Challenges to Labour Law

Аннотация

The article deals with three main challenges to labour law referring especially to the German experience.The world-wide market induced enterprises to relocate their production and to reduce labour costs at home.In Germany, a quite indirect way of exercising pressure on the workers was developed; counter-measureswere rare and did not really change the situation. TTIP and CETA will worsen the situation because nationalsovereignty in social and environmental questions will fade away. The second challenge comes from inequalityexisting among workers as well as in society as a whole. There is a scission between very wealthypeople on one side and people becoming poorer and poorer on the other side. Labour law has not yetdeveloped the instruments to realize more equality among workers but some ideas are discussed. The thirdchallenge is the digitalisation of many activities; they are no more bound to certain places or certain timesof the day. The “freedom” to work at any moment and at any place entails very long working hours, work atnight and work on Sundays. Legal rules on working time lose more and more there importance. A solutioncan be the right of workers´ representatives to discuss the tasks given to individual workers, but other meansare examined in the article, too. The internet makes crowdworking possible — a new form of work which iscurrently not covered by labour law.