The Legal Construction of Personal Work Relations
Mark Freedland and Nicola Kountouris
Abstract
This book argues that a broad notion of ‘personal work relations’ should become the central organising idea for the future development of labour law. This concept is developed by drawing on extensive comparative research of the legal architecture of employment relations in national legal systems and EU law to analyse the traditional model of the contract of employment and the difficulties of using that traditional model to frame modern working relationships. The chapters then present a new model of the foundations of employment relationships, based on the concept of a ‘personal work nexus’, an ... More
This book argues that a broad notion of ‘personal work relations’ should become the central organising idea for the future development of labour law. This concept is developed by drawing on extensive comparative research of the legal architecture of employment relations in national legal systems and EU law to analyse the traditional model of the contract of employment and the difficulties of using that traditional model to frame modern working relationships. The chapters then present a new model of the foundations of employment relationships, based on the concept of a ‘personal work nexus’, and explore the potential of the book's model in shaping labour law along the lines of the normative goal of ‘personality in work’, and its conceptual building blocks of ‘dignity’, ‘capability’, and ‘stability’. Throughout, the book analyses the interaction of domestic and EU employment law, and discusses the possibility of future legal harmonisation in the area. The book concludes by exploring the potential for a common framework for European employment law, in the context of broader debates surrounding the harmonisation of European private law.
Keywords:
personal work relations,
contract of employment,
worker notion,
personal work nexus,
personal work profile,
European labour law,
dignity at work,
comparative labour law
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2011 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780199551750 |
| Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: January 2012 |
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199551750.001.0001 |
Authors
Affiliations are at time of print publication.
Mark Freedland, author
Professor of Employment Law at the University of Oxford
Nicola Kountouris, author
Lecturer in Law at University College London
More
Less
