No. 25700. European convention on the legal status of migrant workers. Concluded at Strasbourg on 24 November 1977

Author(s):  
Ian Smith ◽  
Aaron Baker ◽  
Owen Warnock

This chapter considers the laws that affect trade unions and employment relations at a collective level, with the exception of strikes and other industrial action which are examined in Chapter 10. The chapter begins by considering the legal status of a trade union and the statutory concept of trade union independence. The applicability of trade union law to workers in the gig economy is also considered. The focus then shifts to the ways in which the law seeks to secure freedom of association, by provisions which protect and support union membership and activities including giving protection against discrimination and providing rights to time off for union duties and activities. The chapter then turns to the concept of recognition of unions for collective bargaining, and the legal rights that come with recognition. It also examines the statutory system for securing recognition. The relevance of the European Convention on Human Rights is considered throughout as are the changes made by the Trade Union Act 2016. The law relating to domestic and European works councils is also considered.


2019 ◽  
Vol 138 (11-12) ◽  
pp. 1287-1299 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marjut Salokannel ◽  
Heta Tarkkala ◽  
Karoliina Snell

Abstract Biobank operations started officially in Finland in 2013 when the Biobank Act defining and regulating biobank operations came into force. Since then, ten biobanks have been established and they have started to collect new prospective samples with broad consent. The main corpus of biobank samples, however, consists of approximately 10 million “legacy samples”. These are old diagnostic or research samples that were transferred to biobanks in accordance with the Biobank Act. The focus of this article is on ambiguities concerning these legacy samples and their transfer in terms of legality, human rights, autonomy, and social sustainability. We analyse the Finnish biobank operations in the context of international regulation, such as the European Convention of Human Rights, the Oviedo Convention, European Charter of Fundamental Rights, the GDPR, and EU Clinical Trials Regulation, and show that the practice of using legacy samples is at times problematic in relation to this regulatory framework. We argue that the prevailing interpretations of these regulations as translated into the Finnish biobank practices undermine the autonomy of individuals by not giving individuals a right to consent or an actionable right to opt-out of the transfer of these legacy samples to the biobank. This is due to the fact that individuals are not given effective notification of such transfers. Thus, issues regarding the legal status of the biobank samples and the social sustainability of biobank operations remain a challenge for biobanks in Finland despite governmental efforts to create pioneering, comprehensive, and enabling legislation.


2018 ◽  
Vol 27 (3) ◽  
pp. 249-272 ◽  
Author(s):  
Grace Baey ◽  
Brenda S. A. Yeoh

Within the scholarship on precarity, low-waged contract-based migrants are recognized as centrally implicated in precarious employment conditions at the bottom of neoliberal capitalist labor markets. Precarity as a socially corrosive condition stems from both the multiple insecurities of the workplace as disposable labor, and a sense of deportability as migrant subjects with marginal socio-legal status in the host society. Our study of Bangladeshi construction workers in Singapore contributes to refining understandings of precarity by approaching labor migration as a cumulative, intensively mediated process, whereby risks and vulnerabilities are compounded across different sites in migrants’ trajectories, even as they enact themselves as mobile, aspiring subjects. As a condition-in-the-making, precarity is experienced and compounded, through a continuum beginning in pre-migration indebtedness, multiplying through entanglements with the migration industry, and manifesting in workplace vulnerabilities at destination. It is most finely balanced when predictability and planning yield to arbitrary hope.


2011 ◽  
Vol 12 (10) ◽  
pp. 1833-1861 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roderic O'Gorman

Ever since the conceptual division of rights into three separate categories; civil, political and social, the legal status of social rights has been controversial. This divergence in views is illustrated by the decision of the Council of Europe in 1950 to protect civil and political rights through a judicial format where adherence to the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) was ensured by the European Court of Human Rights, whereas social rights were addressed separately through the European Social Charter (“Social Charter”), with merely a reporting mechanism to the European Committee of Social Rights.


2019 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 63-89
Author(s):  
Indrė Balčaitė

AbstractThis study probes the relationship between legal precarity and transborder citizenship through the case of the Karen from Myanmar in Thailand. Collected through ethnographic multi-sited fieldwork between 2012 and 2016, interconnected individual life stories evolving across the Myanmar-Thailand border allow the critical interrogation of the political and legal categories of ‘migrancy’, ‘refugeeness’, and ‘citizenship’, teasing out their blurry boundaries in migrants’ experience. Following the recent critical research in legal ethnography, this study demonstrates that legal precarity is not simply an antithesis to citizenship. The social and legal dimensions of citizenship may diverge, creating in-between areas of not-yet-full-citizenship with varying levels of heft (Macklin 2007). The article consists of three parts. First, it offers a theoretical framework to reconcile the Karen legal precarity (even de facto statelessness) and citizenship, even on both sides of the border (legally impossible). Second, it presents the three groups of Karen in Thailand, produced by the interaction of three major waves of Karen eastward migration and tightening Thai citizenship and migration regulations: Thai Karen, refugees, and migrant workers. All three face varying levels of legal precarity of temporary status without full citizenship. However, the last part demonstrates the intertwined nature of those groups. A grassroots transborder perspective reveals the resilience of the Karen networks when pooling together resources of the hubs established on Thai soil by the three waves. Even the most recent arrivals in Thailand use those resources to move from one precarious legal status to another and even to clandestinely obtain citizenship.


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