PRESS RELEASE
7 April 2009
A policy brief to be published tomorrow by The Foundation for Law, Justice and Society (FLJS), a socio-legal thinktank affiliated with Oxford University, will challenge the effectiveness of the government’s reforms to flexible working conditions. The policy brief, written by Professor Joanne Conaghan of Kent University, comes in the wake of the announcement that an extra 4.5 million parents will now have the right to ask for flexible working, and argues that, “it must be seriously questioned whether a right merely to request flexible work, backed by little or no sanction, is robust enough to withstand the pressures that employers are likely to face in the current period of economic difficulty.”
The policy brief raises concerns over the coercive aspects of existing welfare-to-work reforms, as well as the implications of “the introduction of a raft of family-friendly employment policies” for gender equality in the workplace and child poverty: “These concerns are not likely to recede as the recession deepens, although the government considers recent and anticipated job losses not as a reason for delaying welfare reform but rather as a ground for proceeding with even greater vigour and expedition.”
The policy brief is published alongside a report and policy briefs emerging from a recent FLJS conference on Work, Employment and Industrial Relations, held in Oxford. The publications, written by an international panel of employment law experts, analyze a range of policies relating to employment and industrial relations, and include a proposal for far-reaching reforms to liberalize the movement of international labour markets.
The report and policy briefs are available to download from our publications pages.
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Notes for editors
• PDFs of the following policy briefs and report, to be published on Wednesday 8 April, are available on request:
o ‘Gendered Aspects of Activation Policies: The Limits of Welfare to Work’ by Joanne Conaghan
o Report: ‘Work, Employment and Industrial Relations in the New Social Contract State’ by Amir Paz-Fuchs
o ‘Transborder Labour Liberalization’ by Karen Bravo
o ‘Renewing the Social Contract for Work in Anglo-Saxon Economies’ by John Grahl and Paul Teague.
• The conference entitled ‘Work, Employment and Industrial Relations in the New Social Contract’ was held at Rhodes House, Oxford on 29-31 October 2008. The conference was opened with a lecture by Professor Hugh Collins, Professor of English Law at the London School of Economics, entitled, Beyond the Third Way in Labour Law. A transcript and podcast of the lecture, as well as programme and participant details, are available on request.
• The Foundation for Law, Justice and Society is an independent institution affiliated with the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies at the University of Oxford. Founded in 2005, the mission of the Foundation is to study, reflect on, and promote an understanding of the role that law plays in society.
• The Foundation draws on the work of scholars and researchers, and aims to make its work easily accessible to professionals in government, business, or the law.
http://www.fljs.org
• For more information, please contact Phil Dines, Communications Manager:
+44 (0)7809 219 543 (mobile); +44 (0)1865 284433 (day)
phil.dines@fljs.org
About the authors
• Joanne Conaghan is a Professor of Law and Head of Kent Law School, University of Kent. She has taught and researched in labour law for many years and has published widely in labour law and related fields. Much of her work takes a gender perspective on labour law issues, and she is an internationally renowned expert on issues of gender, work, and legal regulation, including equality issues.
• Amir Paz-Fuchs is the Programme Director of the Foundation for Law, Justice and Society’s research programme entitled The Social Contract Revisited. He teaches labour law and jurisprudence at the Ono College of Law, Israel. His book, Welfare to Work: Conditional Rights in Social Policy is published by Oxford University Press.
• Karen E. Bravo is an Associate Professor of Law at the Indiana University School of Law, Indianapolis, where she researches and publishes on, among other subjects, regional integration, human trafficking, labour liberalization, and democratization and the rule of law.
• Paul Teague is the Martin Naughton Chair of Management at the School of Management and Economics, The Queen’s University Belfast. He has written on the employment relations consequences of deeper European integration, employment standard setting, and the nature of social partnership in Ireland and elsewhere.
• John Grahl is a Professor of Economics at Middlesex University. He is a specialist in the political economy of European integration.