The Labour Constitution

Via a comparison of traditional understandings of labour law with market-focused approaches brought to the fore by globalization, Dukes contends that the labour constitution continues to offer a vital framework for scholarly analysis, emphasizing the critical nature of the link between democracy and the protection of workers' rights.

Dukes presents a convincing argument which outlines the attractiveness of the labour constitution as an idea... For anyone interested in the question of what is labour law this book is highly recommended reading and certainly makes a valuable contribution to the existing literature.

A brave book that retrieves and defends the goals of emancipation and democracy against contemporary theorising that accepts the market as the measure of and mechanism for achieving workplace and economic justice... An important contribution to debates about the crisis of labour law.

Thoughtful and thought-provoking... It merits a very wide readership among all serious students of labour law.

I really enjoyed the deliberate stirring up of thinking in Dukes' work... If ensuing debates reawaken discussion of the big battles to be fought for/ by workers, such as freedom and democracy, and capital vs labour, Dukes will have succeeded rather spectacularly in reclaiming old approaches.

In this brilliant monograph, Dukes develops a rich account and application of the old ideas of labour law within the context of advanced globalization and the complex interaction between different legal orders concerned with the regulation of work.

The strength of this marvellous book lies in its duality: it offers a truly original analysis of the evolution of labour law as well as central insights into the relationship between law, economy, and politics. The book is not only a must-read for labour lawyers but also for social theorists and sociologists, as well as political economists and political scientists.

Ruth Dukes gifts us an ambitious scholarly accomplishment that conveys a compelling message. In its origins, labour law was committed to achieving egalitarian redistribution, democratizing economic life, and ending domination and subordination in work. Recently, it has forsaken these enduring aspirations. We should recover and modernize them, and re-orient our work in their light.

Ruth Dukes is a Professor of Labour Law at the University of Glasgow. She holds degrees from the University of Edinburgh (LLB), the Humboldt University in Berlin (LLM with distinction), and the London School of Economics (PhD). In 2010, she was awarded the Modern Law Review's Wedderburn Prize for her article 'Otto Kahn-Freund and Collective Laissez-Faire: an Edifice without a Keystone?'. In 2011-12 she was an Early Career Fellow of the AHRC and a MacCormick Fellow at the University of Edinburgh. She is a member of the Executive Committee of the Institute of Employment Rights.