Regulating Flexible Work

Regulating Flexible Work PDF Author: Deirdre M. McCann
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780199218790
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book Here

Book Description
The rhetoric of 'flexibility' and its potential to empower workers forms a key part of employment policy at the EU level. This book examines the regulation of 'flexible' or 'non-standard' forms of work, which include part-time, temporary, and temporary agency work. It unites analysis of changing patterns of work with exploration of the policy debate about how such work should be regulated. McCann explores how workers in non-standard jobs have traditionally been excluded from the protection of labor law or treated less favorably than the full-time permanent workforce because labor laws have been designed around the 'standard' full-time permanent employee. Analyzing in detail recent United Kingdom legislative reforms and the wider context of the EU and International Labor Organization, this book shows how, although flexible working arrangements are now more strongly protected, they are not fully integrated into UK labor law. McCann ascribes the continuing disadvantage of flexible workers to the quest to maintain a 'flexible' labor market. She contends that the current balance between ensuring flexibility for employers, and ensuring minimum standards for workers is undermining protection for non-standard workers by allowing their employment rights to be derogated in the interest of labor market flexibility.

Regulating Flexible Work

Regulating Flexible Work PDF Author: Deirdre M. McCann
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780199218790
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book Here

Book Description
The rhetoric of 'flexibility' and its potential to empower workers forms a key part of employment policy at the EU level. This book examines the regulation of 'flexible' or 'non-standard' forms of work, which include part-time, temporary, and temporary agency work. It unites analysis of changing patterns of work with exploration of the policy debate about how such work should be regulated. McCann explores how workers in non-standard jobs have traditionally been excluded from the protection of labor law or treated less favorably than the full-time permanent workforce because labor laws have been designed around the 'standard' full-time permanent employee. Analyzing in detail recent United Kingdom legislative reforms and the wider context of the EU and International Labor Organization, this book shows how, although flexible working arrangements are now more strongly protected, they are not fully integrated into UK labor law. McCann ascribes the continuing disadvantage of flexible workers to the quest to maintain a 'flexible' labor market. She contends that the current balance between ensuring flexibility for employers, and ensuring minimum standards for workers is undermining protection for non-standard workers by allowing their employment rights to be derogated in the interest of labor market flexibility.

Rethinking Workplace Regulation

Rethinking Workplace Regulation PDF Author: Katherine V.W. Stone
Publisher: Russell Sage Foundation
ISBN: 1610448030
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 438

Get Book Here

Book Description
During the middle third of the 20th century, workers in most industrialized countries secured a substantial measure of job security, whether through legislation, contract or social practice. This “standard employment contract,” as it was known, became the foundation of an impressive array of rights and entitlements, including social insurance and pensions, protection against unsociable working conditions, and the right to bargain collectively. Recent changes in technology and the global economy, however, have dramatically eroded this traditional form of employment. Employers now value flexibility over stability, and increasingly hire employees for short-term or temporary work. Many countries have also repealed labor laws, relaxed employee protections, and reduced state-provided benefits. As the old system of worker protection declines, how can labor regulation be improved to protect workers? In Rethinking Workplace Regulation, nineteen leading scholars from ten countries and half a dozen disciplines present a sweeping tour of the latest policy experiments across the world that attempt to balance worker security and the new flexible employment paradigm. Edited by noted socio-legal scholars Katherine V.W. Stone and Harry Arthurs, Rethinking Workplace Regulation presents case studies on new forms of dispute resolution, job training programs, social insurance and collective representation that could serve as policy models in the contemporary industrialized world. The volume leads with an intriguing set of essays on legal attempts to update the employment contract. For example, Bruno Caruso reports on efforts in the European Union to “constitutionalize” employment and other contracts to better preserve protective principles for workers and to extend their legal impact. The volume then turns to the field of labor relations, where promising regulatory strategies have emerged. Sociologist Jelle Visser offers a fresh assessment of the Dutch version of the ‘flexicurity’ model, which attempts to balance the rise in nonstandard employment with improved social protection by indexing the minimum wage and strengthening rights of access to health insurance, pensions, and training. Sociologist Ida Regalia provides an engaging account of experimental local and regional “pacts” in Italy and France that allow several employers to share temporary workers, thereby providing workers job security within the group rather than with an individual firm. The volume also illustrates the power of governments to influence labor market institutions. Legal scholars John Howe and Michael Rawling discuss Australia's innovative legislation on supply chains that holds companies at the top of the supply chain responsible for employment law violations of their subcontractors. Contributors also analyze ways in which more general social policy is being renegotiated in light of the changing nature of work. Kendra Strauss, a geographer, offers a wide-ranging comparative analysis of pension systems and calls for a new model that offers “flexible pensions for flexible workers.” With its ambitious scope and broad inquiry, Rethinking Workplace Regulation illustrates the diverse innovations countries have developed to confront the policy challenges created by the changing nature of work. The experiments evaluated in this volume will provide inspiration and instruction for policymakers and advocates seeking to improve worker’s lives in this latest era of global capitalism.

