Labour regulation now and in the future: Current trends and emerging themes

Abstract

This article examines recent scholarship by labour lawyers and industrial relations scholars concerning the regulation of labour markets and work relationships. Over the last two decades, scholarship in both fields has moved away from a narrow legal definition of regulation towards a more plural conception recognising the diversity of regulatory mechanisms and actors in this field. The article also charts a growth in scholarship on enforcement of labour regulation, as well as studies of the effectiveness or impact of regulation. The article suggests some key issues facing researchers of labour regulation and identifies some emerging research themes.

Keywords

Effectiveness enforcement industrial relations labour law regulation and governance

Introduction

Labour law and industrial relations (IR) researchers have faced similar challenges and opportunities over the last two decades, no more so than in relation to the nature, role and impact of labour regulation.

Changing labour market and work practices, a different gender balance at the workplace, the prevalence of multilateral business structures and models, the decline in trade union membership and the influence of neoliberal economics on scholarship and policymakers are some of the developments which have forced a rethink of the traditional focus of labour law and IR on legal regulation pertaining to unions, employers and collective bargaining. There has also been an increase in precarious work arrangements and vulnerable workers, in many cases working outside formal regulatory systems. Political and economic disturbances, such as the global financial crisis, have subjected labour regulation to constant review and debate, much of it skewed towards business concerns about the impact of regulation on managerial prerogative and productivity (e.g. Ewing, 2008).

The changes and disturbances described have been contributing factors in a reformulation of both labour law and IR scholarship with respect to regulation. Scholars have increasingly looked beyond the employment relationship to the organisation or enterprise, the labour market and to ‘forms and legalities of regulation distinguishable from the rights and obligations borne by employers and employees’ based on a broad conception of what constitutes ‘regulation’ (Arup, 2001: 229). ‘Regulation’ is defined here as ‘the sustained and focused attempt to alter the behaviour of others according to defined standards or purposes with the intention of producing a broadly defined outcome or outcomes, which may involve mechanisms of standard-setting, information gathering and behaviour modification’ (Black, 2002: 26). This definition, drawn from the field of regulatory governance scholarship (Lobel, 2012), is not confined to laws such as legislation and case law, but includes ‘soft’ or ‘light touch’ forms of regulation often based on forms of state authority and power other than the promulgation of mandatory rules, including deployment of wealth. It also recognises that non-state actors such as business organisations, unions and civil society are involved in regulation and not merely as subject or object of regulation – there is no assumption that the state has a monopoly on governing society.

As well as adopting a broader view both of what constitutes labour regulation and its subject, labour lawyers are increasingly interested in how regulation operates in practice, and its impact or effectiveness in achieving goals. This is in part due to significant regulatory developments, but also to the influence of international scholarly discourse around the nature, role and impact of regulation stemming from regulatory governance scholarship.

In the field of IR, the focus has broadened from concern with collective institutions and actors to ‘the interaction of people and organisations at work’, or more specifically, ‘the study of the formal and informal rules which regulate the employment relationship and the social processes which create and enforce those rules’ (Bray et al., 2009: 7).¹ Regulation has long been a central concern of IR, but perhaps due to the centrality of labour regulation to global political and economic debates over the last decade, and the influence of neo-institutionalism, IR scholars are becoming more engaged with regulation in its many guises, and its significance for the practice of IR.

In many cases labour lawyers and IR scholars are collaborating in their efforts to explain and understand labour regulation. In other research engaging with regulation the fields remain separate, but there are increasingly converging tracks – labour law and IR scholars investigating and thinking about the same or overlapping issues, but not always speaking to the other.

The first section of the article is a brief sketch of a shift in how labour law and IR scholars typically viewed and analysed labour regulation that occurred late in the 20th century. I then explore recent developments in labour regulation research in order to provide a snapshot of what I see to be the current state of research on regulation in both disciplines and the key drivers of those changes. I then discuss some of the key issues facing researchers of labour regulation and possible future directions.

Labour regulation then – traditional labour law and IR perspectives

For much of the 20th century most labour law and IR scholars saw labour regulation as the rules governing the employment relationship and collective bargaining between unions and employers. The rules were sourced from legislation, statutory instruments such as awards or other collective agreements, and court decisions.

