The Contract of Employment and Collective Labour Law

Abstract

Abstract This chapter seeks to illustrate that the law of the contract of employment has been and continues to be shaped quite profoundly by collective bargaining practices and collective labour law. In doing so, it challenges directly the contrary proposition that the significance of collective bargaining to an analysis of the current law of the contract of employment lies only with the decline of the former (and consequent flowering of the latter). Reference is made at the outset to Kahn-Freund’s analysis of the law of contract of employment. Consideration is then given, in particular, to the significance of collective bargaining and collective labour law to the emergence of a standard employment relationship in the middle decades of the twentieth century, to the more recent proliferation of ‘flexible’ forms of contract, and to the repressive role of common-law doctrine in relation to individual strikers’ contracts of employment.