Bristol Studies in Law and Social Justice explores the role of law in securing social justice in society and the economy. The focus is on ‘social justice’ as a normative ideal, and the law as a critical tool in influencing (for good or for ill) the social structures that shape people's lives. This international series is designed to be inclusive of a wide range of methodologies and disciplinary approaches. Contributions examine these issues from multiple legal perspectives, including constitutional law, discrimination law, human rights, contract law, criminal law, migration law, labour law, social welfare law, property law, international and supranational law. The Series has broad jurisdictional coverage, including single- country, comparative, international and regional legal orders, and encourages a critical and interdisciplinary approach to legal analysis.

Bristol Studies in Law and Social Justice explores the role of law in securing social justice in society and the economy. The focus is on ‘social justice’ as a normative ideal, and the law as a critical tool in influencing (for good or for ill) the social structures that shape people's lives. This international series is designed to be inclusive of a wide range of methodologies and disciplinary approaches. Contributions examine these issues from multiple legal perspectives, including constitutional law, discrimination law, human rights, contract law, criminal law, migration law, labour law, social welfare law, property law, international and supranational law. The series has broad jurisdictional coverage, including single-country, comparative, international and regional legal orders, and encourages a critical and interdisciplinary approach to legal analysis.

Bristol Studies in Law and Social Justice explores the role of law in securing social justice in society and the economy. The focus is on ‘social justice’ as a normative ideal, and the law as a critical tool in influencing (for good or for ill) the social structures that shape people’s lives. This international series is designed to be inclusive of a wide range of methodologies and disciplinary approaches. Contributions examine these issues from multiple legal perspectives, including constitutional law, discrimination law, human rights, contract law, criminal law, migration law, labour law, social welfare law, property law, international and supranational law. The series has broad jurisdictional coverage, including single-country, comparative, international and regional legal orders, and encourages a critical and interdisciplinary approach to legal analysis.

Labour lawyers are familiar with the binary divide between employees and the self-employed. Historically, this also demarcated the exclusion of competition law restraints on workers’ collective action. In recent times, growing numbers in the labour market are self-employed yet work in circumstances of economic disempowerment. They would benefit from collective bargaining, but competition law operates as a barrier to its realization. This chapter considers a ‘fundamental rights’ strategy for challenging competition law restraints. This strategy is based on the simple claim that the fundamental human right to bargain collectively is a right for ‘everyone’. The chapter identifies some weaknesses and problems with this approach within the European context. Abstractions like the ‘everyone’ argument can be counterproductive because human rights must be situated within existing power relations and economic structures in labour markets. Nevertheless, a suitably contextual fundamental rights strategy has an important role to play. On this contextual approach, reflected in the European Social Charter, entitlements to collective bargaining must be sensitive to substantive social and economic disadvantages. The exclusion of competition law would no longer be tied to specific contractual forms like ‘employee’.

Legal texts are the outcome of political processes. As such they provide an insight into the deep ideological changes that may be taking place within any legal system. In this chapter, we propose to contrast two important instruments of the EC/EU, the first being the Community Charter of the Fundamental Social Rights of Workers of 1989, and the other being the EU Social Pillar of 2017. The aim is not to engage in a literal compare and contrast of the two instruments, as one might compare and contrast apples and oranges; rather, it is to engage in a contextual compare and contrast of the two instruments, with a view to understanding what they tell us about the changing economic and political direction of the EU. In doing so we aim better to understand the evolution of social policy, the changing role of trade unions within the EU, and the inactivity in relation to employment rights despite the great changes in the global economy and working practices since the last employment law directive was produced in 2008.