This chapter explores a double shift in social policy from the late 1990s to the mid 2010s. Firstly, under the Atal Behari Vajpayee-led NDA governments (1998-99; 1999-2004) contributory social insurance was extended to reach labour market ‘outsiders’, who worked in the informal sector without access to the social insurance enjoyed by formal sector workers. This policy shift was intended to support wider labour law reforms by sidelining the political power of organised labour. As the sustainability of India’s new economic model came under scrutiny, a second shift took place under the Congress-led UPA government (2004-14) in which non-employment-linked social assistance programmes were recognised for the first time - at least in theory - as permanent, statutory rights or entitlements of citizenship. The chapter ends by examining the centrality of states to social policy implementation. It shows that by 2014 the typical subnational welfare regime combined high levels of labour commodification with publicly financed social assistance. This reflected the embrace of labour informalisation on the one hand, and the provision of direct, publicly financed social assistance on the other.

This chapter is the first of two focused on the period between 1919 and 1947 bookended by, on the one hand, India’s membership of the new International Labour Organisation in 1919 and, on the other, the birth of independent India in 1947. Together these chapters chart the origins of a social insurance-led model for a future Indian welfare state directed towards an industrial working class. The chapter also documents how - facing rising industrial unrest - the newly elected provincial government of Bombay, the historic centre of India’s textile industry, began to experiment with social insurance. Limited decentralisation under successive Government of India Acts had provided greater autonomy to provinces in the field of labour policy. Bombay was the first to introduce maternity benefits. It then became the first to support sickness insurance for industrial workers as a means of labour force stabilisation. However, given fierce inter-regional competition within India’s textile industry, the adoption of sickness insurance did not proceed because without national coordination Bombay would have been disadvantaged in competition with regions without labour regulation.

This chapter explores the reasons why workers would stay in or run from a factory, as well as the traps and perceived appeal of temporary employment and day labor jobs. It discusses the role of employment service agencies and their networks of job intermediaries in sustaining factories’ power and control over workers and in making workers more vulnerable and more susceptible to informal and temporary employment.

Access to Austrian employment law is dependent on whether an individual can be regarded as an ‘employee’. Essentially, the idiosyncratic protection provided by employment law is awarded based on a binary option: the subordinate ‘employee’ in contrast to the self-employed person. Intermediary categories – such as the ‘quasi-subordinate’ status – are mere exceptions, although with increasing importance.

Austrian law does not provide a given notion of the ‘employee’. The Austrian Civil Code came into force in 1812, when special protection for employees was not considered necessary.

Denmark is a Scandinavian country of 5.8 million inhabitants. It is a constitutional monarchy, and state powers are divided between the parliament (legislative), the government (executive), and the courts (judiciary). The rule of law is a fundamental principle in the Danish legal system. Denmark is one of the richest countries in the world, and presumably also among the happiest. In the area of digitalisation, Denmark is among the most digitalised countries in the EU as well as globally.

Defining the employment relationship in the United States is not an endeavor for timid souls. The hallmark of American work law, especially its classification of employees and employers, is confusion. And that confusion has only intensified as emerging technologies have changed both the way that many people work and their relationship to the companies that profit from that work. The result of this trend has been an amplification of a long-existing problem: the exclusion of workers from workplace protections because they fall outside statutory definitions of the employment relationship.

Since the Dutch debate about the digitisation of labour is often reduced to a debate about how to qualify a contract between a worker and the platform they work through, or work for, the definition of the term ‘employment contract’ deserves a lengthy discussion. This approach means that the other effects of technological changes, such as changes in the organisation of work owing to changing structures of authority, receive far less attention. In Section II, I examine the definition of an employment contract and the obligations associated with employment contracts, partly to distinguish them from contracts for services. I also discuss the incentives for avoiding employment contracts or the associated obligations. As a result, Section II also includes discussions of flexible employment relationships, domestic work, and, of course, contracts for services, each – to the extent possible – in light of technological developments.

Technological innovation has disrupted standard forms of employment and fragmented the world of work, creating new digital sites of work and new modes of work organised around digital platforms. The arrangements for platform work, which vary in form and substance, defy classification in terms of the traditional configuration of employment and bypass the boundaries of South African labour law. Even the net of protection designed to provide labour rights for atypical (non-standard) forms of work is inadequate and excludes vulnerable workers in the digital economy from its scope. As such, work in the digital economy is largely ‘characterised by an absence of effective labour regulation’.

