Category Archives: Employment and Labour Law
Joe Atkinson, ‘Implied Terms and Human Rights in the Contract of Employment’
ABSTRACT This article considers the potential for implied terms in the contract of employment to protect employees’ human rights. The slim prospects of legislative action in this area make it important to consider common law means of protecting human rights at work. Part 2 begins by setting out the function of implied terms in the […]
Elizabeth McKelvy, ‘The Faithless Servant Doctrine: An Employer’s Remedy for Workplace Sexual Harassment’
INTRODUCTION In May 2018, the Metropolitan Opera (the Met) sued their longtime music director, James Levine, for the entire salary paid to him during his forty-one years of employment. The Met claimed that the famed conductor ‘engaged in sexually abusive and harassing conduct both before and during the period when he worked at the Met’ […]
Hugh Collins, ‘Justice at Work’
ABSTRACT Theories of justice suitable for ordinary market transactions are not appropriate in the special context of work, because they must confront the challenges of the subordination of employees and the risk of commodification of workers by treating them like things or machines. It is argued that the legal protection of fundamental or human rights […]
Christina Inglis, ‘Defining good faith (and Mona Lisa’s smile)’
INTRODUCTION Good faith has played a role in employment contracts for some time. In 2000 it received statutory recognition in the Employment Relations Act. Some commentators have suggested that an overly cautious approach has been taken to the application of good faith and that Parliament’s vision for the concept has yet to be fully realised. […]
Chandrasekher and Horton, ‘Empirically Investigating the Source of the Repeat Player Effect in Consumer Arbitration’
ABSTRACT Policymakers, courts, and scholars have long been interested in whether repeat players enjoy an advantage in forced arbitration. Sophisticated empirical studies of consumer and employment awards reveal that there is indeed a repeat player effect: even controlling for other factors, companies that arbitrate more than once boast higher win rates than one-shot firms. However, […]
‘Two sorts of labour: maternity and employment, medieval style’
“The plea rolls of the fifteenth century Court of Common Pleas have a lot of ‘labour law’ cases, based on the post-Black Death labourers legislation. Although each concerns a dispute which mattered massively to the individuals involved, the records are mostly fairly repetitive: parties argue as to whether there had been an agreement to serve, […]
Easteal and Saunders, ‘Revisiting Vicarious Liability in Sexual Harassment Cases Heard Under the Sex Discrimination Act’
ABSTRACT This article considers recent trends in the judicial interpretation of workplace vicarious liability provisions with respect to sexual harassment matters under the Sex Discrimination Act 1984 (Cth) (SDA). In a study undertaken by the authors in 2008, we found that the Federal Court and Federal Magistrates Court appeared to be taking a ‘broad-brush’ approach […]
Niall O’Connor, ‘Whose Autonomy is it Anyway? Freedom of Contract, the Right to Work and the General Principles of EU Law’
ABSTRACT Just how significant is the freedom of contract found in Article 16 of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights for the regulation of the employment relationship? For the first half of its existence, few could have foreseen that Article 16 would soon be at the centre of debates surrounding the place of business freedoms […]
Ruth Dukes, ‘Review Article: Regulating Gigs’
J Prassl, Humans as a Service: The Promise and Perils of Work in the Gig Economy, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018, 208 pp, hb £26.49. At labour law conferences of the past two or three years, the emergence of the gig economy was the cause of a flurry of excitement. Having spent decades charting the […]
Marc Moore, ‘The gig economy: a hypothetical contract analysis’
ABSTRACT Gig work and other flexible labour practices have been subject to unprecedented levels of attention recently. While this topic has attracted significant interest from employment lawyers, it remains relatively underexplored from other pertinent legal and inter-disciplinary angles. This paper will adopt an alternative perspective on flexible work inspired by Coase’s theory of the firm. […]