was among the founders of the International Labour Organisation (ILO) in 1919 - labour conditions in China today are the subject of concern to observers both inside China and in the international community. In response, China has devoted much attention recently to reforming its labour law system, a process driven by a political reorientation towards labour protection in the context of economic globalization. However, labour disputes and labour unrest continue to proliferate. Using as its starting point an international research seminar held at Helsinki University in January 2013, this volume gathers a remarkable array of academic perspectives on China and its legal system by scholars from China, the United States, and Europe into a stimulating and unique combination of commentary and analysis of the challenges relating to implementation of fundamental labour rights as spelled out in the landmark 1998 ILO Declaration on Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work in the Chinese setting. Importantly, the analysis fully takes into account action in relation to the promotion of labour rights by not only the Chinese government but local governmental authorities, trade unions, enterprises, and other actors. Each author focuses on a different aspect of how these fundamental labour rights operate in the Chinese legal environment and the kinds of obstacles met in their protection. Among the issues that arise are the following: gaps between ILO conventions and Chinese national laws occurring in the transformation of international obligations into domestic laws; how parties to a labour dispute cases may invoke ILO conventions before courts or administrative authorities; market obstacles caused by linking trade with observance of labour standards; the trade union rights framework in China; bottom-up pressures from workers' collective action; conflicts between Chinese state-owned enterprises and their employees; complications in informal employment labour relations; the growing divide between statute law and legal practice; implementation of the anti-discrimination law; discrimination due to China's household registration system; and corporate social responsibility. Many of the challenges relating to implementation of fundamental labour rights discussed in this volume can be considered common to many countries. The book offers new research questions and a wider scope of analysis, and also provides new tools for discussion regarding the promotion of fundamental labour rights.

China and ILO Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work

Underscoring the demonstrable illegality of the transfer system imposed by the International Federation of Football Associations (FIFA), this text describes in detail the complex ramifications of FIFA's rules in the lives of players, revealing how their fundamental rights are systematically denied.

Legal Status of Sportsmen and Sportswomen Under International European and Belgian National and Regional Law

Brian Langille

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 a weakening of the EU guarantee of gender equality. The essays originated in a research meeting held at the Instituto Internacional de Sociología Jurídica at Oñati (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.

Employment Policies and Multilevel Governance

Toker Dereli

The creation of dynamic and flexible labour markets increasing flexibility by removing existing rigidities is widely seen as contributing to economic growth. Expectations from flexibility centre on the creation of employment and thus reducing unemployment, increasing the adaptability of enterprises, social inclusion of marginal groups on the labour market (particularly women and young first entrants), and combating undeclared work. Since the acquis communautaire includes instruments on flexible work, Turkey, while preparing itself for accession to the EU, has to take measures to increase flexibility. Moreover, flexibilisation contributes to modernisation of the Turkish labour market, as it has to increase the participation of women in work and it has to reduce the huge informal labour market. The studies and proposals underlying this book were initiated within the framework of the Matra Pre-accession Projects Programme of the Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs. So many valuable information came to light in the course of the project that this revised and updated version of the reports is now presented to a wider audience. Its keen insights, applicable both in general and specifically to Turkey, shed light on such vital employment issues as the following: A general introduction to key actors in the Turkish labour market; models of linking security with flexibility; relation between the formal and informal labour markets; industrial relations and collective bargaining; reciprocal rights and duties of worker and employer; the application of existing labour legislation; protection of flexible workers in social security. In their analysis of the Turkish case the authors explore the role of the Ministry of Labour and Social Security and its affiliated institutions: the Social Security Institution (Sosyal G?venlik Kurumu) and Is-Kur (which has evolved from the former Public Employment Services Organisation BK); the consistency of the flexibliity clauses of the new Turkish Labour Act with the acquis; and Turkish solutions as compared with those of EU Member States. Although it focuses on Turkey and will be of particular interest to practitioners and scholars concerned with EU and Turkish law, the factual and descriptive analysis of labour flexibilisation that the study provides complete with various detailed models of flexibilisation will be of great value in assessing the state of employment law in any country experiencing the economic pressure of the current transitional period in worklife realities.

Flexibilisation and Modernisation of the Turkish Labour Market

Juan Pablo Landa

Philippe Auvergnon

Compares multilevel manpower and social policy in five EU member states, with one chapter also on the Canadian federal model.

On the occasion of the official ‘retirement’ of the eminent labour law scholar Antoine Jacobs, a number of his colleagues – themselves well-respected in the field of labour law and industrial relations – have assembled this volume of essays to manifest the breadth and variety of this great professor’s work. The authors pay particular attention to the tension, always present in Jacobs’s critical research, of traditional values with an acute awareness of emerging realities. He approached labour law, not merely as a series of static issues concerning workers and employers, but as an evolving discipline that persistently challenged its socio-political context. Among the wide range of issues considered in this collection – all of them prominent in Jacobs’s work – are the following: the right to work; the right to strike versus the freedom to strike; the role of the European Union in national labour law; transnational collective bargaining; social security issues; labour law and the social teaching of churches; bankruptcy; and more.

