Democracy at Work: Contract, Status and Post-Industrial Justice
Channel: LSE Law School
Date: 2023-05-20

An event to mark the publication of Democracy at Work: Contract, Status and Post-Industrial Justice  (Polity, 2022) by Ruth Dukes and Wolfgang Streeck, with contributions from Diamond Ashiagbor (Kent), Hugh Collins (LSE), Lydia Hayes (Liverpool), Richard Hyman (LSE), Costas Lapavitsas (SOAS), Hannah Reed (Unite), Mike Wilkinson (LSE), and David Woodruff (LSE).

In their new book, Dukes and Streeck argue that the time is ripe to restate the principles of industrial democracy and citizenship for the post-industrial era. Considering developments within political economy, employment relations and labour law since the postwar decades, they trace the rise of globalization and the ‘dualisation’ of labour markets – the emergence of a core and periphery of workers – and the progressive insulation of working relations from democratic governance. What these developments amount to, they argue, is an urgent need for political intervention to tame the new world of ‘gigging’ and other forms of highly precarious work. This, according to the authors, will require far-reaching institution-building, designed to fill legal concepts such as ‘employment’ with political substance.