Book Review of Rethinking Workplace Regulation: Beyond the Standard Contract of Employment

Reviewed by: Chris F. Wright, Work and Organisational Studies, University of Sydney, Australia DOI: 10.1177/0730888415570292

The emergence of the standard contract of full-time and typically long-term employment during the postwar decades represented a progressive innovation that provided income, job, and social security to workers. In recent years, the proportion of workers covered by the “standard employment contract” (SEC) has fallen almost everywhere. The associated rise of the nonstandard contract with minimal security has created a raft of psychological, social, and political consequences that policymakers and practitioners struggle to grapple with.

These are the starting points for Rethinking Workplace Regulation, edited by Katherine V. W. Stone and Harry Arthurs. While the reasons for the demise of the SEC and the consequences of this development are well traversed, research on viable policy measures to offset the shortcomings of the nonstandard contract is scant. This volume goes a long way toward addressing this gap. At a time when these shortcomings are ever more striking, as evident in widening income disparities and the growing incidence of precarious work in virtually all developed economies, the volume represents a timely, notable, and necessary contribution to existing scholarship.

The editors have assembled an impressive group of contributors to answer the question of what can be done to address these challenges. Given the focus on regulation, it is understandable that many of the chapter authors are lawyers, but there are also contributions by industrial relations and management scholars, economists, geographers, sociologists, and political scientists. This interdisciplinary focus helps the editors to meet two key objectives: (a) to persuade readers that the transformation of employment relationships requires reinvention of existing regulatory frameworks and institutional strategies and (b) to show that cross-national learning has an important role to play in this process.

The first two sections of the book focus on the contemporary context of employment regulation and legal conceptions of the employment contract. The latter sections pay attention to “green shoots” developments designed to address the challenges of nonstandard employment. The possibilities of regulatory and institutional innovation are canvassed within the parameters of what Stone and Arthurs call the “plausibility principle.” In the introductory chapter, the editors acknowledge that “too much has changed too rapidly and too profoundly” to imagine a complete restoration of the SEC that the postwar regime of strong unions and strong social protections operating within relatively protected economies enabled. As such, the book shies away from the temptation to advocate a return to the “old regime” and instead accepts the reality of “how things actually are and not the way they used to be or ought to be.”

The book contains many highlights, particularly in the sections focusing on contemporary innovations and experiments. For example, Thomas Bredgaard’s chapter draws attention to the importance of vocational training underpinning the Danish system of flexicurity, a key and often overlooked ingredient in assisting the return of unemployed workers back into work. Another interesting chapter by John Howe and Michael Rawling examines supply chain regulation in Australia that extends employment protection to “outworkers” often vulnerable to mistreatment owing to their ambiguous legal status. Keisuke Nakamura and Michio Nitta study the emergence of community unions in Japan that recruit nonstandard workers on a regional basis rather than at the enterprise. Among several interesting chapters on social policy reform, Julie C. Suk outlines attempts to decouple retirement security from the SEC, and thereby improve pension security among working mothers whose caring responsibilities impede their capacity to engage in long-term full-time work.

In the final chapter, Harry Arthurs examines the extent to which these cases can be transplanted to other institutional contexts. Notwithstanding the virtues of the innovations analyzed throughout the book, this chapter returns to the “plausibility principle” by emphasizing the limits as well as the opportunities of cross-national learning for policymakers and practitioners.

One constraint not given sufficient attention is the vulnerability of regulatory innovation to hostile policymakers. The Australian government’s recent decision to revoke one of the supply chain regulation initiatives examined by Rawling and Howe and the attempts to dismantle French pension credits for working mothers discussed by Suk shows that it is not simply enough to develop and implement these innovations; finding ways to embed them is also vital.

Nevertheless, the book achieves the main task that it sets out to achieve: “not simply to identify the risks and vulnerabilities” associated with the demise of the SEC, but also to highlight “new approaches to labor market regulation that will be regarded as plausible in the political and intellectual climate in which we find ourselves today.” This volume will have significant appeal to anyone interested in understanding how regulatory innovation can help to address the deep-seated problems of contemporary labor markets.