A new legal order has arisen in the United Kingdom (‘UK’) following that country's withdrawal from the European Union (‘EU’). Nowhere are these changes more evident than in the complex rules that have emerged in the fields of freedom of movement and the right to work. In evaluating the new legal landscape, this Article has two overarching aims. The first is to assess the level of protection granted to the right to work and associated free movement rights within EU and UK law, including the terms of the EU-UK Withdrawal Agreement. The second aim is to examine the extent to which those right to work rules are reflective of the status of the right to work as a fundamental social right. It is argued that Brexit unmoors the right to work from EU free movement rules, thereby undermining the normative value of that right, while exacerbating flaws in domestic rules governing access to employment for both national and migrant workers.

At first glance, Part 3–1 of the Fair Work Act 2009 (Cth) seems to overlap with long-established anti-discrimination laws, offering protection against adverse, attribute-based conduct in employment. On close analysis, however, it turns out to be a new and quite different regime. Although the Fair Work Act offers a simple alternative to dated and complicated anti-discrimination laws, its provisions are at times overly-simple, raising uncertainty about how they will operate. Our analysis leads us to conclude that the approach to discrimination protection in the Fair Work Act, while an important addition to the remedies available to Australian workers, is compromised by failing to take account of lessons learned in the long history of anti-discrimination law.

This is the first work to explore the possibility of holding sports governing bodies and competition organisers vicariously liable for the tortious behaviour of athletes that compete under their auspices. In contrast to other scholarly contributions on vicarious liability in sport, this paper examines the scope of responsibility for athletes in individual sports (as opposed to team sports). It begins by drawing upon the recent tribunal proceedings between professional cyclist Jess Varnish and British Cycling to analyse the employment status of government-funded individual athletes. In calling for a contextual and policy-sensitive approach to the definition of an ‘employee’, this paper argues that certain normative and theoretical considerations ought to be granted more or less weight depending on the particular legal issue animating the dispute. Thereafter, and with one eye on the overly intrusive regulatory provisions found in sports such as tennis and golf, this paper also demonstrates that the vicarious liability of governing bodies and competition organisers could equally be extended to cover the tortious conduct of non-funded individual athletes. In making these claims, it is demonstrated how a sport-specific application of the doctrine may help to teach us a few broader lessons about vicarious liability more generally.

Employment-at-will (EAW) is the legal presumption that employers and employees may terminate an employment relationship for any or no reason. Defenders of EAW have argued that it promotes autonomy and efficiency. Critics have argued that it allows for the domination, subordination, and arbitrary treatment of employees. We intervene in this debate by arguing that the case for EAW is contextual in a way that existing business ethics scholarship has not considered. In particular, we argue that the justifiability of EAW for a given jurisdiction depends on existing complementarities among the institutions that constitute the jurisdiction’s political economy. Notably, our view takes seriously the ethical concerns EAW critics have raised by showing how these concerns can be mitigated through public policy measures that do not require eliminating EAW.

Gig work and other flexible labour practices have been subject to unprecedented levels of attention recently. While this topic has attracted significant interest from employment lawyers, it remains relatively underexplored from other pertinent legal and inter-disciplinary angles. This paper will adopt an alternative perspective on flexible work inspired by Coase's theory of the firm. Focusing on the implications of flexible work for the relative allocation of control, risk and reward within the firm, it will highlight how both task-oriented (gig) and on-demand (casual) work practices typically entail workers assuming most of the positional disadvantages associated with orthodox employment and self-employment, while enjoying none or few of the corresponding advantages. Using a hypothetical contract analysis, it will highlight the structural similarity between flexible work and unsecured financial investments in business firms by reference to key strands of institutional economics and law and finance literature. On this basis, it will enquire as to optimal forms of compensation that rational flexible workers can (counter-factually) be regarded as bargaining for in the absence of impediments to efficient contracting, and as the price for trading off their traditional employment guarantees.

While the rights of domestic workers are expanding in international law, including through the adoption of the ILO Domestic Workers Convention in 2011, migrant domestic workers remain particularly vulnerable to employment-related abuse and exploitation. This article explores the intersection of the employment law and migration law regimes applicable to migrant domestic workers in the United Kingdom, France and Ireland. The article suggests that the precarious immigration status of many migrant domestic workers renders employment protections, such as they exist in each jurisdiction, largely illusory in practice for this group of workers. The labour standards contained in the Domestic Workers Convention, together with the recommendations of the UN Committee on Migrant Workers on the features of an appropriate immigration regime for migrant domestic workers, are identified as providing an alternative normative model for national regulatory frameworks.