International Collaborative on Social Europe

Law and Society Association Collaborative Research Network 8 (Labor)

Program for International Research Collaborative (PIRC)

International Collaborative on Social Europe, Berlin, July 25-28, 2007

The Program for International Research Collaborative (PIRC) was established by the Law and Society Association "to foster sustained international collaboration among socio-legal scholars, stimulate new approaches to comparative study of socio-legal topics, and support mapping of international and transnational phenomena." (http://www.lawandsociety .org/International/IC_sum.htm).

Social Europe, under twin pressures of globalization and broadening European integration, constitutes the theme of this international research collaborative. Its resilience to neoliberal pressures and efforts to establish a European Social Model (ESM) at the level of the European Union has attracted worldwide attention. It is undoubtedly true that with the enlargement of the European Union not only the new Central and East European member states but also the older member states are forced to modernize their welfare systems. It is, however, shared among these countries that the goal is improved social protection. Underlying the debate of Social Europe is the assumption that welfare protection has an important economic function for the performance of the European economy as a whole.

Each of the participants in the collaborative has rich experience in socio- legally-oriented research into comparative aspects of labor or social welfare law, and most bring the perspective of having spent extended periods of time teaching or conducting research on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. They are interested in the interaction of the domestic and the transnational, at both the regional and global levels, in law and in institutional arrangements and practices. Their focus varies, with some of the participants more interested in collective representation and participation organs such as trade union confederations, trade unions, and works councils, others more interested in the state and the supranational governance scheme, and others more focused on phenomena such as the mobility of workers, plants and jobs, and the increasingly transitory nature of the employment relationship, as these interact to create threats to established bodies of social law and its institutional framework.

The international collaborative provides a unique opportunity to forge an ongoing set of relationships, pooling the diverse perspectives and backgrounds of the participants and asking them to rethink their approach to the slice of the broad subject of Social Europe with which they are concerned. There are many groups of researchers devoting themselves to various aspects of this topic, but it is rare to combine, in one group, such a spectrum of foci, and with a willingness to truly collaborate intellectually in producing a unified product, despite what are likely to be divergent views on particular aspects. It is hoped that the collaboration will not only produce its own output, at least one volume of papers, and foster further ongoing collaboration among the participants, but also that it will lead the way to deeper, as well as wider, comparative socio-legal research collaborations. There would appear to be no other way to move forward in addressing transnational phenomena, which require an ability and willingness to shift perspective and combine knowledge, across national boundaries.

Biographical information about the IRC members (as of June 14, 2007):

Diamond Ashiagbor (UK) is a Lecturer in Law at University College London, having previously been a Research Fellow in the Institute of European and Comparative Law at the University of Oxford, and a Lecturer in Law at the University of Hull. She has also been a Visiting Fellow at Columbia Law School, New York, and the holder of a US-EU Fulbright Research Award. Her research interests primarily concern welfare state and labour market reform, and the evolution of new forms of governance to achieve the goals of European Union employment and social policy. Her recent publications include The European Employment Strategy: Labour Market Regulation and New Governance, (Oxford University Press, 2005) and her research for the international collaborative project will address questions of soft law and new governance within the EU.

Joel Handler (U.S.) is Richard C. Maxwell Professor of Law, UCLA Law School Professor of Policy Studies, Los Angeles, California, where he has been teaching since 1985. He received his A.B. from Princeton and his J.D. from Harvard Law School. His main area of research interest has been poverty and social welfare programs in the U.S. and in Western Europe. His current interest is the spread of work requirements and sanctions on the "socially excluded" with particular emphasis on the impact of immigration and high levels of youth unemployment on the various European welfare states, as well as the flip side, the rising pressures on European welfare states from the "socially excluded," primarily youth unemployment and immigration. This research builds on his previous work, Social Citizenship and Workfare in the United States and Western Europe: The Paradox of Inclusion (Cambridge U. Press 2004) and Blame Welfare, Ignore Poverty and Inequality (with Y. Hasenfeld) (accepted for publication).

Kerstin Jacobsson is Associate Professor of Sociology. She is a senior lecturer at South Stockholm University College and a research fellow at SCORE (Stockholm Centre for Organizational Research), Stockholm University. Recent research interests have been new forms of governance in the EU, where she has published extensively on the European employment strategy and the open method of co-ordination. Current research focuses on state - citizen relationships in Sweden.

Claire Kilpatrick (U.K.) is University Senior Lecturer, and Co- Director, Centre for European Legal Studies (CELS) at the University of Cambridge. From 1999-2000, she was a Jean Monnet Fellow at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy. She was previously Senior Lecturer at the University of London, Queen Mary and Westfield College. Her research has focused on the relationship between social protection under conditions of free trade and market integration, and the substantive and institutional relationships in which these changes are embedded, most recently, new soft law methods of European governance in connection with the Open Method of Coordination and the European Employment Strategy. This will also be the focus of her research in conjunction with this project.

Csilla Kollonay Lehoczky (Hungary) is Head of the Department of Labor and Social Law, Eötvös Loránd University Faculty of Law, as well as a member of the faculty of the Legal Studies Department at the Central European University, Budapest, Hungary. She received her JD from ELTE Faculty of Law, and her CSc from the Hungarian Academy of Science. She is also a member of the European Committee of Social Rights of the Council of Europe and a member of the Gender Equality Legal Experts’ Network of the Commission of the European Union. Her research for the international collaborative project will address the transformation of the labor/employment relationships, with special regard to the drastic alterations in the labor contract in the 21st century in Central and Eastern Europe, particularly the case of Hungary, under pressure related to accession to the European Union, and consider potential legal means of addressing the problem.

