Comparative insights into the challenges and potential of regulation of precarious and low-quality jobs around the world will be the focus of a new research project to be undertaken by Kent employment law expert Professor Judy Fudge with Dr Deirdre McCann, Reader at Durham Law School
Together the team (led by Dr McCann as priniciple investigator) has been awarded a grant of £112,176 for 2017 by the Economic and Social Research Council Global Challenges Fund to establish The Network on Legal Regulation of Unacceptable Forms of Work.
The Network will nurture international collaboration between researchers from multiple disciplines, developing countries and advanced industrialised countries, and policy-makers at all levels and will support a rigorous, interdisciplinary and policy-oriented reflection on unacceptable forms of work (UFW). It plans to meet in Geneva, Durham and Bangkok during 2017 and hopes to generate meaningful insights into the design and implementation of domestic and international laws.
The Network will centre on Global Regulatory Challenges (GRCs) in UFW regulation, identified as among the most urgent and complex issues that face lower-income countries. Each Network Team will address labour market/regulatory phenomena in two paired countries across different income levels. The Teams will (1) map the existing ‘state of the art’ on the GRCs and (2) devise research strategies that can identify the most effective regulatory and policy strategies to address each, with a particular focus on developing countries.
The new Network forms part of an existing research project led by Dr McCann with Professor Fudge as co-investigator: the Legal Regulation of Unacceptable Forms of Work. This overarching project responds to the growth in unacceptable work, generating ideas for global policy on identifying and eliminating UFW. The first product was a policy report, commissioned by the ILO: Unacceptable Forms of Work: A Global and Comparative Study.
Professor Judy Fudge has published widely on this topic; publications include Challenging the Legal Boundaries of Work Regulation (with Kamala Sankaran and Shae McCrystal) (Hart Publishing, 2012) and Precarious Work, Women, and the New Economy: The Challenge to Legal Norms (with Rosemary Owens) (Hart Publishing, 2006). She was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 2013 for her contribution to labour law scholarship and received an honorary doctorate from the Faculty of Law of the University of Lund (Sweden).