Labour Law Utopias: Post-Growth & Post-Productive Work Approaches

Labour Law Utopias: Post-Growth & Post-Productive Work Approaches engages with new socioeconomic ideas that look beyond the current growth-driven competitive market economy. Building on analysis of economic growth, as well as the limits of the logic of human productivity and competitivity for workers and the environment, it explores alternative approaches and what those will mean for work in general, and labour law in particular.

The concept of ’post-growth’ is used to rethink the purpose of the economy by looking beyond merely increasing wealth, consumption, and production, considering what this means for the position of work in society as well as the individual worker. The post-productive work approach is used to question the centrality of economically productive work and its regulation in labour laws. The chapters in this book take a progressive approach and discuss whether and how labour law can contribute to the emancipation of work from the constraints of growth and productivity by revisiting the value, organization, and impact of work. With these utopian ideas for labour law, the contributions in this book present inspirational ’dots on the horizon’ that could guide the direction of changes in labour law as it navigates issues such as the implementation of digital and green solutions, the energy crisis, migration, rising inequality, and precariousness.

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read on Oxford Academic and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations.

Nicolas Bueno, Professor of Law, UniDistance Suisse, Beryl ter Haar, UW Prof. and Head of the Centre for International and European Labour Law Studies, University of Warsaw, Nuna Zekic, Associate Professor of Labour Law, University of Amsterdam

Nicolas Bueno is Assistant Professor of Law at UniDistance Suisse. He completed his PhD in public international law at the University of Lausanne after a research stay at Columbia Law School (2012-2013, Fulbright). He conducted post-doctoral research at the University of Louvain (2016), the London School of Economics (2017), and at the University of Zurich (2018-2021) with research grants from the Swiss National Science Foundation. His research in Labour Law & Political Economy has been published in the International Labour Review, the Journal of Human Development and Capabilities, and the International Journal of Comparative Labour Law. His current project focuses on the economic ideology of labour law from classical liberalism to post-growth economics.

Beryl ter Haar studied law at Leiden University where she also obtained her PhD on the open method of coordination. She did a post doc on transnational private labour law at the Amsterdam Institute for Advanced Labour Studies, University of Amsterdam. Currently her research deals with international and European labour law, especially collective bargaining, social dialogue, new governance, transnational private regulation, and the changing world of work. She has published widely on these issues in national and international journals, she is co-editor of several books, the lead editor of the Elgar Encyclopedia in Labour and Employment Law, and member of editorial boards of several labour law journals.

Nuna Zekic is Associate Professor of labour law at the Amsterdam Institute of Advanced Labour Studies - Hugo Sinzheimer Institute (AIAS-HSI) at the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Previously, she worked at Tilburg University where she also obtained her PhD in the field of labour law. Her expertise lies in the area of labour law and more precisely, dismissal law, flexible working arrangements, and collective bargaining. She has published widely on these issues both in national and international journals. She has been a visiting researcher at the European University Institute (EUI) in Italy, University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) and Lund University in Sweden. She acts as deputy judge at ’s-Hertogenbosch Appeal Court in the Netherlands.