Guy Mundlak is a Professor of Law at the Faculty of Law, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel, with a joint appointment in the Department of Labor Studies in the Faculty of Social Sciences at the same university. He obtained his J.D. from the Hebrew University Faculty of Law in 1990, and his SJD from the Harvard Law School in 1995. His recently completed project The Right to Work was sponsored by the EU FP6 and carried out at the Universiteit van Amsterdam 2004-2005, where he was a Marie Curie research fellow. He is now developing a project to exam through empirical research the effectiveness of European soft law instruments pertaining to labor, employment, and work, in influencing the conduct of public and private actors in certain EU member states.

Ralf Rogowski (Germany) obtained his law degree in Berlin, his LL.M. from the University of Wisconsin and his Ph.D. in law from the European University Institute in Florence. He has been teaching at Warwick University in England since 1993. He has previously held teaching or research appointments at institutions in England, Germany, the United States and Hungary. His interests include systems theory of law and the regulation of employment in the European Union; these interests are conjoined in his research related to the collaborative. His research for this project will use new labor market theories to analyze experiments with so-called soft forms of governance, in particular in the context of the European Employment Strategy.

Katherine Stone is a Professor of Law at the UCLA School of Law, where she has been teaching since 2004. Prior to that, she was Professor of Law at Cornell Law School (1992-2004) and Anne Evans Estabrook Professor of Dispute Resolution at Cornell School of Industrial and Labor Relations (2000- 04). Previously, she was Professor of Law at the Benjamin N. Cardozo Law School, Yeshiva University from 1984 to 1992. Stone received her B.A. from Harvard University (1970) and earned her J.D. from Harvard Law School (1979). She was an attorney at Cohen Weiss & Simon from 1979-1981 and at Rabinowitz Boudin Standard Krinsky & Lieberman from 1981-1984. She has also visited at Chicago Law School (1990-91), Stanford Law School (1997) and Yale Law School (1999- 2000). She received both her B.A. and her J.D. from Harvard University. Professor Stone's most recent book, published by Cambridge University Press in 2004, is From Widgets to Digits: Employment Regulation for the Changing Workplace. In connection with this collaborative project, she will be conducting research on the demise of the standard labor contract, flexible work practices and the fragmentation of the employment relationship, its causes and consequences within Europe, and in comparison to North America.

András Tóth (Hungary) is Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Political Sciences, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Lecturer at the Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, Faculty of Sociology, an external research collaborator with the Freie Universität Berlin, Zentralinstitut für sozialwissenschaftliche Forschung (Institute for Interdisciplinary Social Science Research). From 1995-1998, he was first a Visiting Fellow, and then a Senior Research Fellow, European Trade Union Institute, Brussels, with which he continues to work as an external research collaborator. He received his B.A. in 1982 from the College of Public Administration, his M.A. in 1988 from the Eötvös Loránd Faculty of Sociology, and his Ph.D. in Sociology in 1997 from the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. His fields of specialization include Sociology of Work, Industrial Relations, Labor Law, Labor History, Human Resource Management, Sociology of Production Organization, and Sociology of Regional Development. He has conducted extensive research into Hungarian industrial relations, trade unions, collective labor law, comparative industrial relations among Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries and among European Union countries, and the impact upon EU social partnership arrangements of the accession of the CEE countries. His research for this collaborative will examine from a comparative industrial relations viewpoint the impact of accession on the industrial relations systems of the acceding countries, and the impact upon social Europe of the accession of countries with weaker industrial relations institutions.

David M. Trubek (U.S.) is David M. Trubek is Voss-Bascom Professor of Law and Senior Fellow of the Center for World Affairs and the Global Economy (WAGE). He also serves as co-director of the UW-Madison's European Union Center. From 1989-2001 he was the UW's Dean of International Studies and Director of the International Institute. He has published articles and books on the role of law in development, the social role of the legal profession, human rights, European integration, the impact of globalization on legal systems, the governance of work and welfare in a new economy, civil litigation, social theory, and critical legal studies. Along with Louise Trubek, David is a participant in the EU New Modes of Governance Project. He is working on research regarding the rise of new approaches to governance and the transformation of law, which he believes may supplant more traditional forms of law; he seeks to chart the emergence of these new forms, understand the causal processes behind their emergence, and track their impact on legal thought and practice in the US and Europe. His paper for this international collaborative project will address new approaches to governance and the emergence of "post-regulatory" law in the context of globalization, European Union employment and social policy; and international economic and social rights.

Marley Weiss (U.S.) received her B.A. from Barnard College in Columbia University and her J.D. from the Harvard Law School. She practiced labor law for ten years with the International Union, United Auto Workers, and has spent the following twenty-two years as a member of the faculty of the University of Maryland School of Law. She also has taught at Eötvös Loránd Faculty of Law and at the Central European University in Budapest, Hungary. She was the first Chair of the U.S. National Advisory Committee regarding the North American Agreement on Labor Cooperation (the NAALC, or NAFTA Labor Side Agreement). Her research interests primarily involve international and comparative labor law and industrial relations, with a particular focus on the interaction of domestic (municipal) labor law and institutions, on the one hand, and regional integration regimes such as the EU and NAFTA, on the other, as well as on cross-regional comparisons between integration-related social law developments within Europe and those within North America. Her research for this project will consider the interaction of capital redeployment and labor mobility, both within and across the borders of the EU, and their consequences for Member State and EU social law and institutions.