Traditional labour law scholarship was concerned largely with the process for determination of these rules, and description and analysis of their content (Gahan and Mitchell, 1995; Hammond and Ronfeldt, 1998). Compliance and enforcement, for example, was seen as largely unproblematic and was understudied (Bennett, 1994). Labour lawyers generally did not engage in empirical research on the operation and impact of labour regulation, in large part because they were trained in doctrinal legal research, not in social science research techniques (Dickens and Hall, 2005: 32; Hammond and Ronfeldt, 1998: 234). Moreover, labour law scholarship was largely uncritical of how these traditional regulatory mechanisms constructed the world of work in favour of men, largely excluding the interests and concerns of women (Owens, 1995).

IR scholars have long recognised the plurality of regulation and the centrality of law to the field (Buchanan and Callus, 1993; Frazer, 2014). In the main, however, IR scholarship has largely focused on legal rules emanating from legislation as an exogenous influence on industrial relations (Deakin, 2010; Frazer, 2014), ‘drawing a strong distinction between [these rules] and the norms generated by the parties’ (Frazer, 2014). That is, law has been presented as essentially external to the parties ‘as part of the framework within which industrial relations takes place, rather than as a component of the construction of industrial relations practices’ (p. 9; see also Arup et al., 2009: 30; Dickens and Hall, 2005).

Things began to change from the mid-1990s, when labour law and IR perspectives on regulation began a significant transformation. A key feature of labour law over the last two decades has been a debate about the scope of the field (e.g. Arup et al., 2006; Davidov and Langille, 2006). Some have argued that labour law should look beyond the employment relationship to encompass all regulation pertaining to those who are dependent upon their labour for a living, recognising labour markets as the dominant forum for exchange of labour in most economies (e.g. Howe et al., 2006). Others have focused on the extension of labour law’s social protection to non-standard or precarious work relationships (e.g. Johnstone et al., 2012; Stone and Arthurs, 2013).

A key feature of this transformation has been the influence of regulation and governance scholarship on labour law and IR studies. Regulation and governance (including ‘new governance’, a term mostly used in the US and Europe) is an international, interdisciplinary academic discourse that developed in response to economic and socio-legal critiques of the effectiveness of traditional ‘command and control’ regulation as a means of achieving social objectives (Lobel, 2012). Of particular note are Ayres and Braithwaite’s theory of ‘responsive regulation’ (1992) and the ‘decentred’ understanding of regulation developed by Black (2002) and others. As noted earlier, these approaches recognise that the state is not the only actor with the power to deploy resources and influence others. Instead, regulation can involve a range of different regulatory strategies combining governmental and nongovernmental actors, and state efforts can be indirect in the sense that they are focused on steering, influencing and coordinating interactions between actors and systems (Black, 2002: 7; Hardy, 2011: 120). Further, a key focus of regulation and governance theory is on the effectiveness of regulation and regulatory compliance.

Although regulatory studies had commonly been employed in the analysis of occupational health and safety law from the 1980s (e.g. Gunningham and Johnstone, 1999), it was only in the late 1990s that labour law scholars began to see it as a useful lens through which to examine other labour law topics (see Arup, 2001; Collins, 2000). For labour lawyers, the regulation approach was

a standpoint from which to identify and explore the nature of different forms of regulation, the interests and role of different actors [state and non-state], and their impact. It is a critical approach that facilitates the deconstruction of rhetoric which masks the true purpose of regulatory agendas, and the evaluation of regulatory regimes from a range of different perspectives. (Howe, 2006: 152)

A particular attraction for labour lawyers was that in many jurisdictions, labour law is not a typical example of command and control regulation, given that labour standards are frequently not set by government, but by negotiations between unions and employers, albeit within state sanctioned IR systems. In some jurisdictions, particularly the US and Canada, a regulatory perspective offered a way to respond to the ‘ossification’ of the traditional labour system, particularly in political discourse (Doorey, 2012; Estlund, 2014).

The broader focus facilitated by regulation and governance also infiltrated IR (Bray et al., 2009: 266; Martínez Lucio and MacKenzie, 2004). The influence of regulatory perspectives may be in part due to the new institutionalism in IR scholarship which emphasises the institutional environments within which employers and workers act and the key role of states in shaping and sustaining these environments (Godard, 2002: 250). New institutional scholarship recognises that legal regulation is only one mechanism through which states perform these functions, and that rules may be set through government approaches to their own employment practices, incentive structures, promulgation of ‘best practice’ guides, rewards and penalties as well as the threat of legal regulation (Godard, 2002: 257).

