MSEs are an increasingly important source of employment creation in many States.• Job quality in MSEs is generally very poor.• Poor job quality is due in part to the fact that many MSEs are unstable, short-lived and operate in a state of semi-formality. This has repercussions for job quality and for broader economic growth and development.• The formalization of MSEs is critical for the creation of Decent Work: MSEs that operate within the scope of the regulatory framework are more likely to create productive, remunerative jobs in which workers have rights at work, security, and equality.• States must devise a policy environment that balances the need to protect workers, with acknowledgement of the extent to which MSEs genuinely require special regulatory measures in light of their ability to meet the costs of the regulatory framework.• A key challenge for the ILO and for its member States is how to devise a legal and regulatory environment that promotes Decent Work in MSEs and facilitates economic growth.• Labour and labour related laws can be an important means of improving job quality.• This study suggests that there is significant scope for States to take regulatory action to address these challenges. CHAPTER 3 LABOUR LAW, JOB QUALITY AND FORMALIZATION OF MSEsChapter summary• Job quality for workers in MSEs falls far below the level necessary to promote or achieve Decent Work.• There is little evidence to suggest that excluding MSEs from labour laws, or failing to apply them in practice, has major positive effects on MSE growth and economic development.• There are substantial benefits that can be gained from compliance with labour laws.• Surveys across seven countries have found that MSE owners do not regard the costs of complying with labour laws as a major constraint on MSE growth.• Evidence suggests MSE owners make strategic choices about which elements of their regulatory environment they will comply with. This suggests that they will respond to innovative regulatory approaches targeted specifically at MSEs.

The Work Choices package of legislative reforms has significantly altered both the institutions and the instruments of the federal regulatory architecture for setting minimum working conditions. This paper surveys the reduced role of awards and of the Australian Industrial Relations Commission, before considering the function and content of the Australian Fair Pay and Conditions Standard and Australian Pay and Classification Scales, as well as the role of the newly created Australian Fair Pay Commission. It argues that the Work Choices reforms have shifted power over the setting of minimum working conditions to the government, which will set many conditions directly, and to employers, who will be entitled to require employees to be party to workplace agreements that displace very many of the minimum working conditions that are otherwise purportedly guaranteed. These shifts have opened up the space for significant reductions in minimum working conditions, as well as for falls in real wages for those not able to benefit from wage bargaining.

Globalization is generally thought to be harmful for human rights, as the state retreats in favor of international organizations or private actors. Analysis of human rights law regulating the use of prisoners' labor offers an interesting insight into the impact of globalization on human rights, particularly where the private operation of prisons is concerned. Prisoners held in privately run facilities are better protected by international human rights law than those in publicly-run prisons, at least in their capacity as workers. The applicable law, however, offers only tenuous protection: there are doctrinal inconsistencies, and the law presumes that state power exists to exact forced labor.

The allocation of any benefit that arises from worker-generated innovation is complicated by the importance of three separate areas of law -employment law, intellectual property law and equity -and the distinction between those types of innovation that attract intellectual property rights and those types that do not (the latter being a category that is often referred to as 'know-how'). The purpose of this article is to engage with the legal scholarship on the principles that are relevant to innovation. To date, the discussion has focused on two distinct approaches -what may be termed the economic and the fairness perspectives. The former may be seen as a justification for the current regime, while the latter has focused on the perceived needs of workers (in large part in opposition to the employers). Our argument is that these two approaches are both incomplete. In an attempt to get closer to a workable framework for the effective allocation of benefits, we offer a third approach; one that is based on the practices that are central to the employerworker relationship. 1

The authors use time series econometric analysis applying non‐stationary panel data methods to estimate the relationships between employment protection legislation and legal protection of different forms of employment (part‐time, fixed‐term and agency work), and economic outcomes, with a data set based on the Centre for Business Research Labour Regulation Index (CBR–LRI), covering 117 countries from 1970 to 2013. Findings suggest that these laws have become significantly more protective over time and that strengthening worker protection is associated with an increase in labour's share of national income, rising labour force participation, rising employment, and falling unemployment, although the observed magnitudes are small when set against wider economic trends.