Dear Colleagues and friends,
As soon as I received the email saying that Professor Judy Fudge was nominated for the Bob Hepple Award for distinguished achievement in labour law, I volunteered to introduce her. I knew that a lot of her colleagues, friends and those influenced by her amazing work, would be eager to do it. Although I feel sorry for monopolizing that honour, I still hope to tell you how her work has inspired people, like me, who seek to look into the interaction between labour law, workers’ movement and society.
When I first found out about her, I asked her to review my draft paper on precarious workers’ legal battle in Korea, in 2008. I didn’t know her personally, and I was an early-career researcher and totally unknown person from the Global South. But very surprisingly, she sent me very detailed comments and advice on my paper with warm encouragement, in a few days. I was deeply moved by her kindness, generosity and insight. Since then, Judy has become my mentor.
This may be a very personal experience, but I think it also shows how great of a scholar and person she is. I can summarise her achievement as creative dismantling of existing boundaries and transforming labour law’s boundaries.
The first and foremost boundary is the employment relationship.
When I began to communicate with her, I struggled to grapple with questions like how labour law should regulate a proliferation of precarious work. At that time, Korean society couldn’t even reach a consensus on the definition of precarious workers who were deprived of their rights and even their name. “Atypical”, “non-standard”, “vulnerable”, and “workers in need of protection” and so on – these were often used terminology. Professor Fudge has taken a socio-legal approach to the study of work and labour, and she is committed to fostering a multidisciplinary approach to understanding the challenges and opportunities facing workers. Her initial research was on Canadian labour law history and precarious work. Since the early 1990s, Judy has already argued that such terms take ‘standard’ employment relationships as an unchangeable definitional starting point but without examining how that norm was constructed and deteriorating. In this way, Judy sees the legal regime as historical constructing of inequality. She has looked into that law has played a role in structuring and mediating the power relations between workers and capital. In other words, labour law is directly about power and distribution.
Secondly, the boundary of work in the capitalism itself is the subject of her insightful analysis. She has argued that unpaid care and domestic work performed in the household, typically by women, troubles the personal scope of labour law. Combined with social policy and family law, labour law also allocates responsibilities between “different social spheres and institutions such as the state, firms, families or households, and the wider community”.
Redrawing the territorial and personal scope of labour law in light of feminist understandings of social reproduction, her work renders us to extend the boundaries of the field beyond paid work to unpaid caring and domestic labour, and beyond formal employment to informal economy.
Her most recent work goes further or returns to the fundamental question: How and why does the law categorise some forms of labour as free and others as unfree?
She is currently publishing the ground -breaking book – “Labour exploitation, Modern slavery and Unfree labour. If labour law’s goals are seen solely in terms of protection and inequality, this critical dimension of freedom – self-determination or self-government – is ignored. Self-determination or non-domination is also an important goal of labour law, as it is a critical dimension of freedom. Feminists are wary of attempts to substitute protection for self-determination. Non-domination is where equality and freedom meet.
Last but not the least, she keeps exploring the reality of social life, crossing the boundary of entrenched academia. An activist as well as an academic, she has worked with women’s groups, legal clinics, and the International Labour Organization. From her own commitment to workers’ struggle for human dignity and self-domination and with respect for workers organisation, she advocated that it is crucial to institutionalize a plurality of forms of workers’ collective representation that provide an independent basis for workers to exercise power.
Labour lawyers, adjudicators, and policymakers cannot ignore the problem of power, and we cannot pretend that the current distribution of power is inevitable. However, a few centuries ago, When the contemporary form of labour exploitation and key concept of labour law had emerged in the late 19th century, Karl Marx wrote:
““The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it”
Professor Judy Fudge has echoed that brave wisdom: Stop discussing labour exploitation and let’s fix it.
Please give a round of applause to 2025 LLRN Awards Recipient, Judy Fudge.
29 June 2025, Bangkok
Aelim Yun