Category Archives: Employment and Labour Law
Madeleine Gyory, ‘The Reasonable Pregnant Worker’
ABSTRACT Pregnant workers often need changes to their work responsibilities to stay healthy during pregnancy while earning a needed paycheck. Congress passed the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act (PWFA) in December 2022, entitling many workers for the first time to ‘reasonable accommodations’ for their pregnancy, childbirth, and related medical conditions, so long as they do not […]
Robert Emerson, ‘The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: Franchising Has a Joint Employment and Independent Contracting Problem’
ABSTRACT Legal turmoil originating from the ambiguity of independent contractor and joint employment law has been exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic and the growth of e-commerce and the gig economy. Chaos and uncertainty have hindered business advancement, especially for franchises. Still, there are exemplary international approaches, proposed US and state laws, uniform tests or guarantees, […]
Hariharan and Noorda, ‘Imprisoned at Work: The Impact of Employee Monitoring on Physical Privacy and Individual Liberty’
ABSTRACT There are now a wide range of tools available to monitor employees, boasting sophisticated features like keystroke logging, geolocational tracking, and video surveillance. From a legal perspective, employee monitoring is most commonly analysed in terms of the impact it has on an employee’s control over their information and data ie their ‘informational privacy’. This […]
Asymina Aza, ‘Scores as Decisions? Article 22 GDPR and the Judgment of the CJEU in SCHUFA Holding (Scoring) in the Labour Context’
INTRODUCTION In SCHUFA Holding (Scoring), the Court of Justice of the European Union (‘CJEU’) held that a probability value (such as a score), based on the evaluation of an individual, can breach the provisions of the EU General Data Protection Regulation (‘GDPR’) on automated decisions. Whilst the SCHUFA Case does not explicitly discuss worker’s data […]
Maja Breznik, ‘Less or More Labour Law for Social Change?’
ABSTRACT In the field of labour law, recent contributions to the theory of legal form have addressed the question of whether the purpose of labour law is merely to reproduce capitalist social relations. The resulting debate has acted as a trigger for profound self-reflection among both labour law scholars and the labour movement. While the […]
Charlotte Villiers, ‘Bridging the Gap Between Labour Law and Company Law: Wedderburn’s Legacy: An Appreciation’
ABSTRACT The paper surveys the extensive writings of the late Professor Lord Wedderburn and explores the interactions between company law and labour law. A set of case studies illustrates labour law’s relative weakness in the contemporary corporate law context. Whilst it does change over time, company law has largely remained consistent with its two fundamental […]
Myriam Hunter-Henin, ‘Religious Expression and Exemptions in the Private Sector Workplace: Spotting Bias’
ABSTRACT Courts tasked with ruling on religious freedom claims in the private sector workplace have been faced with the following challenge: too weak a protection of religious freedom and it will become meaningless; too strong, and individual freedom will be stifled. Recently, courts on each side of the Atlantic have, respectively, leant towards each of […]
Susan Altmeyer, ‘The Original Instagram – Whose Property is it?’
ABSTRACT When a worker creates a personal social media account and then uses it to promote their employer, courts differ as to whether subsequent use for the employer can operate as an implied transfer of the account to the employer when the employment relationship ends. Allowing an implied transfer flies in the face of traditional […]
Lawrence Friedman, ‘Work Accidents: A Drama in Three Acts’
In the early 1840s, Nicholas Farwell brought a lawsuit against his employer, the Boston & Worcester Rail Road. Farwell was an ‘engineman’ who earned two dollars a day. One day in 1837, he suffered an accident, was thrown to the ground, and the wheels of a railroad car passed over his right hand and crushed […]
‘The Case Against Static Contract Remedies’
Kimberly D Krawiec and Nathan B Oman, ‘The Case for Specific Performance of Personal Service Contracts’, 110 Iowa Law Review (forthcoming, 2025), available at SSRN (17 May 2024). Professors Krawiec and Oman’s insightful new article caught my eye, having myself challenged various contract remedial rules in my research and writing over the years. The title […]