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...

Remarkably, the core element of labour relationswage determinationhas been excluded from the European social dialogue about harmonisation of working conditions and national systems of social security. The present study responds by analysing the prospects of building up structures of wage formation in Europe through a reevaluation of collective bargaining and collective agreements as they exist under the law of the most industrialized Member States. The impetus for the study is the widely debated crisis of the system of concluding regional collective agreements on wages. Social partners seem...