Project description
Reshaping labour law in supply chain capitalism
Labour law and institutions are failing to protect workers against challenges of supply chain capitalism. Initially aimed at addressing power imbalances in industrial economies, labour law now struggles as employers often act solely as suppliers in global value chains (GVCs), limiting workers’ ability to organise and assert their rights. The ERC-funded New Labour Law project aims to reshape labour law by examining GVC governance to propose a framework that redefines labour law and strengthens workers’ power and voice. Current efforts to improve workers’ rights often rely on voluntary schemes, which are viewed as private or soft law. The project will analyse these initiatives to explore how labour law can adapt to better support and empower workers within GVCs.
Objective
Labour law gradually protects fewer of the worlds workers. Changes in work and capital structure, new technologies and evolving modes of supply and production (together: supply chain capitalism), lead to an incongruence between the distribution of market power and the premises and tools of labour law, creating barriers to workers organization and agency. This incongruence stems from the fact that labour law developed in industrial economies to respond to the power disparities between capital and labour, and is therefore tied to a dyadic employer-employee paradigm in which labour law seeks to empower workers vis--vis employers, the presumed owners of capital. Yet this is no longer the case in the era of supply chain capitalism, where the direct employer is often a supplier in a Global Value Chain (GVC), whose economic calculus is dependent on corporations in higher tiers of the chain. Given the crises of both labour law and GVC governance, this project offers a path to restructure labour law to fit new patterns of supply chain capitalism.
The project includes three main components:
1) Theoretical: The project intervenes in existing literature and theory on GVC governance and on labour law to propose a new analytical framework for reconceptualizing the role of workers and of labour law in GVC governance.
2) Empirical: Current initiatives to improve workers rights in GVCs worldwide are based mostly on voluntary schemes, often perceived as private or rooted in soft-law. The project will closely study existing initiatives and holistically analyse the studies development and examine whether and how labour law can be restructured to support existing successful initiatives and produce new sustainable paths to strengthen worker power in GVCs.
3) Normative: Based on the two preceding parts, the project will create a blueprint for a new, and overdue, labour law for supply chain capitalism.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
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Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
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Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
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HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC)
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(opens in new window) ERC-2022-COG
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69978 Tel Aviv
Israel
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