Tonia A Novitz

International Promises and Domestic Pragmatism: To What Extent Will the Employment Relations Act 1999 Implement International Labour Standards Relating to Freedom of Association

This paper explores the rhetoric and reality surrounding implementation of international labour standards in the Employment Relations Act 1999. It focuses on UK commitments relating to freedom of association and considers whether the new legislation goes any significant way towards their fulfilment. The paper begins by outlining obligations which arise from a states membership of the International Labour Organisation (ILO) and ratification of ILO Conventions. It then goes on to examine indications that, since the change of government in 1997, there has been a significant shift in UK policy relating to such international obligations. The remainder of the paper examines reforms made by the Employment Relations Act to trade union recognition, protection of strikers from dismissal and prevention of anti-union discrimination. It emerges that the Third Way proposed by the present Labour Government entails a complicated detour from the path of full compliance with ILO standards.

The Place of Domestic Work in Europe: An analysis of current policy in the light of the Council Decision authorising Member States to ratify ILO Convention No.189

The recent Decision of the Council recommending ratification of ILO Convention No. 189 fails to recognise the ways in which European Union (EU) law has facilitated cheap informal labour in the domestic sphere so as to enable participation in the formal labour market. This article examines the approach taken by EU Member States to the drafting of Convention No. 189 and argues that, despite its resultant diluted content, this instrument requires certain fundamental changes to the current treatment of domestic workers in the EU. We further propose a reorientation of the ‘flexicurity’ principle to enable reform, such that contemporary modes of work can be reconsidered and transformed.

Voices at work : continuity and change in the common law world

INTRODUCTION: THEORIZING VOICE IDENTITIES OF VOICE INSTITUTIONS OF VOICE LOCATIONS OF VOICE BEING HEARD-OBSTRUCTING AND FACILITATING VOICE

Resocialising Europe in a Time of Crisis: Migrant workers and collective bargaining: institutional isomorphism and legitimacy in a resocialised Europe

Migrant Workers and collective bargaining : Institutional isomorphism and legitimacy in a resocialised Europe

Labour Standards and Trade: Need We Choose Between ‘Human Rights’ and ‘Sustainable Development’?

This chapter examines the links made between labour standards and trade, in the context of an apparent shift away from a human rights (HR) perspective to one more focused on sustainable development (SD). The approach taken by the European Union (EU) is taken here as an example of this evolution in approach. My concern is whether this shift of language could entail a change in content. Can the justificatory basis for inclusion of labour standards make any difference to the efficacy of trade conditionality? My suggestion is that there may be benefits to supplementing bare HR compliance with a richer and more nuanced SD perspective, but that we have yet to see trade instruments which realize that ambition.

The EU and the Right to Strike: Regulation through the Back Door and Its Impact on Social Dialogue

The treatment of the right to strike by the European Union (EU) has long been problematic and contested. The Member States of the EU and its predecessors, the European Economic Community (EEC) and the European Community (EC), were wary of seeking to regulate industrial action. They understood freedom of association, the right to strike and the lock-out as lying within their own competence to be exercised as national governments according to socially embedded industrial relations systems, subject only to their other international obligations. Hence, the legislative competence of the EU on social policy under Article 153(5) of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU) ‘shall not apply to pay, the right of association, the right to strike or the right to impose lock-outs’. However, this formal exclusion has not been sensible or, indeed, ultimately respected by EU institutions. Two reasons (at least) are indicative of why the EU should actively protect a right to strike. One is that capacity to exercise a right to strike is determinative of the efficacy of trade unions’ participation in social dialogue, a mechanism on which the EU social policy has relied for several decades now. In this respect, it would seem that the EU has been tacitly reliant on national labour laws implementing International Labour Organization (ILO) standards regarding industrial action, both of which are now under threat. The second is that constructing a basis for legitimacy for the EU within a human rights tradition requires some recognition of the significance of a right to take strike action, acknowledgement of which arguably culminated in the text of Article 28 of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights 2000, given legal effect by the Treaty of Lisbon on 1 December 2009. We might expect that ILO standards would inform the interpretation and application of that text, but there have already been significant deviations from those norms in the case law of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU).