A Rose by Any Other Name: Work Law as the Law of Power

This chapter reviews the troubled histories of labour and employment law, reviews the forces that have destabilized them, and identifies the most promising—albeit non-legal—strategies for developing the new field of ‘work law’. The old regimes of labour and employment law are faltering under pressure of neoliberalism, new technologies, new legal strategies, globalization, and other hostile developments. A new regime of ‘work law’ is struggling to be born. But work law, too, is likely to falter unless it is achieved and supported by a new constellation of social forces powerful enough to secure justice not just for ‘workers’, but for a broad array of subaltern communities.