Regulating Flexible Work

Regulating Flexible Work PDF Author: Deirdre M. McCann
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780191711787
Category : Equal pay for equal work
Languages : en
Pages : 198

Get Book Here

Book Description
This work examines the regulation of 'flexible' or 'non-standard' forms of work, including part-time, temporary and temporary agency work. It explores how labour law can evolve to protect workers more adequately in the changing workforces and evolving working arrangements of contemporary industrialised economies.

Regulating Flexibility

Regulating Flexibility PDF Author: Mark P. Thomas
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
ISBN: 0773576762
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 320

Get Book Here

Book Description
In a contemporary labour market that includes growing levels of precarious employment, the regulation of minimum employment standards is intricately connected to conditions of economic security. With a focus on the role of neoliberal labour market policies in promoting "flexible" employment standards legislation - particularly in the areas of minimum wages and working time - Mark Thomas argues that shifts toward "flexible" legislation have played a central role in producing patterns of labour market inequality. Using an analytic framework that situates employment standards within the context of the broader social relations that shape processes of labour market regulation, Thomas constructs a case study of employment standards legislation in Ontario from 1884 to 2004. Drawing from political economy scholarship, and using a qualitative research methodology, he analyses class, race, and gender dimensions of legislative developments, highlighting the ways in which shifts towards "flexible" employment standards have exacerbated longstanding racialized and gendered inequities. Regulating Flexibility argues that in order to counter current trends towards increased insecurity, employment standards should not be treated as a secondary form of labour protection but as a cornerstone in a progressive project of labour market re-regulation.

Flexible Workers

Flexible Workers PDF Author: Teela Sanders
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317755332
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 216

Get Book Here

Book Description
Striptease and other types of erotic dance increasingly make up a large, lucrative and visible part of the sex industries in the United Kingdom and 'lap dancing' has become the focus of many important contemporary debates about gender, work and sexuality. This new book from Teela Sanders and Kate Hardy moves away from the more traditional focus on the relations between dancers and customers, to a focus on regulation and the working conditions experienced by those working in stripping work. Drawing on interviews, survey data and participant observation with dancers, managers, regulators and other staff, Sanders and Hardy present the first ever nationwide study of the stripping industry and the working lives of those within it. The book explores the reasons for the expansion of the industry in the United Kingdom and the experiences, opinions and perspectives of those that produce and shape it. Placing dancers' voices centre stage, it examines the wider political economy which shapes dancers' engagement in employment in the stripping industry, pointing towards the wider conditions of the labour market and growing privatisation of Higher Education as explanatory factors for its labour supply. In suggesting a new feminist politics of stripping, dancers voice their own political awareness of erotic dance and an intersectional analysis of solidarity with workers in the stripping industry is foregrounded. Presenting a 360 degree view of the industry, this ground-breaking study presents systematic evidence for the first time on this area of social life which has become central as a strategy of survival, class mobility and urban accumulation. It will appeal to undergraduate and postgraduate students across the fields of criminology, sociology, geography, labour studies and gender studies, as well as regulators, activists and even dancers themselves.

The Autocratically Flexible Workplace

The Autocratically Flexible Workplace PDF Author: Marc Linder
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book Here

Book Description
That the trend during the past two decades to weaken hours laws in Europe and Canada -- in the name of creating more “flexible” workplaces that can compete more fiercely in a world economy -- has been as inexorable as globalization itself suggests that pressures will mount to dilute an already weak U.S. overtime law. Such “flexibility,” one-sidedly serving firms' needs, may, thanks to bills before Congress, eventually legalize 60-hour workweeks without premium pay. As millions of workers are being forced to work overtime without a right to refuse except at the risk of losing their jobs, this book, complementing the author's “'Moments Are the Elements of Profit': Overtime and the Deregulation of Working Hours Under the Fair Labor Standards Act,” expands the social and labor history of overtime regulation. It focuses on the irrationality of regulating working hours by means of overtime premiums, which encourage workers to overwork without being large enough to deter firms from requiring employees to work unlimited hours. Instead, the book re-examines maximum-hours laws, which prohibit employment beyond a set number of hours. Case studies uncover a body of state maximum-hours legislation -- invalidated by judicial doctrines no longer an obstacle today -- far more radical than any national labor standards. While highlighting the most recent state legislative efforts to entitle workers to refuse to work overtime, the book also documents employers' determined opposition.

