Questions central to both the legislative debate and to this book include:
- How will the information and consultation rights be organised?
- What can be learned from the experience of the European Works Council Directive (1994), now that more than 600 EWCs have been established by agreements between management and labour?
- What is the role of trade unions and collective bargaining?
- What role can employees play in the exercise of managerial prerogative?
- How does the European Works Council relate to the European Company Statute?
- How will the presence of employees'...

In recent years, a number of company bankruptcies in Europe - particularly in the Netherlands - have exposed serious gaps in the securing by law of reparations due to employees. As matters stand, employees - who were dependent upon the bankruptcy not only for their income but also for their employment and social security - have little to expect in terms of payment of arrears of pay, protection against dismissal, continued employment in the event of a business transfer, or participation rights. This work opens this far-reaching and hugely important issue by comparing employee rights in...

A generation ago, temporary work was practically outlawed. During the 1950s, the International Labour Organisation (ILO) clearly stated (in request to a question from the Swedish government) that temporary agency work was prohibited by ILO Convention 96 regarding fee-charging placement. Trade unions, of course, were in complete agreement, both because temporary work arrangements undermined the situation of permanent workers and deprived the temporary workers themselves of equal treatment guarantees. Yet persistent employers, always ready to find ways around this prohibition, have gone from...

No one denies that the institution of collective bargaining between workers and employers has been a powerful tool for social dialogue. Without our history of effective collective bargaining there would be no mutual understanding, no industrial peace, no constructive cooperation between social partners. Yet there is a feeling today that this history has drawn to a close; that our post-industrial world demands something different, something our tradition of collective bargaining and collective agreements cannot give us. What information and insight can we gather to verify or challenge this...

Do core labour standards exist in todays global economy? If so, what are they? And most importantly, how effective are they? In this book two outstanding labour law scholars answer these questions in a definitive manner. In deep and convincing detail they demonstrate that, although insufficiently legally binding instruments governing employment and labour exist beyond the national level, a significant body of international soft law has developed that does in fact carry great weight. Blanpain and Colucci identify four major sources of this soft law - the UN Global Compact of 1999, the ILO...

While legislation protecting employees exists in most advanced countries, the notion of who actually is an employee has become unstable. Moreover, the decentralization of traditional collective bargaining is clearly under way everywhere, and the all-important balance between workers security and employers flexibility continues to change radically, either retreating toward individual statutory rights or seeking new forms of employee representation. Labour Law in Motion reprints sixteen reports originally submitted to the seventh Comparative Labor Law Seminar (Tokyo Seminar) sponsored by the...

This first comprehensive global study of attempts to control the level of tobacco smoke in the workplace environment addresses company policies regarding smoking, international trade flow, the threat of litigation, public health, concentration of production, and more.

The analyses and commentaries collected in this volume accomplish two essential tasks. They detail the findings and recommendations of the Commission, and they also spell out the implications of the Commission s report for the ongoing viability of economic globalisation in practice. The authors include ILO officials, representatives of both employers and labour unions, specialists in various work-related professions, and academics in disciplines related to work and society. Several authors deal with the role played by other international organisations like the OECD and the EU regarding the...

Although European policy initiatives to advance the position of women in Academia (and especially in science) have proliferated, both at national and EU levels, serious inequities of many kinds remain. This situation is exposed and investigated in this outstanding book, which presents reports and discussions from a two-day conference held at the Law Faculty of Lund University in December 2004. The participants and#8211; law professors and social scientists and#8211; present detailed reports on domestic experiences and regulations in eight European countries: Denmark, France, Germany, Hungary,...