Among other things, a broader regulatory perspective enabled IR scholars to move beyond the traditional focus on legislation to address and analyse an increasingly complex and plural labour regulation environment (e.g. Bray and Waring, 2005). There were also calls for more research on the actual practice of regulation, and not just its terms (p. 13), a point made by IR scholars in the UK around this time who were concerned that there had been insufficient research conducted on the impact of labour regulation (Dickens and Hall, 2005). Others were attracted to regulation theory’s capacity to capture a variety of labour market institutions and regulatory techniques, hoping it would open up new avenues for research (Gahan and Brosnan, 2006).

These developments were a harbinger for the convergence between labour law and IR scholarship on regulation which has occurred over the last decade, with IR scholars noting that the influence of regulatory theory on labour law scholarship and its similarities with the neo-institutionalist approach ‘[provide] a great opportunity to bring together the fields of employment relations with labour law’ (Bray et al., 2009: 266).

Current trends in labour regulation research

In this section I outline some trends in both labour law and IR scholarship in regulation over the last 5–10 years, under three broad categories: regulatory design and regulatory pluralism; the role of non-state actors in regulation; and enforcement, effectiveness and impact of labour regulation.

Regulatory design and regulatory pluralism

Many regulation and governance theorists share a common starting point, recognition of a shift away from the interventionist state from government to governance (Ashiagbor, 2015: 129; Black, 2002; Lobel, 2012). Regulatory scholarship in labour law has not assumed there is an inevitability or necessity about this shift. Instead regulatory analysis has been deployed to evaluate regulatory design to provide a more nuanced analysis of the labour regulation system and whatever direction it may be heading in. For example, some studies in Australia used regulatory analysis to highlight that neoliberal labour law reforms such as Work Choices increased prescriptive legal regulation of IR (or ‘command and control’) and were therefore not ‘deregulatory’ in nature, as claimed by proponents (Cooney et al., 2006).

Regulatory analysis has also been useful in capturing the plurality in labour regulation, including alternatives to traditional mechanisms and institutions of legal regulation (Bercusson and Estlund, 2008). It has been fruitfully applied to analysis of anti-discrimination legislation and other initiatives designed to address gender inequality, given the diversity of regulatory approaches in that jurisdiction. A regulatory perspective has been particularly useful for the study of affirmative action regulation, where government has been reluctant to mandate outcomes but has instead preferred more light touch regulatory approaches (Smith and Hayes, 2015). Among other things, Smith and Hayes’ study explores how in Australia, the Employer of Choice for Gender Equality Award has been used to encourage affirmative action, and evaluates the most recent legislation’s improvements to stakeholder reporting to identify ‘industry benchmarks’ which can be used to highlight both good and bad performers (pp. 191–217).

Recent IR scholarship has continued to explore this broader, plural perspective on regulation. Concern about the limitations of traditional labour regulation in achieving decent work outcomes has led IR scholars to consider regulatory alternatives to labour law, particularly in sectors dependent upon government funding or contracts. For example, Kaine has argued that traditional labour regulation has failed to achieve adequate or sustainable outcomes in the aged care industry, suggesting that instead, integration of labour standards and outcomes into accreditation standards and funding mechanisms may be a more effective regulatory approach (Kaine, 2012). There has also been interest in the extent to which government procurement can be used to leverage improvements in labour conditions (Holley et al., 2015; Ludlow, 2015; Ravenswood and Kaine, 2015).

IR scholars in particular have looked beyond formal regulatory instruments, however broadly conceived, to consider phenomena such as social norms and markets as sources of regulation. For example, Charlesworth (2012) identified three key regulatory forces impacting on the working conditions of care workers in Australia: labour regulation, the funding market and gender care norms. Charlesworth argues that the devaluing of care work is due to the high proportion of older women working in this sector, which has been a factor in government underfunding and also in the setting of minimum labour standards under state regulatory mechanisms.

Other scholars are more wary of the alternative regulatory techniques offered by regulatory governance perspectives (e.g. Vosko et al., 2016). Instead, they suggest focusing on effective enforcement of more traditional regulation, a theme which is explored further in the following.

Role of non-state actors

One of the influences of the regulatory governance literature on labour scholarship has been to generate interest in the role that non-state actors play under a decentred concept of regulation. In labour relations, of course, the role of unions and employer associations as ‘joint regulators’ has long been recognised. However, as noted earlier, scholarship has been more focused on unions’ role in setting standards through the award-making process and collective bargaining than it has on their enforcement role. Recent studies have given more attention to the role that unions play in enforcement (Colling, 2012; Landau and Howe, 2016).

