Guy Davidov

The mismatch between goals and means is a major cause of crisis in labour law. The regulations that we use - the legal instruments and techniques - are no longer in sync with the goals they are supposed to advance. This mismatch leads to a problem of coverage, where many workers who need the protection of labour law are not covered by it, as well as a problem of obsoleteness, as labour laws are not sufficiently updated in light of dramatic changes in the labour market. Adopting a purposive approach to interpretation and legislative reform, this volume addresses this crisis of mismatch. It first articulates the goals of labour law, both general and specific, through an in-depth normative discussion and a consideration of critiques. The book then proceeds to reconsider our means, asking what we need to change or improve in the laws themselves in order to better advance the goals. Some of the proposed solutions are at the level of judicial interpretation, others at the legislative level. The book offers several examples of the way a purposive analysis should be performed in concrete cases. It also recommends institutional structures that are suited to ongoing adaptation of the law to ensure that our goals are advanced even when circumstances frequently change. Finally, in response to the crisis of enforcement in this field, which frustrates the achievement of labour law's goals, several proposals to improve compliance and enforcement are considered.

A Purposive Approach to Labour Law

Brian Langille

Labour law is widely considered to be in crisis by scholars of the field. This crisis has an obvious external dimension - labour law is attacked for impeding efficiency, flexibility, and development; vilified for reducing employment and for favouring already well placed employees over less fortunate ones; and discredited for failing to cover the most vulnerable workers and workers in the "informal sector". These are just some of the external challenges to labour law. There is also an internal challenge, as labour lawyers themselves increasingly question whether their discipline is conceptually coherent, relevant to the new empirical realities of the world of work, and normatively salient in the world as we now know it. This book responds to such fundamental challenges by asking the most fundamental questions: What is labour law for? How can it be justified? And what are the normative premises on which reforms should be based? There has been growing interest in such questions in recent years. In this volume the contributors seek to take this body of scholarship seriously and also to move it forward. Its aim is to provide, if not answers which satisfy everyone, intellectually nourishing food for thought for those interested in understanding, explaining and interpreting labour laws - whether they are scholars, practitioners, judges, policy-makers, or workers and employers.

Guy Davidov

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