Making Bricks Without Straw: The Creation of a Transnational Labour Regime

This essay suggest that attempts to create a transnational regime of labour regulation have been frustrated by a series of related and mutually reinforcing developments: the incapacity or unwillingness of states to intervene in labour markets, changes in those markets associated with globalization and post-industrial capitalism, the decline of the “standard employment contract”, the demise of working class consciousness, solidarity and power, and the shift from “hard” to “soft” labour law. It concludes with a proposal for three-part strategy of reinventing labour law in the new dispensation: by enlarging its intellectual ambition, expanding its clientele, and extending its spatial reach