Ryan, Bernard --- "Transnationalism and Labour Law: The ‘British Jobs’ Protests of 2009" [2011] ELECD 884; in Moreau, Marie-Ange (ed), "Before and After the Economic Crisis" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2011)

Book Title: Before and After the Economic Crisis

Editor(s): Moreau, Marie-Ange

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9781849809924

Section: Chapter 5

Section Title: Transnationalism and Labour Law: The ‘British Jobs’ Protests of 2009

Author(s): Ryan, Bernard

Number of pages: 17

Extract:

5. Transnationalism and labour law:
the `British jobs' protests of 2009
Bernard Ryan

In his writing, Brian Bercusson often questioned the disciplinary founda-
tions of labour law. This was evident for example in the introduction to
the 1987 textbook on British labour law which he co-authored with Roger
Benedictus:

Currently, British labour law starts from the assumption that the legal concepts
and institutional forms which govern the organisation of work and workers are
the subject-matter of labour law. The alternative starting-point . . . proposed
here is that the subject-matter of labour law is work and workers . . .1

A similar outlook lay at the heart of his subsequent focus on European
Union labour law. The preface to the first edition to European Labour
Law, published in 1996, argued that labour law could no longer be concep-
tualised solely in national terms:

The aim of this book is to build on the vision of European labour law passed
on by comparativists. Their perspective of different national labour law systems
focused on comparison, mutual influences, transplantation, and so on. But
national, not a transnational, European labour law was the centre of their
attention. The argument of the book is that European labour law now has come
into its own, as a complex distillation of national labour laws into something
original and distinct ­ and genuinely European in character.2

This chapter aims to draw upon the insights that labour law analysis
may fruitfully start from labour market developments, and that national
labour ...