Category Archives: Employment and Labour Law
Charlotte Alexander, ‘Rethinking the Litigation Boom’
ABSTRACT This Article rethinks the functions and functioning of litigation booms. Using an original data set that tracks Fair Labor Standards Acts cases during the 2000-2016 period, the Article shows that booms are not anomalies but are instead an expected behavior in our distributed system of civil law enforcement. Specifically, plaintiffs and their lawyers ‘herd’ […]
Sabine Tsuruda, ‘Workplace Authority and the Duty to Bargain’
ABSTRACT Collective bargaining law has a neglected but morally essential role to play in employment. Each person possesses fundamental and equal moral authority over what to do with their bodies, how to think, and what kind of projects and life to pursue, and that authority is directly implicated by employment. Collective bargaining law has the […]
Harris and Kaufman, ‘Consumer Law Meets the New Company Store’
ABSTRACT Firms have discovered new ways to extract value from workers beyond traditional labor exploitation. In labor markets increasingly characterized by monopsony power, platform work, and financialization, employers push a variety of financial products onto workers and establish surveillance systems that monetize worker data. This Article introduces the Triple Extraction Model to explain how firms […]
Ewan McGaughey, ‘Economic Growth and Labour Rights: The Case of the Employment Rights Act 2025’
ABSTRACT How do labour rights affect economic growth, and what may we predict from the Employment Rights Act 2025? The UK government says its first mission is ‘growth’, and improving workers’ rights is part of this. However, the government chose to define its ‘growth’ mission solely in terms of Gross Domestic Product (GDP). GDP often […]
Margaret Zhang, ‘The Haircut Cases Were Wrong’
ABSTRACT Why an Exception for Sex-Segregated Grooming Standards Undercuts Title VII. Employers in the United States have courts’ approval when they require women to wear makeup at work or to dress in a different (sometimes more revealing) uniform than men. Despite the Civil Rights Act of 1964’s nationwide ban on workplace sex discrimination in the […]
Yang Chen, ‘The Law of Employee Distillation and Cloning’
ABSTRACT The next generation of workplace AI may not merely replace employees; it may be trained to become them. Employers can now feed an employee’s emails, chats, documents, meeting transcripts, code reviews, and behavioral traces into AI systems that reproduce not simply discrete outputs, but working style, tacit judgment, institutional memory, and professional persona. This […]
Nicola Countouris, ‘The Reform That Wasn’t There – On the Perduring Necessity of a “Single Worker Status” in UK Employment Law’
ABSTRACT This article explores the proposal contained in Labour’s Plan to Make Work Pay to move towards a single status of worker in UK employment law. It argues that a reform of the personal scope of application of UK employment legislation is both long overdue and has only become more urgent and necessary, also in […]
Ewan McGaughey, ‘Executive control of labour rights: the dangerous path of the Employment Rights Act 2025’
INTRODUCTION ‘Democracy is protected’, wrote Nye Bevan, ‘by extending its boundaries’. In this time, in 1952, Britain had around 70% collective bargaining cover. This paved the path to fair pay, better conditions, and equality, and the UK government was committed to full employment. But Bevan knew that democracy’s boundaries were too restricted, because in the […]
Christine Carter, ‘Statistical Methodologies and the Treatment of Risk in Industrial Disease Disputes’
ABSTRACT Workers are often exposed to hazardous industrial contaminants in the course of their employment and go on to develop serious diseases. Yet, when bringing claims in negligence, they face significant challenges in proving a causal relationship between the harm suffered and the employer’s breach of duty. These challenges arise from the methodological gaps between […]
Philippa Collins, ‘The Law of Unfair Dismissal and the Employment Rights Act 2025: An Opportunity Missed?’
ABSTRACT The right not to be unfairly dismissed has been a remarkably constant force in employment law since its introduction over 50 years ago. Unfair dismissal law was therefore overdue for some attention when the incoming Government was planning a major overhaul of employment rights, described as the ‘biggest single upgrade of employment rights in […]