Deregulation and Labour Law: In Search of a Labour Concept for the 21st Century

Since the onset of globalisation, protective labour legislation has been deeply eroded throughout the industrialised world. In its place we have a plethora of new employment phenomena such as flexible work time, temporary work services, decentralisation of collective bargaining, private fee-charging employment placement services--a wide variety of arrangements in which employers and individual workers reach mutual agreement with little or no reliance on legal norms of government regulation. What are the dimensions and implications of this trend? And how should we go about ensuring the continuing effectiveness of labour law as an instrument of social ordering? These important questions drew a group of prominent labour law scholars from eight major developed countries to the Fifth Japan Institute of Labour (JIL) Comparative Labour Law Seminar in Tokyo in November 1998. This book is the record of this significant seminar. Each participant presented papers and engaged in group discussion on the following topics: changes in labour market regulations, such as abolition of state-monopolised employment placement services and deregulation of fixed-term contracts; trends in individual labour relations, such as working hour flexibilisation and expansion of derogation toward individual consent developments in collective labour relations, such as the movements from centralised bargaining to company- or plant-level bargaining and from trade unions to works councils.