Both labour law and IR scholarship have tended to neglect the role that actors other than unions play in labour relations, but that is starting to change, perhaps by necessity given the decline in union membership in many industrialised countries (Estlund, 2010; Hardy, 2011; Weil, 2007). Hardy (2011) found that the Australian labour inspectorate had sought to ‘enrol’ actors such as unions, industry bodies and community groups in compliance activities in a range of different ways. Studies in the US have noted the increasing role of ‘worker centers’ in playing a support and advocacy role for vulnerable workers, particularly migrant workers (Fine and Gordon, 2010).

IR scholars have explored how non-state actors might experiment with their own forms of regulation to complement or supplement state regulation, consistent with the broad definition of regulation outlined earlier. Kaine and Brigden (2015) examine ‘how unions have sought to carve out or cling on to aspects of their regulatory relevance … through strategies attempting both to appropriate aspects of the formal regulatory system and to augment that system with non-traditional regulatory options’ (p. 615). They look at initiatives in the textiles, clothing and footwear (TCF) sector, road transport and aged care services, arguing that the shortcomings of formal regulation and ‘the limited success of [union organizing strategies] further prompted unions [in certain sectors] to re-imagine their regulatory role, both within the broad bounds of traditional labour law but also beyond it’ (p. 619).

In a similar vein, Wright has investigated how trade unions and other civil society organisations can leverage both public and private sector entities to influence the labour management practices of suppliers and subcontractors in their supply chains or production networks (Wright, 2016).

Enforcement, effectiveness and impact

As well as broadening the scope of labour law research to include alternative forms and legalities, regulatory governance perspectives have challenged legal scholars to think more about the effectiveness of regulation in achieving its objectives (Lobel, 2012). A significant stream of the regulatory literature has investigated the link between regulation and compliance, focusing on the targets of regulation and ‘their responses to and implementation of regulation’ (Parker and Nielsen, 2011). This has given rise to a greater interest among labour lawyers (and IR scholars) in the enforcement of, and compliance with, specific areas of regulation.

The increased interest in enforcement can also be attributed to a range of other factors, including a shift away from collective regulation of working conditions through industry or enterprise level to statutory individual legal rights, associated with a decline in union membership, and a growing interest in labour regulation in developing countries, where unions are often weaker and labour inspectorates play a more significant role in the observance of labour standards (Piore and Schrank, 2008). Concern over increasing evidence of ‘wage theft’ by employers in the US, and David Weil’s groundbreaking research with the US Wages and Hours Division highlighting the importance of ‘strategic enforcement’, have also been influential (e.g. Weil, 2014).

In Australia, IR scholars Goodwin and Maconachie’s research into federal and state enforcement agencies’ approach to inspection and prosecution of employment standards breaches from the late 1950s until the mid-1990s was based upon qualitative research and analysis of data kept by regulatory agencies (e.g. Goodwin and Maconachie, 2007).

Labour law researchers have adopted similar methodologies in evaluating how the Australian federal enforcement agency (now the Fair Work Ombudsman (FWO)) has investigated noncompliance and taken enforcement action since 2006 (e.g. Howe et al., 2014). In addition to a mixed methods study of how the FWO carried out detection of non-compliance, drawing on qualitative interviews and both publicly available and FWO-provided data, labour law research has focused on how the agency uses its different enforcement tools in responding to noncompliance. Increasingly, the agency prioritises its enforcement action, particularly in light of the fact that strategies targeting the direct employer of labour in the context of supply chains and other multilateral business models are often ineffective (Hardy and Howe, 2015).

The growing interest of IR and labour law scholars in enforcement has been matched in other jurisdictions. In the UK, scholars from both labour law and IR have shown a greater interest in the role of tribunals and courts as enforcement institutions (Dickens, 2012). In Canada, Vosko et al. (2016) recognised that non-compliance was a significant factor in the gap between labour standards and working conditions in that country, necessitating further study into government enforcement practices in Ontario.

Looking beyond research concerning how labour law is enforced, there has recently been a much greater interest among labour lawyers and IR scholars in the effectiveness of labour law in achieving its goals, and more broadly, its impact on the economy.

In the Australian context, the radically conservative Work Choices reforms sparked a flurry of studies, mainly by IR and other labour studies scholars, on what impact the legislation was having on workplace practices and on the working conditions of vulnerable workers (Arup et al., 2009). For example, a qualitative study by Baird et al. (2009) found that Work Choices had a significant impact on women, not only at the workplace, but also in their family and community experiences.

