The Worker and the Law Revisited: Conceptualizing Legal Participation Mobilization and Consciousness at Work

Abstract

Situating legal mobilization within a wide-ranging conceptual framework of worker activity that goes beyond recent interest in ‘strategic litigation’ and related organizing in the gig economy, this contribution explores the fundamental relationship between ‘laypeople’, i.e., the non-professional subjects of law, and labour law. Notwithstanding a growing interest in empirical labour law research, there remains a lack of conceptual clarity and rigorous evidence pertaining to how workers, activists and employers think about law and how this has evolved over time. The idea, often implicit within policy discourses, that we have become increasingly ‘legally minded’, and the implications of this, remain particularly underexplored. This article develops understanding of what legal mobilization is, does, or potentially can do, mapping the range of ways in which ‘laypeople’ may invoke or engage with law at work, distinguishing between activities defined as (1) legal participation; (2) mobilization; and (3) consciousness. This schema goes beyond the more obvious ways in which laypeople engage formal legal institutions, ‘strategically’ or otherwise, towards everyday processes of constructing ‘legalities’. The concept of legalities, meaning taken-forgranted assumptions about what is ‘legal’, provides a lens through which to view the ideological processes involved in the constitution of society and economic institutions through law and vice versa. Revisiting the theme of the worker and the law, this schema focuses as much on how the worker understands and acts upon the conceptions of law as much as how the law characterizes and protects the worker, and how the interrelations between the two may have evolved over time. Legal Participation, Mobilization, Consciousness, Juridification, Individual Employment Rights, Employment Tribunals