Dialogue & Debate: Labour, Constitution and A Sense of Measure: A Debate with Alain Supiot

Abstract

The paper 'A sense of measure' that we publish in this section was Alain Supiot's contribution to a series of workshops organised at the School of Law of the University of Glasgow, in autumn 2009, on the general theme of 'constitutionalising employment relations'. The underlying idea for the seminars was to ask the question of labour law as a question of constitutional law; to cut across the categorical distinctions that are taken, increasingly, as given between the public sphere and the workplace. The entrenchment of this distinction between public sphere and workplace obscures the fact that significantly similar forms of powerlessness and vulnerability affect both citizens and workers. The emphasis on constitutionalisation marked the attempt to recover an earlier vocabulary of labour law; one that did not undercut the expression in anything but market terms of the creation of value and the stakes of the employment relation. The original impetus for our project was a shared concern that much of what has been written about labour law over the past 10 years or so emphasised a move away from traditional conceptions of its function of redressing asymmetries in the respective positions of employers and workers through protective measures, towards a full-blown market paradigm focused on maximizing flexibility. Together with this development, there seemed to be a growing perception that 'old ways' of regulating employment relations had become inappropriate. Instead, there was discussion of the benefits of minimal or 'light'The papers published in this section were presented at the second of three workshops on the theme, 'Constitutionalising Employment Relations'. We are grateful to Social & Legal Studies, the Modern Law Review and the School of Law, University of Glasgow for providing financial support for the workshops.