Labor Law and Institutional designs: norms, practices and conceptions in dispute

The Dossier aims to contribute to contemporary reflections that articulate Labor Law and Change, in particular to map the debates on (a) labor reforms and counter-reforms, (b) the demands for new horizons in labor regulations in different normative spaces, (c) the performance of labor system institutions and their contribution to the effectiveness and efficiency of labor rights, (d) as well as the disputes over public policies to combat precarious work, reduce informality and regulate new forms of work and ways of working, which are driven by the changing nature of productive organization in capitalism and regulated by different policy options.

It intends to problematize the processes of productive change, institutional reforms, legislative amendments, constitutional mutations, hermeneutic and jurisprudential turns, both those which contribute to the disintegration and the corrosion the structural axes of Labor Law, reducing the efficacy and effectiveness of its norms, and those which, on the other hand, aim to reinforce the purposes of a legal branch focused on the needs of protecting workers' rights, controlling economic power and the employment and algorithmic powers, and affirming the human rights of all working people.

For this purpose, the call involves articles in several languages (Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, French and English) and focused on national and international reflections on multiple perspectives, with interdisciplinary approaches (i) of theoretical and reflective bias that allow revisiting the Labor Law itself, its configuration, specificities, objectives, actuality and relevance in the contemporary world; (ii) of a legal-political nature that contemplates debates based on the need to update legal institutes, review reforms or counter-reforms, regulate non-regulated areas or (iii) of a prescriptive, comparative nature or focused on dogmatic problems related to the necessary overcoming of precedents and the use of conventionality controls in order to make domestic law compatible with the guidelines provided for in the international norms coming from the Inter-American System of Human Rights and the International Labour Organization.

Based on the theoretical assumption that Labor Law aims at the control of techniques, the reduction of inequalities, the reduction of asymmetries and the integration of workers and their collective and representative organizations in the various spaces of public and private deliberation, the dossier intends to stimulate the dissemination of studies that contribute to social dialogue and with national and international debates around the rescue of the constructions and meanings of a labor regulation committed to democracy and the rights regime."

Articles written in English, Portuguese, Italian, Spanish, and French will be accepted.

Submission Deadline: February 23, 2023 to June 20, 2023.

Organizers of the Thematic Dossier:

Sayonara Grillo is an associate professor at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (PPGD-UFRJ), with a PhD in Legal Sciences and a master's degree in State Theory and Constitutional Law from PUC-Rio.

Nunzia Castelli is professor at the University Castilla la Mancha (UCLM)Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (PPGD-UFRJ), with a PhD in Legal Sciences at the Universidad Castilla la Mancha (UCLM) and Universitá degli Studi di Roma Torvergata (Italia).

Karen Artur is a tenured assistant professor at the Federal University of Juiz de Fora (UFJF), with a PhD in Political Science and a master’s degree in Social Sciences from the University of São Carlos (UFSCAR), and a post-doctoral internship at UFRJ (PPGSA-IFCS).