Virginia Mantouvalou

Should workers ever lose their job because of their political views or affiliations? Should female employees be entitled to wear a headscarf in the workplace for religious reasons? Can it ever be right for an employer to dismiss someone for personal activities undertaken in their leisure time? What restrictions, if any, should be placed on the right to strike ?Engagingly written, this innovative new textbook provides an entry point for exploring these and other topical issues, enabling students to analyse the applicability of human rights to disputes between employers and workers in the UK. It offers an original perspective on the traditional topics of employment law as well as looking in greater depth at new issues, such as employees’ use of social media or the enforcement of human rights in the gig economy.Uniquely, the book considers the most important international Conventions that are relevant for the law in the UK, especially the European Convention on Human Rights, the European Social Charter, Conventions of the International Labour Organisation, and the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union.A central question that each of the chapters addresses is whether UK employment law is compatible with human rights law. Each chapter discusses all the key cases drawn from various jurisdictions, including the Court of Justice of the European Union and the European Court of Human Rights.Written by a stellar team of authors, this textbook is an invaluable teaching aid for both postgraduate and undergraduate students studying employment law, human rights, human resource management, and industrial relations.

Should workers ever lose their job because of their political views or affiliations? Should female employees be entitled to wear a headscarf in the workplace for religious reasons? Can it ever be right for an employer to dismiss someone for personal activities undertaken in their leisure time? What restrictions, if any, should be placed on the right to strike ?Engagingly written, this innovative new textbook provides an entry point for exploring these and other topical issues, enabling students to analyse the applicability of human rights to disputes between employers and workers in the UK. It offers an original perspective on the traditional topics of employment law as well as looking in greater depth at new issues, such as employees’ use of social media or the enforcement of human rights in the gig economy.Uniquely, the book considers the most important international Conventions that are relevant for the law in the UK, especially the European Convention on Human Rights, the European Social Charter, Conventions of the International Labour Organisation, and the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union.A central question that each of the chapters addresses is whether UK employment law is compatible with human rights law. Each chapter discusses all the key cases drawn from various jurisdictions, including the Court of Justice of the European Union and the European Court of Human Rights.Written by a stellar team of authors, this textbook is an invaluable teaching aid for both postgraduate and undergraduate students studying employment law, human rights, human resource management, and industrial relations.

When discussing exploitation in workplaces, governments typically deploy a rhetoric of personal responsibility: they place attention on employers who take advantage of workers, or on workers who choose non-standard, precarious work arrangements. On this account, the responsibility of the state is to address the harm inflicted by private actors. This book questions that approach and develops the concept of 'state-mediated structural injustice at work': a phenomenon which manifests when legislation that has an appearance of legitimacy, in fact has very damaging effects for large numbers of people and results in structures of exploitation at work. Using a series of examples such as migrant workers, captive workers, people under welfare conditionality schemes, and other precarious workers, Mantouvalou shows how the law creates these structures of injustice, entrenching long-term, standard, and routine exploitation. She also assesses these examples against human rights principles, including civil, political, economic, and social rights. The ultimate aim of the work is to show that these structures routinely lead to workers' exploitation which may in turn give rise to state responsibility for human rights violations and to argue that there is a pressing need for reform.

Debating Law is a new series that gives scholarly experts the opportunity to offer contrasting perspectives on significant topics of contemporary, general interest. In this second volume of the series, Conor Gearty argues that for rights to work effectively in the wider promotion of social justice, they need to be kept as far away as possible from the courts. He acknowledges the value of rights language in legal and political debate and accepts that human rights are not solely civil and political, with social rights language clearly having a progressive, emancipatory dimension. However he says that lawyers - even well-intentioned lawyers - damage the achievability of the kind of radical transformation in the priorities of states that a genuine commitment to social rights surely necessitates. Virginia Mantouvalou argues that social rights, defined as entitlements to the satisfaction of basic needs, are as essential for the well-being of the individual and the community as long-established civil and political rights. The real challenge, she suggests, is how best to give effect to social rights. Drawing on examples from around the world, she argues for their 'legalisation', and examines the role of courts and the role of legislatures in this process, both at a national and a international level.