As flexible career paths become more common in European labour markets, how to combine the flexibility required by non-standard work with new patterns of security is the focus of political debate. Some European Union (EU) countries have launched radical labour market reforms, while in others such reforms remain limited. This paves the way for bottom-up solutions developed by private and non-profit labour market intermediaries in order to support the job transitions of non-standard workers. We map these initiatives through a multidimensional grid and explore the extent to which they contribute to renewed regulation of modern labour markets. We outline two ideal-typical approaches. The first extends internal labour markets to triangular employment relationships by considering workers as ‘quasi-employees’. The second involves more disruptive solutions by treating non-standard workers as ‘quasi-self-employed’.

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Through their different encounters with union, court, and government equality agency lawyers, workers report diverse understandings of their personal experience of injustice in the workplace. This paper examines workers' experiences of discrimination and the role legal professionals play in litigating these issues in Belgium. Bringing together legal and rights consciousness studies and the sociology of intermediation and tracking different stages in the construction of discrimination cases, from the moment when a future litigant describes an event as an injustice to the moment when the judge recognises a discriminatory behaviour (or conversely, dismisses a case), we suggest several possible empirical explanations of the way in which interactions with legal intermediaries affect workers' rights consciousness. Because we refer to sociolegal studies from common law countries, this paper also calls into question how best to import these studies to assist in analysing legal consciousness in continental Europe.

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