Category Archives: Employment and Labour Law
Gabrielle Golding, ‘Employment as a relational contract and the impact on remedies for breach’
ABSTRACT The notion of employment as a relational contract has received much academic attention and is gradually being recognised by common law courts in judicial decision-making. This article focuses on a primary question: what impact, if any, could that relational classification have on the remedies available where an employment contract is breached? Given that this […]
Matthew Bodie, ‘The Law of Employee Data: Privacy, Property, Governance’
ABSTRACT The availability of data related to the employment relationship has ballooned into an unruly mass of personal characteristics, performance metrics, biometric recordings, and creative output. The law governing this collection of information has been awkwardly split between privacy regulations and intellectual property rights, with employees generally losing on both ends. This Article rejects a […]
Pauline Bomball, ‘Vicarious Liability, Entrepreneurship and the Concept of Employment at Common Law’
ABSTRACT The concept of employment at common law serves as a gateway to a wide range of statutory labour rights in Australia. Despite its significance in labour law and its frequent invocation before the courts, the concept remains the subject of significant contestation. A major point of disagreement concerns the notion of entrepreneurship. In some […]
Kevin Banks, ‘Progress and Paradox: The Remarkable Yet Limited Advance of Employer Good Faith Duties in Canadian Common Law’
ABSTRACT There have been remarkable advances in good faith and fair dealing requirements in the common law of individual employment in Canada since the early 1990s. However, these advances have been subject to the paradoxical limitation that an employer’s duty of good faith and fair dealing does not arise until the employer has terminated or […]
‘After Uber: Purposive Interpretation and the Future of Contract’
“The Uber BV v Aslam [2021] UKSC 5 (‘Uber (SC)’) judgment from the Supreme Court represents the final chapter in the long-running saga of determining the employment status of drivers who provided trips to passengers via the Uber app. As highlighted by Valerio De Stefano, the finding that the drivers must be classed as workers […]
‘The Cost of Care: Night-time Carers Are Not Entitled to Minimum Wage During Periods of Sleep’
“Today, 19 March 2021, the Supreme Court handed down judgment in the conjoined appeals of Royal Mencap Society v Tomlinson-Blake; Shannon v Rampersad and another (t/a Clifton House Residential Home) [2021] UKSC 8. This is an employment law case that will be of real interest to personal injury practitioners …” (more) [Patrick Limb QC, Ropewalk […]
‘Recent Case: Uber BV v Aslam’
“Not all employment relationships are created equal. Nearly every legal system in the world provides multiple frameworks for individuals and businesses to structure their economic relations, each governed by tailored regulations and safeguards. Different options generally entail different tradeoffs between flexibility and protection …” (more) [Harvard Law Review Blog, 8 March] First posted 2021-03-09 07:09:57
Gali Racabi, ‘Abolish The Employer Prerogative, Unleash Work Law’
ABSTRACT Employers are sovereigns in their workplace. Market power disparities, enforcement gaps, and the dwindling power of the beaten US labor movement seem to guarantee that. But it is law that anoints employers as kings. Work law doctrine calls it the ’employer prerogative’, and it stands as the default governing rule in the workplace. This […]
Lea VanderVelde, ‘The Anti-Republican Origins of the At-Will Doctrine’
ABSTRACT This article highlights the origin of the employment at-will rule by providing the contextual contrast of Reconstruction free labor republicanism. To date, no work has situated the doctrine’s emergence in the heady Reconstruction discussions of labor reform that immediately preceded it. This article briefly summarizes how the at-will rule functions to subordinate employees. The […]
‘CJEU on Section 5 Brussels I bis and Article 21’
“The Court of Justice delivered on 25 February 2021 its decision in case C‑804/19 (BU v Markt24 GmbH), which is about Section 5 Brussels I bis and Article 21: ‘1. The provisions set out in Section 5 of Chapter II of Regulation (EU) No 1215/2012 […], under the heading “Jurisdiction over individual contracts of employment”, […]