As the global economy is shaken by sequential and interlinked crises, labour actors are adopting novel regulatory strategies to sustain decent work. One key phenomenon is a heightened attention to the effective implementation of labour rights and standards. Some States are increasingly devoting resources to the enforcement of labour and social protection laws: restructuring enforcement agencies; testing digitalized techniques for identifying and averting labour abuses; integrating trade unions into enforcement mechanisms; and mandating joint and several liability in supply chains, among other strategies.
Another important trend is the increasing recourse to legal fora by individuals, trade unions and civil society organizations. Campaigns by platform workers that engage with legislative processes and courts to assert labour and social security law coverage and basic rights (minimum wages, annual leave, bargaining rights, protection in case of sickness, maternity, unemployment, employment injury or for old age, etc.) have become emblematic. In other settings – often, although not exclusively, in the global South – informal workers are being highly inventive in their strategic engagement with law. Domestic workers, street vendors, homeworkers and waste pickers are targeting the array of interlinked legal regimes that shape their working lives – licensing laws, zoning ordinances, public order statutes, waste management frameworks, in addition to more conventional labour law and social protection regimes. These actors are also pursuing a range of legal outcomes: to be formally recognized as “workers”, reconfigure private homes as workplaces, secure public space, escape police harassment, form trade unions or cooperatives, or be recognized for collective bargaining.
Furthermore, these diverse regulatory strategies are intersecting with, and are driven by, new fields of engagement, in particular the nexus of labour regulation and climate change, and new legislative strategies, including those – at the international level – to include safety and health among the fundamental principles and rights at work (2022) and to articulate a regulatory regime for decent work in apprenticeships (expected in 2023). Papers in this Track will address a broad range of questions on regulatory innovation in the uncertain landscape of contemporary working life. They will be drawn from a range of interdisciplinary perspectives and methodologies and investigate countries in all regions.
In particular, Track IV invites papers that address the following questions:
How are labour and social protection regulatory regimes responding to the transition from the COVID-19 pandemic to a global cost-of-living crisis? Are new strategies emerging that can sustain decent work in circumstances of spreading poverty, rising inflation, and the risk of a further wave of austerity policies?
How effective are new strategies for labour law enforcement? Have effective new methods or techniques been discovered, or traditional enforcement mechanisms reinforced?
Has the pandemic-era anxiety about unacceptable labour standards in global supply chains been translated into legal reform? How effective are “soft standards” for example, of the type associated with living wage campaigns?
What regulatory strategies by workers and their collective organizations are most promising with a view to strengthening and extending labour and social security rights and standards? Are litigation strategies an effective weapon for workplace change? Which are the most successful? What is the intensified engagement of unions and other civil society organizations with the courts and tribunals revealing about the role of litigation in social change?
Can broader lessons be learned from targeted legal reform based on judicial decisions? What can be learned from new laws/proposals on platform work, including at the EU-level? What are the impacts of new legislative and judicial interventions regarding platform work undertaken at the country level on job creation, working conditions and the sustainability of the business models?
What will a new ILO apprenticeship standard add to ongoing efforts to support youth employment in particular?
What lessons can be learned from the recent engagement with climate change in labour regulation scholarship and policy?
What kind of global governance system can be envisaged that would reduce between-country inequalities and ensure fair working conditions for all workers across the globe?
Track coordinators: Deirdre McCann, Sean Cooney, Uma Rani, Valerie Van Goethem, Lisa Tortell
