Regulating Labour In the Wake of Globalisation: New Challenges, New Institutions
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By the mid-twentieth century most North American and European societies had converged upon a model of national regulation of firms’ labour standards and labour relations, coupled with collective bargaining, as the response to unacceptable labour market outcomes. Regulation and collective bargaining occupied largely separate spheres, within which firms were seen as the objects of ‘commandand-control’ regulation and as the sites of industrial self-governance respectively. Subnational and supranational levels of government played only a very marginal role in labour relations or in labour regulations. In recent decades, however, the viability of both national regulation and collective bargaining has come under increasing pressure, and the appropriate institutional locus of workplace and labour regulation has become hotly contested. The forces at work are familiar: cross-border mobility of capital, goods and services, and to a lesser extent labour; the rise of multinational corporate entities; intense product market competition from outside the wealthy West; rapidly changing technology, shorter product cycles, and the resulting clamour for flexibility; and the growing importance of information and intellectual capital relative to physical capital. As the balance of power has shifted away from national governments and labour unions, on the one hand, and toward capital, on the other, employers have ratcheted up the demand for deregulation while gaining the practical ability in many sectors to circumvent or escape regulation by outsourcing production. In response to these forces, there have been efforts to move the locus of regulation ‘downward’ to smaller units of governance, including firms themselves, ‘upward’ to larger units such as regional federations and international organisations, and ‘outward’ to non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and civil society. Institutional actors at every level of governance—the International Labour Organisation, NAFTA and the European Court of Justice, national regulatory agencies, state and local governments, trade associations, labour unions, corporations, and NGOs—are all jostling for a role in the emerging regulatory regimes. Actors at disparate levels, from the firm to the ILO, are linking up to form novel regulatory approaches that do not depend on the efficacy of traditional national regulatory institutions. The efficacy of these emerging forms of labour regulation, their democratic legitimacy, the goals and values underlying them, and the direction of reform are all in dispute. With this as our very large theme, we and our colleagues at the School of Law of King’s College London, the University of London’s Institute of Advanced Legal Studies and the Columbia University School of Law convened an accomplished group of European and North American labour law and labour relations scholars. The group met twice, in 2003 and 2004, to discuss and compare emerging developments on both sides of the Atlantic and beyond. This book is the product of those presentations and discussions.
Source Publication
Regulating Labour In the Wake of Globalisation: New Challenges, New Institutions
Source Editors/Authors
Brian Bercusson, Cynthia Estlund
Publication Date
2008
Recommended Citation
Bercusson, Brian and Estlund, Cynthia, "Regulating Labour In the Wake of Globalisation: New Challenges, New Institutions" (2008). Faculty Chapters. 2090.
https://gretchen.law.nyu.edu/fac-chapt/2090
