Law and Labour

By Alain Supiot

The struggles over employment laws that rocked France and Germany in the past 12 months have been largely defensive.

We should consider how labour law reform should take place to address the changes in work practices and techniques of organization over the past 20 years. In Australia WorkChoices professes to be doing that, but it is not addressing new work and skills, rather dragging the employment relationship back to pre-industrial times. The laws that had been in place in Australia and around the western world tended to be based on mass industrial organization. How can we best remodel labour law for the benefit of workers for the current era?

Supiot sees the old era as based around jobs, subordination and social security. We should be looking to develop a system based around work (understood in all its forms, not just wage labour), professional skills and economic security.

(New Left Review second series; 39, May/June 2006; pp109-21)