Guy Davidov (Hebrew University of Jerusalem – Faculty of Law) has posted Introduction: A Purposive Approach to Labour Law (A Purposive Approach to Labour Law, OUP, 2016). Here is a snippet from the introduction:
The main problem of labour law—the reason for the sense of crisis—lies else- where in my view: in the mismatch between goals and means. The regulations that we use—the legal instruments and techniques—have lost their harmonization with the goals they are supposed to advance. is mismatch has two manifestations. The first is related to coverage: there is a growing discrepancy between the group of workers that need the protection of labour law and those who actually enjoy such protection. is is sometimes based on deficiencies with the tests for ‘who is an employer’ and ‘who is an employee’—the ‘building blocks’ setting the scope of labour law. In other cases or contexts, the problem is not with the legal coverage but with the actual coverage, i.e. a problem of compliance and enforcement. Altogether there is a noticeable trend away from universal application of labour laws and towards what can be termed ‘regressive’ selectivity—labour laws do not cover the workers that need them the most.