Documents Deakin, Simon 72 results

"The timing and nature of industrialization in Britain and continental Europe had significant consequences for the growth and development of labour market institutions, effects which are still felt today and which are visible in the conceptual structure of labour law and company law in different countries. However, contrary to the claims of the legal origin hypothesis, a liberal model of contract was more influential in the civilian systems of the continent than in the English common law, where the consequences of early industrialization included the lingering influence of master–servant legislation and the weak institutionalization of the juridical form of the contract of employment. Claims for a strong-form legal origin effect, which is time invariant and resistant to pressures for legal convergence, are not borne out by a growing body of historical evidence and time-series data. The idea that legal cultures can influence the long-run path of economic development is worthy of closer empirical investigation, but it is premature to use legal origin theory as a basis for policy initiatives."

"The case of the British minimum wage illustrates the interplay of ideas and interests in the making of labour legislation. In the 1980s, the pragmatic and data-driven approach of the Cambridge School, associated with the Department of Applied Economics (DAE), advanced a case for the minimum wage which combined fairness and efficiency justifications. Through collaboration with trade unions and think tanks, the argument was mobilized into an activistled campaign which changed political perceptions of the minimum wage. During the 1990s the campaign looked to have failed, as a more conventional economics informed the passage of the National Minimum Wage Act 1998. In the long run, however, the case made by the Cambridge School has endured, to inform today's global movement for a living wage."

"The concept of the ‘Capitalocene' draws attention to the origins of the climate crisis in capitalist dynamics, and specifically to the need for natural resources to be reproduced for less than their true cost if firms are to remain profitable. This insight suggests that the environmental crisis, manifested by extreme climate events, and the crisis in labour law, manifested by wage suppression and rising inequality, have the same root cause. Bringing production and reproduction back into balance will require changes of a structural kind to the global economy, and a rethinking of the law-nature nexus."

"This report was produced by a group of independent experts, all of them labour lawyers and most of them academic labour lawyers, with a view of assisting the International Labour Office in the context of the ongoing technical assistance programme developed with the Greek Government in a number of areas, including “labour legislation to regulate collective dismissals”. As is widely known, since May 2010, the Union's Euro-area Member States and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) have been providing financial support to Greece through an Economic Adjustment Programme in the context of a sharp deterioration in the country's financing conditions. This support has been accompanied by a request on the part of the lending institutions' representatives to implement a number of reforms aimed at improving the competitiveness of the Greek economy. Amongst a series of detailed specifications, Greece has been asked to adopt “reforms [that] will ease interpretation of and foster compliance with labour laws with a view to bring legislation in line with EU best prac-tices, and to this end a review will be carried out […], comparing Greek regulations on temporary employment, scope of temporary employment agencies […] with those in other EU Member States”."