Charles Woolfson

Labour Mobility in Construction: European Implications of the Laval un Partneri Dispute with Swedish Labour:

The accession to the European Union of new member states from central and eastern Europe, with weak trade union movements, poorly developed social dialogue and inferior working conditions, has been viewed as a threat to regulated labour standards in the EU-15. This article examines a high-profile labour dispute arising from the conditions of Latvian construction contract labour in Sweden. The dispute exposes weaknesses in the protective floor of minimum standards offered by the posted workers Directive. It also goes to the core of the debate about the preservation of a ‘European social model’ and the proposed Services Directive.

The Swedish Model and the Future of Labour Standards after Laval

This article reflects on the European Court of Justice ruling in the case of Laval, involving Latvian posted workers in Sweden. It analyses the implications of the ruling and ensuing debate over the Laval case for the future of the ‘Swedish model’ and labour standards. It suggests that profound dilemmas now face trade unions both at Swedish national and European level as to appropriate strategies to adopt to defend national pay and working conditions in the light of the European Court decision and especially in the Swedish context due to the subsequent ruling by the Swedish Labour Court. Nevertheless, a human rights discourse is emerging in which the European Court of Human Rights may act as a counterbalance to the European Court of Justice, especially in the context of the Lisbon Treaty.

Working Environment and 'Soft Law' in the Post-Communist New Member States

Current, admittedly incomplete evidence, suggests a deteriorating working environment in the new Member States of central and eastern Europe. Moreover, support for occupational health and safety regulation concerning the working environment appears to be limited among business and political elites in the new Member States. This has created a lack of policy ‘reform fit’ between the ‘social dimension’ of a European social model and domestic agendas dominated by more ‘business-friendly’ free market considerations. The European Commission has also currently adopted ‘deregulationary’ assumptions concerning the need to ‘simplify’ the acquis, as well as advocating ‘soft law’ as an alternative to traditional regulatory instruments such as directives. However, the lack of contextual industrial relations supports, in particular, the power imbalance in industrial relations due to the weakness of trade unions and social dialogue at workplace level, make uncertain prospects for ‘soft law’ as a strategy for working environment improvements in the new Member States.

‘Hard times’ in Lithuania: Crisis and ‘discourses of discontent’ in post-communist society

This article analyses the intersection of global recession with the underlying crisis of neo-liberalism in Baltic Lithuania, and the disappointment of expectations regarding the promised benefits of free market capitalism for the citizens of post-communist society. Drawing on an empirical analysis of Lithuania, a new European Union member state and former Soviet republic, the post-communist trajectory of neo-liberal economic and social development is critiqued. Global economic and financial crisis has resulted in a social and economic ‘shock’. It occurred in an environment already marked by disappointment, alienation and high outward migration. Through an analysis of ‘voice’ expressed in ‘discourses of discontent’, the article attempts to chart the impact of ‘hard times’. It predicts a new ‘exit’ in the form of a surge of outward migration resulting from the failures of ‘voice’, and the concerning possibility of ‘internal exit’.

Labour migration and informalisation: East meets West

Purpose – Against a theoretical discussion of informalisation, the purpose of this paper is to trace wider commonalities and migratory interconnections that are leading to informalised or deteriorated employment conditions both East and West in the enlarged Europe. Design/methodology/approach – The paper examines the ways in which informalisation has come increasingly to typify employment relations both East and West via contrastive case studies from Sweden and Latvia. Findings – The paper illustrates how a growing tendency towards informalisation of work and economy comes about as a consequence of dual tendencies towards informalisation both “from above” and “from below”. Migrant labour has a part in this process, especially in the post-EU enlargement period, increasingly enabling free movement of labour from the former socialist countries to the West. Research limitations/implications – The implications of the paper are that the harmonisation of labour standards in the enlarged EU is not necessarily in ...

The regulation of health and safety in Britain: from old Labour to new Labour

The Health and Safety at Work Act (HSWA 1974), passed twenty-five years ago, has been hailed as a significant advance for organised labour and a model for modern work-place regulation. This article argues that, contrary to conventional interpretations, the making of the Act was dominated by business interests. We suggest that the Act’s emphasis on self-regulation and goal-setting made it vulnerable to deregu-latory initiatives, which are unlikely to be reversed by new Labour in the foreseeable future.

Negotiated responses to the crisis in the Baltic countries

This article reviews the negotiated responses to the crisis at different levels of social dialogue in the Baltic countries. The Baltic countries form a relatively coherent group of small open economies that can be classified as belonging to the neoliberal type of central and eastern European capitalism. Their responses to the crisis were consistent with such classification: flexible labour markets absorbed the main impacts of the crisis through rapid increases in unemployment, as well as nominal and real drops in wages. A negotiated response was either not sought at all by governments or was of minor importance at all levels of interaction between the social partners. If anything, national-level social dialogue deteriorated, remaining at a low level even after the crisis had peaked. Based on qualitative examples from Estonia and Lithuania we show that, at company level, responses to the crisis varied.

Migrant precarity and future challenges to labour standards in Sweden

Fears of a ‘race to the bottom’ in labour standards may have been overstated. Nevertheless, using Sweden as a case study, it is argued that the diminished capacity of trade unions to defend labour standards following the Laval judgement of the European Court of Justice, together with a decline in trade union density, a limited remit of enforcement authorities and recent changes to the Swedish labour migration regime, may have detrimental impacts on labour standards, particularly in low-skill low-wage occupations. In combination, these developments are creating new spaces for migrant precariousness within the context of a formerly well-regulated Swedish labour market model.

Employee 'voice' and working environment in post-communist New Member States: An empirical analysis of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania

This article examines employee ‘voice’ in workplace health and safety in three Baltic New Member States by means of a cross-national survey. The data point to unresolved problems of voice in the context of rather poor working environments. These present opportunities for collective renewal by trade unions, but paradoxically are more likely to be addressed by employers in the context of significant labour shortages created by a post-European Union accession labour ‘exit’.

Migrants and the Unequal Burdening of “Toxic” Risk: Towards a New Global Governance Regime

The article addresses the changing discourse that frames the neo-liberal regulatory agenda, in the context of the current financial crisis and related, system-threatening “toxic” risk. In this, the authors claim that a flexible mix of regulation/de-regulation and self-regulation is reflected in an asymmetric architecture of multi-level governance that is based on an unequal burden sharing of risk, involving the commodification of risk and an imposition of this burden on the socially weakest groups. Migrant workers are identified as being most vulnerable to the condition of precariousness due to “double asymmetry of hyperprecarity”. The article identifies class-biased practices of regulatory failure and the counter-movements that they have generated around the demand for “decent work”. It is claimed that the present systemic failure has created only a “window of opportunity” for the working class and civil society actors to promote de-commodification of labour and equalisation of risk-burdening in the inception of a new regulatory contest on both national and trans-national level.