The construction of workers’ rights consciousness through legal intermediations

Abstract

Through their different encounters with union, court and government equality agency lawyers, workers report diverse understandings of their personal experience of injustice in the workplace. This article examines workers’ experiences of discrimination and the role legal professionals play in litigating these issues in Belgium. Bringing together legal and rights consciousness studies and the sociology of intermediation and tracking different stages in the construction of discrimination cases, from the moment when a future litigant describes an event as an injustice to the moment when the judge recognizes a discriminatory behaviour (or conversely, dismisses a case), we suggest several possible empirical explanations of the way in which interactions with legal intermediaries affect workers’ rights consciousness. Because we refer to sociolegal studies from common law countries, this article also calls into question how best to import these studies to assist in analysing legal mobilisations and legal consciousness in continental Europe.