Mobilising Transnational Labour Law in Search of Transformation in Europe

This paper provides a critical map of trade unions’ strategic engagements with transnational legal mechanisms in Europe. Despite high profile defeats and challenges faced by workers and trade unions before supranational courts, they have continued to mobilise complaint and supervisory mechanisms at the transnational level. This raises questions about the reasons why and how law is mobilised in the industrial relations context and over the transformative potential of transnational labour law. Legal argumentation has been mobilised to defend and redetermine legislative rights to protect vulnerable workers and provide the conditions for democracy at work. The experience of legal mobilisation detailed in this paper encourages a sceptical and pragmatic approach to social transformation via legal mobilisation. It will set out the legal opportunities that shape the effectiveness of transnational labour law mobilisation, as well as the structural limitations and competing normative interests that delimit the interpretive trajectory, recognition, and enjoyment of collective labour rights in contemporary Europe.