Unionizing Subcontracted Labor
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Hila Shamir
Subcontracting — the practice of using intermediaries to contract workers, whether through temp agencies, manpower agencies, franchise, or other multilayered contracting — is an increasingly popular pattern of employment worldwide. Whether justified from a business perspective or not, subcontracting has dire implications for workers’ rights: it insulates the beneficiary of their labor from direct legal obligations to the workers’ wages and working conditions and drastically reduces their ability to effectively unionize. This Article explores the impact of subcontracting on unionization of subcontracted labor. It argues that labor law in most postindustrial developing economies is structured around the Fordist model of production and employment and therefore provides insufficient protections to workers whose employment arrangements deviate from that model.
The Article maps the various hurdles subcontracting poses to unionization. It identifies three main challenges to the basic assumptions that animate traditional labor law: first, that a union has leverage and significant bargaining power vis-à-vis an employer; second, that the union and the employer are repeat players in negotiations, and that accordingly the labor contract is a relational contract in which both parties consider the short and the long term in their calculations; and third, that the bargaining unit represented by the union is relatively easily discernable and relatively stable. The Article argues that subcontracting disrupts all of these assumptions. Accordingly, in order to remain relevant to subcontracted workers, labor law requires adaptations. The Article sketches a preliminary list of existing and potential legal responses to subcontracting that better guarantee subcontracted workers’ rights to unionize. Its main suggestion is to move away from a bilateral towards a multilateral structure of collective agreement bargaining in subcontracting situations. Finally, the Article questions whether law can provide a once-and-for-all solution to the problems posed by subcontracting, and explores the dynamic role of law and unionizing in this context.
© 2016 by Theoretical Inquiries in Law
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Artikel in diesem Heft
- Theoretical Inquiries in Law
- Research Article
- Introduction: Labor Scholarship in an Era of Uncertainty
- Research Article
- Reframing the New Deal: The Past and Future of American Labor and the Law
- Research Article
- The Right Not to Have Rights: Posted Worker Acquiescence and the European Union Labor Rights Framework
- Research Article
- Organizing: Should the Employer Have a Say?
- Research Article
- Workplace Democracy and Democratic Worker Organizations: Notes on Worker Centers
- Research Article
- Organizing Workers in Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Mexico: The Authoritarian-Corporatist Legacy and Old Institutional Designs in a New Context
- Research Article
- Organizing Workers in “Hybrid Systems”: Comparing Trade Union Strategies in Four Countries — Austria, Germany, Israel and the Netherlands
- Research Article
- Trade Union Ambivalence Toward Enforcement of Employment Standards as an Organizing Strategy
- Research Article
- Unionizing Subcontracted Labor
- Research Article
- The Untamed Politics of Urban Informality: “Gray Space” and Struggles for Recognition in an African City
- Research Article
- Informal Workers’ Aggregation and Law
- Research Article
- Active Industrial Citizenship of Domestic Workers: Lessons Learned from Unionizing Attempts in Israel and the United Kingdom
- Research Article
- Organizing in the Shadows: Domestic Workers in the Netherlands
