W. Stanley Jevons was a central figure linking political economy with social policy, and The State in Relation to Labour is the quintessential product of that fusion. Jevons reviews how legislation enacted for the protection of labor re-established the social contract on a new industrial footing. The concept of industrial partnership insured that the state continued to hold a monopoly of power while taking account of rising labor agitation. Jevons' scholarly brilliance is evident in this pathbreaking work on economics and policy construction. The State in Relation to Labour deals with the economic role of government in resolving conflicts between different groups of English citizens. The issue of class is central to the topic and two further points are implicit. The first is the market economy as a product of the institutions which form and operate through it. Jevons argues that markets can be and indeed have been formed to favor one class interest or another. Second, he asserts that conventional arguments favor the class interests they serve, whether or not they are recognized to doing so. Jevons neither shrinks from candid analysis of English social, political and economic history and institutions nor espouses an openly pragmatic approach to the economic role of government. He eschews the erection of class or other ideological sentiment into principles of policy. Implicit in his analysis is an understanding that some law, some set of legal rights and limitations, is necessary. The issue is not whether government will establish relative rights and responsibilities but what they will be and, further, when they will be changed. Among the topics discussed are principles of industrial legislation, direct interference of the state with labor, the Factory Acts, and similar legislation directly affecting laborers, trade union legislation, the law of industrial conspiracy, cooperation and industrial partnership, and arbitration and conciliation. In a new introduction, Warren J. Samuels examines the life and works of William Stanley Jevons. He discusses the various arguments put forth in The State in Relation to Labour, and the consequences of Jevons' approach.

I. Principles of industrial legislation. II. Direct interference of the state with industry. III. The factory acts and similar legislation directly affecting labourers. IV. Indirect interference with industry - trades union legislation. V. The law of industrial conspiracy. VI. Co-operation and industrial partnership. VII. Arbitration and conciliation. VIII. Concluding remarks.

Labour law has traditionally aimed to protect the employee under a hierarchy built on constitutional provisions, statutory law, collective agreements at various levels, and the employment contract, in that order. However, in employment regulation in recent years, ‘flexibility’ has come to dominate the world of work – a set of policies that reshuffle the relationship among the fundamental pillars of labour law and inevitably lead to degrading the protection of employees. This book, the first-ever to consider the sources of labour law from a comparative perspective, details the ways in which the traditional hierarchy of sources has been altered, presenting an international view on major cross-cutting issues followed by fifteen country reports. The authors’ analysis of the changing hierarchy of labour law sources in the light of recent trends includes such elements as the following: the constitutional dimension of labour rights; the normative intervention by the State; the regulatory function of collective bargaining and agreements; the hierarchical organization of labour law sources and the ‘principle of favour’; the role played by case law in both common law and civil law countries; the impact of the European Economic Governance; decentralization of collective bargaining; employment conditions as key components of global competitive strategies; statutory schemes that allow employees to sign away their rights. National reports – Australia, Brazil, China, Denmark, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Poland, Russia, Spain, Sweden, South Africa, the United Kingdom and the United States – describe the structure of labour law regulations in each legal system with emphasis on the current state of affairs. The authors, all distinguished labour law scholars in their countries, thus collectively provide a thorough and comprehensive commentary on labour law regulation and recent tendencies in national labour laws in various corners of the globe. With its definitive analysis of such crucial matters as the decentralization of collective bargaining and how individual employment contracts can deviate from collective agreements and statutory law, and its comparison of representative national labour law systems, this highly informative book will prove of inestimable value to all professionals concerned with employment relations, labour disputes, or labour market policy, especially in the context of multinational workforces.