The ‘quartet’ of the Laval/Viking decisions, all decided by the Court of Justice of the European Union within a period of two years (2007–2009)2 heralded a ‘constitutional moment’ of far-reaching significance that has shaped the field of labour protection and Europe’s social constitution. It is a degenerative constitutional moment. Its impact has been to unsettle the difficult articulation between the national and transnational constitutional orders of labour protection. It was clear then, as it is now, that the launch of EU Labour Law with Maastricht, during what we identified in Chapter 3.3 as the second phase of European integration, was never going to be smooth. From the start, EU Labour Law understood itself as the regulation of the European labour market (the same shift in the self-understanding of labour law as labour market regulation had occurred in the United Kingdom in the 1980s).3 This placed EU Labour Law in a difficult ‘middle’ position where it faced a difficult relationship at either interface: with the ILO which now held to (a limited but) substantive set of principles, and with the national systems (organised in their majority according to principles of political constitutionalism) that established social and labour protection as a matter of national-democratic decision-making. The earlier phase of the constitutional jurisprudence of the European Court had reflected both the difficulty of boundary-maintenance, but also a deference to what the Treaty clearly identified as matters that fell under member state jurisdiction. Not always coherently, and certainly with a dose of self-restraint on the part of the ECJ, the fragile architecture had been upheld during this time. It took the constitutional moment of Laval/Viking decisively to collapse what for a decade before it had been quietly eroding, and to subsume labour protection to the logic of market optimisation. Let us look at the steps of this degeneration, both in terms of its effects on the institutional architecture of labour protection in the European Union, and also at the conceptual level, in terms of the deep commodification of labour.