Individual Employee Rights at Work
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Description
There have been laws regulating the employment relationship for as long as there have been employment relationships. Across the industrialized world, societies have claimed a significant stake in workers’ terms and conditions of employment, and have been unwilling to leave them entirely to the vagaries of private bargaining within unregulated labour markets. For much of the 20th century, the primary mode of societal intervention into the employment relationship took the form—or a variety of forms—of frameworks for collective representation and bargaining. But even when and where collective bargaining was the dominant mode of workplace governance, the collective freedom of contract was either constrained by legislation (e.g. setting a floor on labour standards), coordinated through (corporatist) institutions accountable in some manner to the wider public, or both. Work has long been deemed too important to leave its regulation entirely to the decisions of workers and employers alone. So alongside the development of legal frameworks for collective bargaining—which aim to reform the bargaining process between workers and employers—modern industrial societies have also regulated the substantive terms of employment. With few exceptions they have done so in response to the demands of workers and their allies for protection from employer treatment that is deemed unfair, exploitative, arbitrary, or otherwise contrary to societal norms of decent work. To that end legislatures, and sometimes courts, have imposed mandatory rights and minimum terms or conditions of employment that are more generous to employees than those which the latter might have agreed to, individually or collectively, under prevailing labour market conditions. (To be sure, many of these employment mandates also correct for collective action problems, information asymmetries, or other impediments to efficient contracting; but they still operate largely in favour of employees, as constraints on employers, and as floors rather than ceilings on what the parties may agree to on their own.) By contrast, employers are generally thought capable of protecting their own interests in the employment relationship, and are rarely given the benefit of mandatory terms of employment more favourable than those they can exact for themselves through voluntary agreements.
Source Publication
Comparative Employment Relations in the Global Economy
Source Editors/Authors
Carola Frege, John Kelly
Publication Date
2020
Edition
2
Recommended Citation
Estlund, Cynthia, "Individual Employee Rights at Work" (2020). Faculty Chapters. 425.
https://gretchen.law.nyu.edu/fac-chapt/425
