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Barnard, Catherine; Deakin, Simon --- "European Labour Law after Laval" [2011] ELECD 895; in Moreau, Marie-Ange (ed), "Before and After the Economic Crisis" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2011)

Book Title: Before and After the Economic Crisis

Editor(s): Moreau, Marie-Ange

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9781849809924

Section: Chapter 16

Section Title: European Labour Law after Laval

Author(s): Barnard, Catherine; Deakin, Simon

Number of pages: 18

Extract:

16. European labour law after Laval
Catherine Barnard and Simon Deakin

INTRODUCTION

Brian Bercusson was the first scholar `convincingly to make the case for
European labour law as a wide-ranging discipline in its own right, with a
distinct identity separate from national labour law systems, but influenced
by them'.1 In his landmark treatise on the subject, Bercusson saw the
core of European labour law as the symbiosis between EU level norms
and those operating at the level of national labour law systems.2 EU level
norms on labour law matters were both a reflection of, and a shaping
influence on, the traditions of the national regimes. EU labour law drew
on the experience of the Member States in such matters as the working
environment, information and consultation and aspects of employment
protection (acquired rights and collective redundancies), consolidating
existing national laws and extending their effects within the `social space'
of the internal market. At the same time, EU law was innovative both in
terms of its subject matter, as in the case of the impulse it gave to the exten-
sion of the principle of equal treatment in employment, and in its methods,
through the development of the techniques of social dialogue and the open
method of coordination as applied in the areas of employment policy and
social cohesion.
It seemed that European labour law, so conceived, had achieved a
certain legitimacy notwithstanding the neglect of social policy issues in
the Treaty of Rome, an omission only partly ...