Future Prospects for Labour Law--Lessons from the United Kingdom‪.‬

Introduction Globalisation presents major challenges for governments, and some are now looking to the United Kingdom as an example of how to create global competitiveness, economic efficiency and labour market flexibility in a way that also responds to demands for fairness at work. But what the British approach conceals behind its alluring synthesis of regulation and deregulation is the changing nature of labour law, which is now principally a tool of economic policy, and as such less concerned with its historic mission of promoting social justice. Labour law is thus increasingly concerned principally with the re-commodification of labour, rather than the protection of workers; with promoting the flexibility of labour, rather than the security of citizens; and with controlling rather than encouraging labour organisation as an instrument of industrial democracy (a term about which little is now heard). The transformative new synthesis between regulation and deregulation is thus no more than a form of labour standard dilution, and the creation of a labour law for employers, by reinforcing the primacy of the common law in the void left by legislatures and collective bargaining.