Legal power resources and dualisation in Britain and Sweden: trade unions, juridification and employment protection

This article examines how juridification reshaped trade union power resources in Britain and Sweden, and how this process interacted with labour market dualisation. Comparative research on employment protection links job security to partisanship, union strength and skill regimes, but often treats law as an index and unions as exogenous to legal change. Drawing on a qualitative comparison of developments since the 1960s, the article refines the concept of legal power resources, understood as legally recognised positions, procedural rights and organisational capacities that enable unions and workers to mobilise legal rules in employment relations. The analysis shows that unions in both countries moved from scepticism about statutory job security to investment in legal representation and collective enforcement. Legal power resources were most readily mobilised by insiders in standard employment and less accessible to temporary, agency, zero-hours and other non-standard workers, helping to show how dualisation persisted alongside expanding employment protection.