It is also apparent that labour lawyers have increasingly been embarking on empirical research, or the use of direct quantitative or qualitative methods, to explore the operation of labour regulation in practice (Ludlow and Blackham, 2015). Labour lawyers’ use of social science research methodology has brought the research techniques of the field closer to that of IR, a departure from the legal formalism noted earlier.

Some of these studies have been interdisciplinary. Moore and McKay’s (2013) evaluation of the UK statutory union recognition procedure found that overall it had a negative impact on unions and their role in IR, as unions had become overly reliant on the statutory process. The authors argue that the procedure is ‘not an adequate substitute [for voluntary industrial relations processes] and that it has encouraged a more limited form of joint regulation’ (Moore and McKay, 2013: 240). In Australia, Forsyth et al.’s (2012) study of the federal IR tribunal’s effectiveness in overseeing and influencing good faith bargaining under the FW Act combined statistical analysis of tribunal records and interviews with employers and unions that had been parties to disputes before the tribunal. The study found that a combination of the bargaining provisions and the role of the tribunal appear to have reshaped the bargaining behaviour of both management and union bargaining representatives. However, the provisions had proven incapable of addressing situations where an employer did not wish to bargain in any circumstances.

In addition to the influence of regulation theories, increased interest in atypical and precarious work in traditionally gendered occupations and industries may also be a reason for the increase in empirical research on the impact of labour regulation. In their study of the representation of gender in the UK’s Industrial Law Journal, Hayes and Russell (2015) found that labour law scholarship they examined ‘appears highly likely to be informed by empirical data when it engages most strongly with issues of gender. … It therefore seems that this turn to empiricism coincides with increased concern for women as subjects of labour law who are gendered through work’ (p. 53).

Burchielli et al. (2014) examine the legal framework protecting Australian garment homework, which they note is mostly done by women and is highly insecure. They expressly include what they refer to as ‘soft law (such as the promotion of industry norms in codes of practice)’, and set out to examine ‘how these regulatory mechanisms work together’ (p. 82). They do this using responsive regulation theory. The authors conclude that the regulatory framework is insufficient to achieve effective homeworker protection, and that there is a need for other social and political mechanisms to secure that goal.

It is also clear that neoliberal economic perspectives on the impact of labour regulation on firm performance, and more broadly that of economies, have also driven the increase in empirical research. Adams and Deakin (2015) describe a new economic and ideological orthodoxy which suggests that labour law

has an inhibiting effect, and that there is a link between the degree of labour market regulation and economic performance. … In order to be influential in policy-making, the analysis of labour law needs to engage with this new orthodoxy. In particular, techniques need to be employed that enable systemic and rigorous analysis of causal influences on economic performance. The evidence then needs to be presented in a way with which policymakers are familiar. Work that is not empirically grounded runs the risk of being written off as “pure theory”. (p. 33)

The economic orthodoxy described by Adams and Deakin is apparent in debates over the economic impact of labour regulation at both the domestic and the international level. Quantitative approaches to the analysis of labour law have become prevalent following the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and then the World Bank adopting employment protection indexes in the late 1990s and early 2000s (Adams and Deakin, 2015). These indexes purported to measure the extent to which labour laws were restrictive of economic development. In the Australian context, labour law and IR scholars have collaborated in quantitative, indicator-based studies to quantify labour regulation and its impact for comparative purposes (e.g. Anderson et al., 2012; Mitchell et al., 2010). These have been important contributions to an international policy debate concerning the impact of labour regulation on economic development (Lee and McCann, 2011).

Where to next with regulation?

To recap, there have been two key trends in the trajectory of research on labour regulation by labour law and IR scholars over the last 10 years. First, each fields’ conception of regulation has become broader, recognising plural forms of regulation. Some IR scholars have engaged more directly with the nature and function of regulation than in the past. A particular development has been the closer attention given by both fields to labour law enforcement. Second, IR scholars have continued their interest in the impact of labour regulation on labour markets, workplaces, industries and occupations, but have been joined by labour lawyers.

Frazer (2009) was largely correct when he observed that there is no need to call for greater collaboration between labour law and IR scholars, nor for closer convergence between the two fields, as both have been happening at pace over the last two decades. However, there are three areas where I believe further research by labour lawyers and IR scholars, whether working together or otherwise, would be fruitful. Both to some extent ask scholars to look beyond state forms of regulation to consider the influence of markets, social norms and other dynamics on outcomes for workers.

