Legal Rights and Interests in the Workplace

This book provides teaching materials for a course merging two areas of law governing the labor market — collective labor law and individual employment law — which have historically been taught as separate courses. These materials represent an effort to interrelate or tie together these two bodies of law into a common framework. The broad premise of the book is that historically and functionally the predominant purpose of labor law has been to protect workers from market forces in the individual labor market. The articulate assumption is that individual bargaining in the labor market will lead to socially undesirable results and that the law here, as in many other areas, should come to the aid of the weaker party. It may do this in two ways: first, employees may be protected by direct regulation of terms and conditions of employment with laws such as minimum wage laws, health and safety laws and prohibitions against discrimination; second, employees may obtain a measure of protection by restructuring the labor market so as to replace individual bargaining with collective bargaining in the belief that the collective labor market will produce more acceptable social results.