Liber Amicorum Antoine Jacobs

Labour Law between Change and Tradition

Leanne Cutcher

Jim Kitay

Nick Wailes

Offering evidence on the nature of the pressure that international economic change exerts in countries with different forms of labour law and regulation, this collection of essays explores the impact of globalization on relations between employees and employers in retail banking. It is the first comparative analysis of the current nature of these relations in the banking field at the national and local levels. The articles report preliminary findings from studies of changes in employment relations in retail banking in seven economies: Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong, the United States, Australia, Germany, and China. This grouping covers both liberal market economies (in which firms rely on markets and hierarchies to resolve coordination problems) and coordinated market economies (in which firms make greater use of non-market mechanisms to resolve coordination problems internally and externally). The article on banking in China is the first English-language study of the emerging pattern of industry-level employment relations in this most important of economies. The wealth of data available here allows practitioners, researchers, academics, and policymakers to reach such valuable understandings as the following: assess whether there is evidence that the impact of globalization on employment relations varies systematically across varieties of capitalism; evaluate factors that shape the relationship between international economic change and patterns of employment relations; gain insight into the relation between foreign direct investment and the politics, economics, and social systems of particular nation states and focus on distinctive developments in the under-researched Asian region. Emphasizing five key issues work organization, skill formation, remuneration systems, staffing arrangements, and enterprise governance, the analysis is attentive to both issues of change and the role of agents in bringing about that change. The authors highlight the possibility that within any economy there may be a range of different and competing sets of institutional logics. These informative and insightful articles represent the first empirical findings from the Globalization and Employment Relations in Auto-assemblies and Banking (GERAB) project. The book demonstrates that the research design of this project is a giant step toward sophisticated theoretical models that are capable of capturing and explaining the complex, contingent, and multi-causal relationship between employers and employees in the context of a changing world economy.

Globalization and Employment Relations in Retail Banking

Michele Colucci

"Do core labour standards exist in today's global economy? If so, what are they? And most important how effective are they?" "In this book two labour law scholars answer these questions in a definitive manner. In detail they demonstrate that, although insufficiently legally binding instruments governing employment and labour exist beyond the national level, a significant body of international soft law has developed that does in fact carry great weight. Blanpain and Colucci identity four major sources of this soft law - the UN Global Compact of 1999, the ILO Tripartite Declaration of Principles, the North American Agreement on Labour Cooperation and the OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises - and show how the principles these instruments enunciate act as a countervailing power to the international economic decision-making of multinational corporations." "The authors cite relevant cases and highlight emerging trends in this important area of labour law. Annexes reprint all four of the instruments. The Globalization of Labour Standards will be welcomed by all sectors of the labour and employment law community as a fully realized analysis of what is currently available to those who would like to ensure economic and social progress in a world dominated by multinational corporations."--BOOK JACKET.

The Soft Law Track

The Globalization of Labour Standards

Shinya Ouchi

Takashi Araki

While legislation protecting employees exists in most advanced countries, the notion of who actually is an employee has become unstable. Moreover, the decentralization of traditional collective bargaining is clearly under way everywhere, and the all-important balance between workers' security and employers' flexibility continues to change radically, either retreating toward individual statutory rights or seeking new forms of employee representation. Labour Law in Motion reprints sixteen reports originally submitted to the seventh Comparative Labor Law Seminar (Tokyo Seminar) sponsored by the Japan Institute for Labour Policy and Training in March 2004. Eleven expert authors describe the situation in their respective countries with regard to issues such as the following:criteria used to determine whether a person is an employee;what categories of non-employee exist, and what measure of statutory protection is afforded to such persons;variations in the concept of employee among labour law, tax law, and social security law;regulation of terms and conditions of employment; the forms and legal nature of employee representation;current trends in deregulation or `re-regulation' of labour laws;mechanisms permitting deviation from legal norms; and,the manner and extent of labour law intervention in the labour market. All eleven authors emphasize recent and ongoing changes in their countries' labour laws and evaluate the factors that have contributed to such changes. Each author concludes that reform of traditional labour laws is indeed necessary. However, the book as a whole clearly demonstrates that the content of such reform differs from country to country, particularly in the extent to which labour law entrusts the regulation of working conditions to the market. Offering as it does a clear and concise summary of the recent and current experience of labour relations in eight major industrialized countries, Labour Law in Motion is an essential resource for professionals and officials engaged in any aspect of labour law or regulation in any country.

Roger Blanpain

About

Books

Join the club