The first area has recently been highlighted by Frazer (2014) and concerns the implementation or translation of state labour regulation by employing organisations. Among other things, regulation constitutes firms and their internal labour practices: ‘legal norms attempt to constitute structures, procedures and routines which are required to be adopted and internalized by firms, so that these structures, procedures and routines become part of the normal operating activities of the firm’ (Howe et al., 2006: 316).

Labour law and IR scholars have noted the proliferation of organisational policies governing employment of staff, covering topics such as sexual harassment and bullying, social media use, drug and alcohol standards and testing, and more general ‘codes of conduct’ designed to promote positive workplace behaviour (Chapman et al., 2015). However, Frazer (2014) has observed that there has been little exploration of how labour law and employment relations operate within firms, or of the relationship between labour law and organisations’ employment relations arrangements. He suggests that such research might be facilitated by a new theoretical perspective, such as that offered by socio-legal theories of legal endogeneity – ‘the emergence of regulatory meaning under conditions of ambiguity’ (Gilad, 2014: 136). Such research should encompass not only the role of ‘rule-makers’ who draft organisational policies, but also the ‘rule-takers’ and ‘rule-intermediaries’ (including advisors, tribunals and courts) who help construct the meaning of these documents and determine their impact on compliance with state regulation.

The second area concerns the relationship between multilateral business arrangements and the fragmentation or ‘fissuring’ of work arrangements (Weil, 2014) that is contributing to precarious and insecure work. Weil has highlighted the extent to which non-compliance with labour regulation can be linked to business structures such as corporate supply chains, franchising, contracting out and use of labour hire agencies, which may in turn be driven by certain market pressures, including the market for capital. Labour lawyers and IR scholars have been investigating the implications for labour regulation of these structures, as evidenced by a recent special issue of the Comparative Labor Law & Policy Journal featuring contributions from around the globe (Comparative Labor Law & Policy Journal, 2015; see also Kellner et al., 2016; Rawling, 2015; Wright, 2016). This is an internationally significant issue as, for example, supply chains often cross state boundaries.

However, aside from the growing literature on labour regulation in supply chains and the recent Kellner et al. (2016) study of franchising and compliance, there has been to date very little examination of why organisations restructure their business arrangements in ways that lead to the exploitation of workers, and how this impacts on compliance. This aspect of the challenge posed by multilateral business arrangements is one that IR scholars would be well placed to address in combination with labour law scholars. For example, Sarina and Wright (2015) have looked at organisational fragmentation and its impact on employment relations strategies at the international airline Qantas, while Westcott and Pendleton (2013) examine the impact of private equity on labour management at a major Australian retail chain. Neither of these studies addresses the implications for labour regulation.

Third, there is room for further studies of the regulatory influence of social norms on labour standards and their interaction with formal regulation. In addition to being useful in assessing the undervaluation of some forms of work in an industrialised economy context, such as the Charlesworth (2012) study discussed earlier, a social norms perspective may also assist in assessing what regulates working conditions in the informal sector in developing countries. What regulates labour conditions in economies where large sections of the workforce are not protected by labour laws due to formal or practical exclusions? Are there cultural, religious or family norms and values which provide some level of decency? A recent study of informal workers in restaurants in Indonesia suggests that all these norms could be in play (Mahy, 2016).

Conclusion

IR scholars continue to write about the impact of law and regulation as they have in the past – largely by accepting the legal framework as the context in which workers exist, and assessing the operation of labour market conditions within that context. However, some IR scholars are engaging more directly with regulatory settings, including a broader range of regulatory approaches, and taking a deeper interest in compliance and enforcement.

In labour law, in addition to embracing regulatory pluralism and complexity, there is an increasing interest in empirical evaluation of the operation and impact of labour regulation, including through enforcement, although scholars continue to engage in doctrinal and contextual evaluation of formal laws.

Overall, this convergence between the two disciplines is a fruitful one – it is giving us more research about how labour regulation works, and its impact. All that is left is to see the two disciplines engage in a deeper conversation around some of the challenges facing labour regulation, such as those outlined in the previous section of this article. Whether that requires a distinctive theoretical approach, or greater engagement between the fields in each other’s research, remains to be seen.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the editors of this special issue and the journal’s anonymous referees for their comments on an earlier version of this article.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

Note

Biographical note

John Howe is Professor of Law at the Melbourne Law School and Co-Director of the Centre for Employment and Labour Relations Law. His recent research has been focused on economic governance and labour rights and also regulatory compliance mechanisms in labour law.

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