Can a legal theory of ‘vulnerability in employment’ be constructed and does it represent a valid organising principle for the regulation of precarious work?

摘要

The context of this thesis lies both in labour law theory and labour law literature on ‘precarious’ work. In this thesis, the concern is to show that although precarious work is presented as a modern problem with distinctive modern solutions in the literature, the problems of precarious work can usefully be aligned with more general attempts to determine the problems and solutions to vulnerability at work.\udIn the first part of the thesis, the analysis proceeds by the construction of a ‘theory’ of vulnerability based around a ‘wide’, ‘middle’ and ‘narrow’ view. It is argued that these different ‘views’ have a certain internal coherence and represent a particular way of seeing both the challenges faced by labour and the best way to tackle those challenges. The second part of this thesis looks at the application of this theoretical framework. It is argued that these different ‘views’ represent a good way of analysing approaches at different geographical levels of regulation (UK, EU and international) to the problems of precarious work. Finally, the thesis investigates two case studies and suggests that these different ‘views’ can be used to analyse the approach taken to different ‘vulnerable’ or ‘precarious’ groups of workers in the labour market.