For many students, the first few weeks of a course in labour law can seem rather daunting. Many of the subject's main principles are derived from statute, rather than case law, so there is less room for the kind of detailed case analysis familiar from core subjects like contract and tort. Policy discussions also play a much greater role in labour law than they do in, say, land law or trusts. When writing about anti-discrimination law, for example, labour lawyers think about whether positive discrimination should be permitted, or whether employers should be allowed to say that ‘market forces’ led them to pay men more than they pay women doing equal work.

The subject's emphasis on legislation and on policy arguments is confusing enough. But life gets even more difficult when we look at the way in which labour lawyers construct their policy arguments. In what Hugh Collins has termed the ‘productive disintegration’ of labour law, writers now draw on a wide range of other disciplines and approaches in order to make sense of the law. As Chapter 1 will show, labour lawyers have traditionally used industrial relations, a branch of sociology, as a frame of reference. But this discipline has been joined by various kinds of economic analysis, arguments from social justice and the discourse of fundamental human rights.

This array of perspectives on labour law is what gives the subject its fascination. But for newcomers it can seem bewildering. Each perspective has its own methodology and its own set of internal problems.