Abstract
The contract of employment has always had a central role in labour law, but its significance has increased with the relative demise of collective bargaining and, paradoxically, with the growth of statutory rights. In The Contract of Employment, a number of distinguished labour lawyers, under the general editorship of Professor Mark Freedland, seek to provide a critique of the strengths and weaknesses of the present state of the law in what is described as a ‘closely co-ordinated treatise’. In this review article, I suggest that whilst the book has many virtues, it falls short of its ambition. I also take issue with two themes in the analysis in particular. The first is the relationship between the common law of the employment contract and statute, and whether they can properly be treated as an ‘inseparable body of legal doctrine’ as the authors claim. The second is the criticism of the courts’ treatment of atypical contracts, in particular agency relationships and zero-hours contracts. Whilst there are justified concerns that rights of workers are being undermined by the often cynical abuse of these forms of relationship, I suggest that the judges have limited scope to prevent that abuse and that criticisms to the contrary are misguided.
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Patrick Elias, Changes and Challenges to the Contract of Employment, Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, https://doi.org/10.1093/ojls/gqy022. Published: 28 August 2018.
First posted 2018-09-02 09:06:37
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