Based on current constitutional, European, and international law, the Center for Interdisciplinary Labour Law Studies recognizes certain normative challenges facing the law of work and employment:
Work forms the basis for a democratic, socially orientated, and inclusive society that is organized under the rule of law. Work provides the economic basis for people’s lifes. In work, people may experience power and powerlessness, but also self-determination, solidarity, co-determination/participation, and self-efficacy. Therefore law should create and sustain spaces for self-determined action and have these spaces to be enabling and empowering for all. Solidarity and collective action are of crucial importance when it comes to exercising autonomy and building spaces of self-determination and participation in work. One of the central tasks of the law, therefore, is to create such spaces; but worker participation, co-determination and collective action should also be able to shape the law.
Research at C*LLaS confronts these normative challenges with labour law’s embossing with capitalist social and economic relations, but also with its gendered and post-colonial social embedding. Anti-discrimination and equality law are important areas of research at the Center.
