About this project
Since 1907, a basic principle of Dutch labour law has been that there is a uniform regulation for all labour relations, rather than a set of special provisions, regardless of the name the parties have given the agreement and regardless of the type of work (Jansen and Loonstra 2013). Uniformity also ensures the togetherness of institutions, e.g. collective agreements and social security. Protecting only certain (groups of) workers would not be stable and financially viable from an organisational perspective. It can also be argued from an EU legal perspective that regulation of various atypical employment relationships would conflict with the EU workers' definition (Kountouris 2018).
At the same time, one of the core functions of labour law is to remedy inequality of bargaining power to eliminate labour relations failures (Cabrelli and Zahn 2017). That function is under pressure. The crisis then seems to be caused by a mismatch between the two building blocks of labour law. This needs to be addressed by reassessing both the basic principle and core function of labour law. With that in mind, this project contributes to the further development of labour law scholarship in three ways.
First, apart from identifying a mismatch (Jansen and Loonstra 2013) and establishing the need for a new labour architecture law (van der Heijden 1997), current research lacks a rigorous and scientifically sound examination of the identified mismatch.
While Davidov's A Purposive Approach to Labour Law (Davidov 2016) serves as an inspiration for this research, there are important differences with the underlying approach: Davidov does not focus on civil law systems, but only on so-called common law systems, ignoring a continental European perspective, while adopting a level of generalisation across all jurisdictions (civil and common law). His approach is therefore not easy to apply to the Netherlands.
This research precisely pursues the foregoing. In designing a legal blueprint, this project provides the key parameters to address and realign the current mismatch in labour law and thus define new principles for the future.