The Rule of Law at Work: Employment Law Enforcement and Compliance

Across Europe and beyond, employment rights are frequently breached in a manner that manifestly undermines the rule of law. Yet breach of employment law remains balefully understudied. Little is understood of enforcement and compliance as social processes: how breach can become normalised or cast as unacceptable; how deterrence measures operate within specific contexts; how enforcement and compliance are affected by the use of new technologies to manage and monitor workers; and how routine breach might cause people to become disillusioned with employment law, and even with law in general, doubting the capacity of legal rules and institutions to hold the powerful to account. Framing enforcement and compliance as a question of the rule of law, and of the capacity of our democracies to regulate the economy in furtherance of collectively devised notions of the common good, LawAtWork develops a novel sociology – or economic sociology – of the rule of law, with application far beyond the fields of labour law and work relations. It develops an innovative approach to the study of employment law enforcement and compliance which puts key actors at the centre of the enquiry: not only firms, labour inspectorates and trade unions but individuals within them, including managers, HR professionals and, critically, workers themselves. Using a combination of methods drawn from economic anthropology, the sociology of law and comparative political economy, it analyses both actors’ decision-making, motivations and understandings and the structural constraints and resources that shape their perceptions and actions. In doing so, it pays particular attention to broad changes in political economy over time, to institutional and organisational change, and to technological developments. It thereby makes transformational advances in our understanding of breach of employment law and the reasons for it, and in much broader understandings of how law works in different socio-economic settings.