ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the concepts of vulnerability and resilience to analyze individuals, institutions, and the role of law in the context of employment and work relationships. Political and policy assessments tend to focus on perceived institutional, economic, and market vulnerabilities of employers in the face of uncertainty and change, often ignoring corresponding detriments to employees' wellbeing and their potential implications for society. Inequitable and uneven attention to the corresponding vulnerabilities of employees versus employers can raise fundamental questions of social justice that suggest new avenues for critical engagement with labor and employment law. Vulnerability theory challenges this dominant, static, and individualized legal subject, and argues for the recognition of the reality of the human condition as finite and fragile, as well as socially and materially dynamic. Vulnerability theory rejects the limited and abstracted subjectivity constructed in the liberal imagination. Human vulnerability therefore has a social or relational component, as well as a physical manifestation.