Guide to Flexible Working 2008

Guide to Flexible Working 2008 PDF Author:
Publisher: Workplace Law Group
ISBN: 1905766459
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 53

Get Book Here

Book Description


Decent Flexibility

Decent Flexibility PDF Author: Dr Fred C. A. van Haasteren
Publisher: Kluwer Law International B.V.
ISBN: 9041192719
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 554

Get Book Here

Book Description
Within the context of social law, temporary agency work has always been subject of debate. The pursuit of more flexible forms of labour is at odds with maintaining decent labour relations. For that reason, ever since it was established, the UN organisation for labour issues, ILO, has focused on private work placement. In its early years it tended to prohibit or severely restrict private work placement, but gradually it came to acknowledge that, for instance, temporary agency work had positive aspects, and that a total ban was pointless. In 1997, this culminated in ILO convention 181, which was widely supported. This did not end the debate on non-standards forms of paid work. Which forms of work can be considered decent? How do they relate to human rights? What are the effects of globalisation? In the European context, too, (cross-border) temporary agency work has attracted extensive attention. Lastly, the Netherlands has its own, unique form of public-private regulation. The guiding principle in this book is whether Convention 181 still has value in this day and age. What are the developments in temporary agency work in the social domain? How do they relate to the wide range of flexible work forms that are increasingly catching up with temporary agency work? Decent flexibility is the challenge. Dr Fred van Haasteren (1949) started his career as a scientific associate at the Society and Enterprise Foundation (SMO). From 1978 onward, he worked in the Dutch temporary agency sector. In 1982 he became a board member of Randstad Nederland; in 1991 he became Vice-President of Randstad Holding. Among other things, he was also President of the platform of European temporary agency employers and of the global temporary agency employer umbrella organisation CIETT. He is still a board member of the Dutch Labour Standards Foundation (SNA) and an independent member of the NCP OECD. The social policy pursued by temporary employment agencies has always been at the centre of his activities.

Regulating Employment Industrial Relations and Labour Law Intl Co

Regulating Employment Industrial Relations and Labour Law Intl Co PDF Author: Blanpain
Publisher: Kluwer Law International B.V.
ISBN: 904113199X
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 226

Get Book Here

Book Description
The complexity of employment arrangements in various countries tends to make it difficult to understand them. Nevertheless, it is important to 'take stock' periodically, particularly from an internationally comparative perspective. This remarkable book is a giant step in that direction. It is especially valuable in the context of increasing globalisation. For each of nine key jurisdictions - the European Union, Germany, Sweden, United Kingdom, United States of America, Canada, New Zealand, Australia and Japan - experts present detailed information and analysis on key issues, shedding valuable light on trends in such specific areas of employment relations as the following: * atypical work and flexible work arrangements; * dispute settlement procedures such as negotiation, conciliation, mediation, arbitration and other forms of governmental or judicial intervention; * job security, anti-discrimination and gender equality; * recognition of unions and employers' associations and forms of employee representation; * how collective bargaining is regulated, whom the collective agreements cover and what they contain; * parental leave and childcare policy; * the capacity of individual agreements to override or not override collective agreements; * minimum wage levels; * overtime and shift work; and * paid leave entitlements. As a general framework, Part 1 offers an insightful summary of the underpinnings of current analysis of globalization, including discussion of the varieties of capitalism thesis, the divergence/convergence debate (with its models of bipolarization, clustering and hybridization), and elements of historical and political-economic path dependency in various cultures. The information gathered here furthers understanding of the increasing 'disconnect' between the prevailing institutional framework for employment relations and the sweeping changes that are taking place in the world of work. With this book's analysis, practitioners and policymakers will be able to overcome their dated assumptions and more effectively accommodate each others' interests in the face of the complex mix of continuity and change that they are confronting. The team of authors are experts in these countries. They are active in policy or legal analysis, business and/or scholarship.

Regulating for Equitable and Job-Rich Growth

Regulating for Equitable and Job-Rich Growth PDF Author: Colin Fenwick
Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing
ISBN: 1788112679
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 257

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book offers a critical reflection on the operation and effects of labour regulation. It articulates the broad goals and extensive potential for it to contribute to inclusive development, while also considering the limits of some areas of regulation and governance.