ABSTRACT
Introduction There have been laws regulating the employment relationship for as long as there have been employment relationships. Throughout the industrialized world, societies have claimed a signifi cant stake in workers’ terms and conditions of employment, and have been unwilling to leave them entirely to the vagaries of private bargaining within unregulated labour markets. For much of the twentieth century, the primary mode of societal intervention into the employment relationship took the form – or a variety of forms – of frameworks for collective representation and bargaining. But even when and where collective bargaining was the dominant mode of workplace governance, the collective freedom of contract was either constrained by legislation (e.g. setting a fl oor on labour standards), coordinated through (corporatist) institutions accountable in some manner to the wider public, or both. Work has long been deemed too important to leave its regulation entirely to the decisions of workers and employers alone.
