A contextual, rigorous treatment of employment law, featuring a running case example to show exactly how the law works, and including extracts from key cases and source materials.

Written by prominent UK labour lawyers, this textbook is comprehensive and engaging, with detailed commentary and integrated materials.

Employment law is a matter of increasing importance for managers and human resource professionals. Approaching the subject from a human resources rather than a law perspective, this book aims to inform about the context in which employment law is enacted and promotes understanding of: the application of the law to HRM, the social purposes behind the legislation, and the contextual issues that affect the implementation of the law.

Very Short Introductions: Brilliant, Sharp, Inspiring In today's society, work takes up a vast proportion of the time and energy of ordinary people. Although use of the phrase 'work-life balance' is now commonplace in the media and ordinary conversation, people work longer hours than ever before. However, rather than purely a means to an end in terms of supporting oneself financially, the workplace is a place to develop skills and talents and build lasting friendships. For these reasons, people want to know about their rights in the workplace. Issues of equal pay, discrimination, discharge/dismissal, and redundancy are prevalent within the media, and there is a growing public appetite for knowledge of the law governing the employment relationship. This Very Short Introduction provides an overview of the main kinds of employment rights and labour laws found in many countries. It unpicks and evaluates some of the assumptions underpinning contemporary attitudes to such rights and laws in order to measure whether they are warranted. Throughout it also considers the economic, political, sociological, and social justifications for employment rights and laws. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

During the past few decades, industrialized countries have witnessed a progressive crisis of the regulatory framework sustaining the binary model of the employment relationship based on the subordinate employment/autonomous self-employment dichotomy. New atypical and hybrid working arrangements have emerged, challenging the traditional notions of, and divisions between, autonomy and subordination. This in turn has strained labour law systems across industrialized countries that were previously based on the notion of dependent and subordinate employment to cast their personal scope of application. Nicola Countouris advances ideas for a new dynamic equilibrium in employment law to accommodate this evolution, providing a comparative account of the development of the employment relationship in four key European countries - the UK, Germany, France and Italy.