Perhaps no other country in recent years has witnessed greater change in its collective bargaining framework than the UK. This paper describes the dramatic developments and their consequences. Like Gaul, it is in three parts. The first part charts the six major pieces of legislation –...

This article examines the recent changes to the federal legal regime that controls the taking of protected industrial action in Australia. It considers the impact of both the Building and Construction Industry Improvement Act 2005 (Cth) and the Workplace Relations Amendment (Work Choices) Act...

On 7 August 2007, Gordon Anderson delivered his inaugural lecture after becoming a professor in the Law Faculty of Victoria University of Wellington. Gordon took as his theme the protection of employees employed on an individual contract of employment. Following the repeal of the award system by...

Labour law as an academic sub-discipline has been changing in response to developments in the labour market and work relationships. Especially in Australia, labour law scholarship has increasingly adopted a perspective of law as socially constitutive regulation. This approach draws on the...

The traditional means by which workers asserted their collective rights was the union movement, but that has been in severe decline in the private sector. Class action lawsuits would appear to be the ideal modern substitute. There have been a few noteworthy successes for employees in the last...

“Structural changes in economies driven by digitalization, demographic changes and migration are changing the shape of jobs and workplaces. Technological advances have the potential to deliver enormous benefits to society but will also have profound consequences on employment and the quality...

Although employee-representation systems coexist with a collective-bargaining framework in continental Europe for many years, US labor advocates have looked upon those representations systems with suspicion. The reasons for this suspicion are historical: US employee-representation systems have...

Using data on more than 13000 European establishments over the 2009-2013 period, we analyze the relationship between discharge regulation and industrial actions. We empirically answer the question as whether stricter dismissal laws make EU establishments experience more frequent and intense...