Labour Legislation and Public Policy A Contemporary History

In this path-breaking work, the authors seek to offer students a fresh way of looking at modern labour law. By taking as their starting point the idea that labour law, having once been governed by common law rules, is now overwhelmingly regulated by statute, the authors show that labour law can only be studied properly by understanding the legislation behind it. They then proceed to lead the student to an understanding of how and why the legislation came to be enacted. They therefore examine, in chronological order, the history and political context of every major piece of labour legislation from 1945 up to and including the momentous changes of the Thatcher years. Guiding the reader through four and a half decades of almost continuous legislative activity, the authors successfully demonstrate how the law was created and why it looks as it does today. No other textbook on this subject takes this approach.

1 - Collective Laissez-faire
2 - Full Employment and the Post-war Consensus 1945-1951
3 - The Easy Decade 1951-1961
4 - Modernization and Experiments with Planning 1961-1970
5 - Industrial Justice and the Individual Worker 1968-1971
6 - The End of Agreement: Collective Labour Law 1965-1974
7 - The Social Contract 1974-1979
8 - Reducing the Power of Trade Unions 1979-1990
9 - Restructuring the Labour Economy 1979-1990

Paul Davies and Mark Freedland co-wrote Labour Law: Cases and Materials (Weidenfeld and Nicolson - second edition 1980) which was very highly respected and became the standard teaching text until it became out of date in the mid-1980s. Paul Davies is the editor of Oxford's Industrial Law Journal and Mark Freedland is the author of The Contract of Employment (OUP, 1972) - sales?