Industrial Law

The research reported on in this paper was carried out in five case study local authorities and funded by the British Academy. Interviews were conducted with key equality actors in each authority including corporate equality teams, human resource managers, trade unions, service user groups, senior officers and elected members with responsibility for equality. Interviews were supplemented with documentary data collection. Our key research question sought to examine how the GED was being implemented in local government and what the issues might be for keeping gender at the forefront of integrated equality frameworks.

This article explores the viability for the executive power to authorise the use of the Australian Defence Force (ADF) domestically, through the lens of military intervention in industrial action. It has become practice, when discussing the executive power, to delineate between breadth and depth-the latter of which is somewhat controversial. The article first looks at possible courses of action that can be taken under the Defence Act 1903 (Cth), before highlighting the apparent gap where the ADF is placed in domestic situations that might require coercion or force, but the situation does not meet the "domestic violence" threshold required under Pt IIIAAA. It then discusses the non-statutory executive power-namely, the internal security prerogative and the implied nationhood power. The article concludes by advocating for statutory empowerment and protection for ADF members.

On 6 April 2010, a new legal right for employees to request time off work for the purposes of study or training came into force. Initially, this will apply only to employees in organisations with 250 or more employees but will be extended to all employees in April 2011. The main ...

ABSTRACT Focusing on the recent decision of the British Court of Appeal (CA) in the case of Stringfellows Restaurants Ltd. v. Nadine Quashie, the paper offers to include into the radical-liberal feminist debate on sex work theories on service work. The case of Quashie questioned whether a lap-dancer, was self-employed or whether she was an employee under a contract of employment. The discussion shows the tight link that the law creates between service workers, gender and precariousness in the context of sex work, and offers to rethink the way the court considers the roles of the three parties in interactive service work - workers, management and customers - in its process of fact assessment and legal interpretation.

'Employment at Will' systems, in which employers have a right to dismiss employees for any reason or no reason at all, have been (rightly) criticized for allowing the arbitrary imposition of significant harms. 'Just Cause' arrangements, in which employers bear the burden of showing a justified reason for dismissals, in a process which often gives unions significant involvement, have been strongly resisted for causing inflexibility. Israeli labour law, which is relied upon here as an example, suffers from a combination of both extremes. UK law, which could be seen to offer a middle ground, is seen by labour law critics as offering too little protection for workers, and by the Government as offering too much. This article searches for other intermediate solutions. Four are discussed: the flexicurity system which is based on broader security provided by the State, rather than job security; a default (rather than mandatory) job security rule, powered by 'soft law' regulations; a prohibition on 'bad faith' dismissals, requiring the employee to prove a 'bad' cause; and finally, a system based on 'rich' procedural guarantees to ensure just cause. The article focuses on the last one, offering a case-study of a new model recently adopted in some collective agreements in Israel. In this model, a detailed process has to be followed to ensure that dismissals are not arbitrary, but at the end of the day the decision is left solely with the employer. We will discuss the experience with this model so far and whether it offers a balanced solution for employers, workers and society at large. Our discussion is based, among other things, on an empirical analysis of job security perceptions as learned from questionnaires we administered to several groups of Israeli employees.

This article addresses unionisation in the armed forces, an issue which has recently attracted the attention of the courts, most prominently in Europe. First, the article focuses on the organisational profiles of military structure, discussing the relationships between the exercise of union freedoms and the necessity of preserving the chain of command, the readiness of troops and their political neutrality. It concludes that some recent evolutions in military organisation have contributed to the pressure to unionise the military. Therefore, this article focuses on the legal perspective to clarify the role of international law in this issue. To this end, international treaties and courts’ or authoritative bodies’ interpretations of them are collected, analysed and compared. The article then confirms that several arguments developed in the European judicial context can be reasonably applied outside Europe, in accordance with similar or identical clauses enshrined in all international ...