Category Archives: Employment and Labour Law
Myriam Hunter-Henin, ‘Religious Expression and Exemptions in the Private Sector Workplace: Spotting Bias’
ABSTRACT Courts tasked with ruling on religious freedom claims in the private sector workplace have been faced with the following challenge: too weak a protection of religious freedom and it will become meaningless; too strong, and individual freedom will be stifled. Recently, courts on each side of the Atlantic have, respectively, leant towards each of […]
Susan Altmeyer, ‘The Original Instagram – Whose Property is it?’
ABSTRACT When a worker creates a personal social media account and then uses it to promote their employer, courts differ as to whether subsequent use for the employer can operate as an implied transfer of the account to the employer when the employment relationship ends. Allowing an implied transfer flies in the face of traditional […]
Lawrence Friedman, ‘Work Accidents: A Drama in Three Acts’
In the early 1840s, Nicholas Farwell brought a lawsuit against his employer, the Boston & Worcester Rail Road. Farwell was an ‘engineman’ who earned two dollars a day. One day in 1837, he suffered an accident, was thrown to the ground, and the wheels of a railroad car passed over his right hand and crushed […]
‘The Case Against Static Contract Remedies’
Kimberly D Krawiec and Nathan B Oman, ‘The Case for Specific Performance of Personal Service Contracts’, 110 Iowa Law Review (forthcoming, 2025), available at SSRN (17 May 2024). Professors Krawiec and Oman’s insightful new article caught my eye, having myself challenged various contract remedial rules in my research and writing over the years. The title […]
Jack Beadsworth, ‘The Migrant Personal Work Relation: A New Category of Employment’
ABSTRACT The relationship between UK immigration law and labour law is increasingly intertwined and complex. Migrant workers are regularly incorporated into the labour market on an unequal and instrumental basis as economic commodities. A central aim of this paper is to expand our conceptual understanding of the legal nature and form of migrant employment. I […]
Michael Doherty, ‘Domino Dancing: Mutuality of Obligation and Determining Employment Status in Ireland’
ABSTRACT It has taken a while, but what has been described as the first ‘gig economy’ case has been decided by the Irish Supreme Court. Although the case did not involve the use of a platform to organise work, it did require the Supreme Court to rule on the question of the employment status of […]
Konstantinos Alexandris Polomarkakis, ‘A Culture of Commodification? Labour Rights in the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union’
ABSTRACT This article examines the deficiencies of the labour rights enshrined in the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union (EU). It draws on the notion of labour as a fictive commodity in order to showcase how labour rights in the Charter can also be framed as being part of a commodification process, owing […]
Pittard and Ewing, ‘“Fire and Rehire”: Four Lessons from Australia’
ABSTRACT The practice of firing employees and then rehiring them in their same jobs on inferior conditions and lower wages (‘fire and rehire’) has emerged as a matter of acute political controversy. Its use in the United Kingdom has become even more controversial in the period since the Covid-19 pandemic. A brutal example of the […]
Pamela Bookman, ‘Default Procedures’
ABSTRACT In vast numbers of debt collection cases, defendants never appear. Courts then routinely issue default judgments, often rubber-stamping complaints with little or no examination of the underlying facts, on the implied justification that absent defendants have waived their right to a hearing or effectively conceded to the plaintiff’s case. Many other reasons likely cause […]
Rachel Arnow-Richman, ‘Battling the Form: A Front-End Approach to Default-Use Noncompetes’
ABSTRACT A growing consensus holds that employer overuse of noncompete agreements adversely affects workers and the economy. But there is little agreement on how best to regulate these instruments. States have experimented with an array of idiosyncratic reforms that capture the most egregious misuses, while the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), has issued an outright ban […]