Ruth Dukes

Introduction to Special Issue on Labour Laws and Labour Markets: New Methodologies

This short piece of writing introduces a collection of papers by Judy Fudge, Diamond Ashiagbor, Simon Deakin, Shelley Marshall, Jenny Julen Votinius and Robert Knegt. It outlines the aims of the collaborative research project from which the papers resulted, referring to the event at which they were first presented, and it summarises the topic and argument of each paper in order.

From the labour constitution to an economic sociology of labour law

As a doctoral student in London some years ago, I soon found that meetings with my supervisor, Paul Davies, adopted a fairly standard pattern. On the basis of the work I had given him in advance, P...

Wedderburn and the Theory of Labour Law: Building on Kahn-Freund

This paper aims to assess the nature and significance of Lord Wedderburn’s contribution to the elaboration of a theory of labour law. Noting the extent to which Wedderburn was influenced, in this respect as in others, by the work of Otto Kahn-Freund, it focuses on the question of whether Wedderburn ever developed a theory of labour law that was clearly distinguishable from Kahn-Freund’s. Were there significant differences in the two scholars’ expositions of abstentionism, or collective laissez-faire? Through a close reading of Wedderburn’s work, it is suggested that Wedderburn was a strong proponent of the principle of collective laissez-fare, in his early as well as his later writing. In the changed political context of the 1980s and 1990s, he undertook the important task of seeking to update or restate the principle as an expression of social-democratic values in the field of work and working relationships.

Dialogue & Debate: Labour, Constitution and A Sense of Measure: A Debate with Alain Supiot

The paper ‘A sense of measure’ that we publish in this section was Alain Supiot’s contribution to a series of workshops organised at the School of Law of the University of Glasgow, in autumn 2009, on the general theme of ‘constitutionalising employment relations’. The underlying idea for the seminars was to ask the question of labour law as a question of constitutional law; to cut across the categorical distinctions that are taken, increasingly, as given between the public sphere and the workplace. The entrenchment of this distinction between public sphere and workplace obscures the fact that significantly similar forms of powerlessness and vulnerability affect both citizens and workers. The emphasis on constitutionalisation marked the attempt to recover an earlier vocabulary of labour law; one that did not undercut the expression in anything but market terms of the creation of value and the stakes of the employment relation. The original impetus for our project was a shared concern that much of what has been written about labour law over the past 10 years or so emphasised a move away from traditional conceptions of its function of redressing asymmetries in the respective positions of employers and workers through protective measures, towards a full-blown market paradigm focused on maximizing flexibility. Together with this development, there seemed to be a growing perception that ‘old ways’ of regulating employment relations had become inappropriate. Instead, there was discussion of the benefits of minimal or ‘light’