In 1969, David A. Morse received the Nobel Peace Prize on behalf of the International Labour Organization (ILO). In his Nobel Lecture, the then Director-General (DG) explained how the organization contributes to ‘an infrastructure of peace’ by providing Member States with ‘a meeting ground’ for cooperation and dialogue. This meeting ground is characterized by tripartism and universalism, two qualities that make the ILO stand out. Tripartism, in which governments and workers’ and employers’ representatives discuss and decide on all ILO action, ‘was both the most daring and the most valuable innovation of the Peace Conference’. By setting up the ILO in tripartite fashion, the social dialogue between trade unions, employers’ organizations, and governments was presented as a viable approach to resolving social conflict. As Morse suggested, if tripartism ‘could be accepted and applied in Geneva, why not at home?’.

The fourth industrial revolution, the economy 4.0, the digital economy … all these terms refer to the profound processes of transformation that are changing the lives of people all over the world. Despite there being no consensus on the founding principles of the digital economy, some basic common points are frequently mentioned in all research studies: the key role played by platforms, robotization, and digital intelligence; the importance of network effects and the use of big data; the emerging model of Industry 4.0; and the increasing profitability of technological investments. Digitalization is changing the economy, our societies, our daily lives, and it is having an especially significant impact on employment, working, and social conditions. In fact, it is one of the major concerns and study targets in the framework of the initiative and activities promoted by the International Labour Organization (ILO) regarding ‘The Future of Work’.

In 2019, the report of the Global Commission on the Future of Work of the International Labour Organization (ILO), Work for a Brighter Future, called for ‘technology in support of decent work’. Affirming that ‘labour is not a commodity; nor is it a robot’, the report insisted on the necessity of making sure that technology is ‘human-centred’ and that a ‘human-in-command’ approach to technology prevails. Whether labour law, as it stands, is sufficiently equipped to reach this goal is a difficult question.

The Republic of Korea (Korea) is known to be a country that is dynamic in many ways. At a glance, this may be true in relation to its labour law. In a relatively short span, it has made and revised a number of labour law statutes and case-law in response to political, economic, and social changes. It is, however, not certain that its labour law, aged almost seventy, remains a still adequate regulatory tool to address the changes in, and challenges to, the world of work caused by recent technological developments. This chapter sees the life of Korea’s modern labour law coming to an end, but does not necessarily see the dawn of a new labour law era. Hoping to contribute to finding this new path, this chapter will lead the reader through where we are now and where we are heading at this crossroads.

The Covid-19 crisis has shaken Israel’s labor market. Many Israeli workers lost their jobs temporarily or permanently. Workers in several sectors, such as teachers and hi-tech workers, have moved to working at home using technology tools such as Zoom. Others, such as healthcare workers, workers at grocery stores, and other types of essential worker, continued to go to work facing health risks. Workers with children, who have been studying at home through virtual learning, needed to find a new balance between work and taking care of family members.

As is the case in many other legal systems, Italian labour law (widely intended) has been traditionally structured around the employment and self-employment divide, taking the standard employment relationship, that is, the open-ended, full-time contract of employment, as a reference.

The summa divisio between employees and the self-employed provided the distinction between those covered by – and benefitting from – labour law regulation and those falling outside its scope of application. This distinction was enshrined in the Civil Code (henceforth: c.c.) of 1942 through the definition of prestatore di lavoro subordinato (employee, Art. 2094 c.c.) and contratto d’opera (contract for services, Art. 2222 c.c.).

The European labour market is undergoing a process of radical change. While the standard contract of employment remains the predominant form of work organisation (often based on full-time work for one employer), its social importance has been declining. In addition to part-time, fixed-term, and agency work (the original ‘atypical’ contracts), new casual forms of employment have become more prevalent; these include zero-hours contracts, employee sharing, information communication technology (ICT)-based mobile work, voucher-based work, interim management, portfolio, crowd, and gig work. The data are revealing: half of all the new jobs created in the last ten years have been non-standard, with more than 25 per cent of the workforce of the twenty-seven European Union countries (EU-27) being engaged in casual and atypical forms of work at any given time.

Polish labour law is mainly statutory law, while collective labour agreements play only a secondary role. The basic concepts are regulated by the Labour Code (LC). Under Article 2 LC, an employee is a person employed on the basis of an employment contract, an appointment, an election, a nomination, or a cooperative employment contract, while, according to Article 3 LC, an employer is an organizational unit, even if it has no legal personality, or an individual, provided it employs employees. Moreover, Article 22 § 1 LC provides that by establishing an employment relationship, an employee undertakes to perform specific work for the benefit and under the guidance of an employer, and an employer undertakes to employ an employee in return for remuneration. This definition is quite short and does not indicate all the features of an employment relationship. Those are – as determined by the jurisprudence and the legal literature – voluntary character, personal work performance on a continuous basis, subordination, and work performance for the benefit of an employer who carries the risk related to the employment. The legal nature of a contract cannot be determined on the basis of a single factor, only on a comprehensive assessment of the factual situation. There are three types of employment contract: a contract for a trial period, a fixed-term contract, and a contract for an indefinite period of time.