A new book edited by Kent labour law expert Professor Diamond Ashiagbor critically explores the growth in informalisation of work and the challenges it presents for regulation in market economies around the world.
Re-Imagining Labour Law for Development: Informal Work in the Global North and South (Hart Publishing, 2019) is a collection of essays by international law and social science scholars which considers the changing role of labour law in industrial, post-industrial and developing countries. Together, they explore the challenges presented by the informalisation of work to an understanding of how labour law functions.
Contributors examine a mistaken prediction that informal employment in developing countries would become formalised as economies modernised. They also explore the unravelling of the formal model of employment in the global North where there is a shift towards work which is part-time, ‘zero hours’, fixed-term, temporary, intermittent, or indirectly employed.
Professor Ashiagbor said: ‘Converting the “informal” into the “formal”, whether this relates to informal arrangements in labour, land, markets, or finance is a central aim of efforts to “modernise” developing countries. Labour law institutions globally, and the labour law scholarship which has developed to explain them, are dominated by narratives originating in the industrialised countries of the global North which have in large part been transplanted to the global South. Yet these narratives are closely allied to a particular economic history of regulation of primarily “Fordist” productive relations, and to regulation which has evolved along with the protective capacities of industrialised states during the 20th century. The starting point and main subject of regulation is the post-war ideal type of the “standard” employee within the “standard employment relationship”, buttressed by institutions of social citizenship. However, the vast majority of workers are located outside this paradigm.’
The book emerged from the Society of Legal Scholars (SLS) Annual Seminar for 2016, a conference, led by Professor Ashiagbor at the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies (IALS), University of London, and supported by the SLS and the SOAS Faculty of Law and Social Sciences.
Professor Ashiagbor joined Kent Law School in October 2018. Her research interests are in labour/employment law; regionalism (the EU and the African Union); labour law, trade and development; human rights, equality and multiculturalism; economic sociology of law; and law and the humanities. She has been Professor of Law and Director of Research at IALS, University of London; a Visiting Scholar at Columbia Law School, New York; Senior Fellow at Melbourne Law School; and Genest Global Faculty at Osgoode Hall Law School.
She is the author of the monograph The European Employment Strategy: Labour Market Regulation and New Governance, which won the Peter Birks/Society of Legal Scholars Prize for Outstanding Legal Scholarship 2006.
Re-Imagining Labour Law for Development: Informal Work in the Global North and South is available to purchase from the Hart Publishing website at a discount of 20% with code: CV7.
Follow Professor Ashiagbor on Twitter: @d_ashiagbor
Image credit: Fading Cloth, by El Anatsui. Saint Louis Art Museum, purchased from October Gallery, London