Introduction ‘Keeping pace with change’. That was the motto when, in cooperation with Wolters Kluwer, we started a blog site in 2017 on ‘Regulating for Globalization’. The blog crossed different disciplines, involving fields as international law, trade law, EU law and labour law. With numerous articles, the blog successfully reached a wide audience. As change…
LLRN5 Poland, the fifth conference of the Labour Law Research Network, ran from 27-29 June 2021, hosted by the University of Warsaw. Naturally, the conference was online due to the COVID-19 Pandemic, but the event was nonetheless a success. There were seven overarching conference themes, with more than 40 panels each day. Unsurprisingly, there was…
In a judgment published earlier today, the Supreme Court of Ireland has confirmed that some forms of collective agreements may be extended erga omnes across economic sectors, thereby helping to bring the benefits of collective bargaining to more people working in Ireland. This note gives a brief background to the colourful history of collective sectoral…
In 2015, the Irish Parliament overhauled the various statutory workplace dispute resolution systems which had been established over the previous 70 years and largely replaced them with a single Workplace Relations Commission (“WRC”). However, a recent judgment of the Supreme Court of Ireland raised a number of constitutional problems with this system, requiring the amendment…
In early April 2021, a draft EU Regulation on a European Approach to Artificial Intelligence was leaked to the press. The draft had been already attentively commented, among others, by Dr Michael Veale (UCL Faculty of Laws). The draft Regulation, however, raised many specific concerns about the use of AI at work to be addressed…
Will offices close in favour of telework/remote work? It is unclear whether telework/remote work will be taken up (where feasible) in a significant manner once businesses more widely re-open. The question of continued use of office space (as well as in what capacity and size) has been posed and widely noted in newsmedia with attention-grabbing…
Valerio De Stefano,* Ilda Durry,* Harry Stylogiannis,* Mathias Wouters* The debates on platform work have come a long way since the early publications in the first part of the last decade. For a long time, many commentators agreed with the words of Judge Vince Chhabria in the Californian case about the ride-hailing platform Lyft:…
The central theme of the 18th International Conference in Commemoration of Professor Marco Biagi, held online 16-19 March 2021 by the University of Modena, was “Protecting Autonomous Work”. I had the honour to chair one of the workshops, entitled “Innovation, Autonomy and (Pseudo) Managerial Legitimations: The Equivocal Paths of Operational Autonomy in EU Academia”. In…
Reclassification of ‘gig’ workers in California The State of California passed a law in force as of 1 January 2020 that classified ‘gig’ workers as employees of the platforms engaging their services ‘unless the hiring entity demonstrates that the person is free from the control and direction of the hiring entity in connection with the…
In two previous blog posts (one here on this blog and an earlier one on EU Law Analysis) I pre-emptively commented on the possible legal construction of professional qualification recognition post-Brexit. Now that the EU-UK Trade and Cooperation Agreement has been published, it is appropriate to describe and critically reflect upon the actual legal construction…
