This article empirically investigates two propositions normally advanced to explain employment stagnation in the organised sector of the Indian labour market namely, rigid labour laws regulating the ‘hiring and firing’ of workers (along with factory closures) and militant trade union activity boosting workers’ bargaining power. It is claimed that labour laws arrest employment creation by making the labour adjustment process difficult. Additionally, it is claimed that workers’ increased bargaining power raises the effective cost of labour, hindering employment creation. This article critically examines both these claims. First, it questions whether labour laws can be held responsible as an explanation for employment stagnation in the organised sector as a whole, since a close reading of the Indian legislation reveals that labour laws apply in less than 35% of aggregate employment in the organised sector in India. Next, it investigates whether employment stagnation in those industry segments where labour laws apply – namely, organised manufacturing – is due to restrictions on ‘hiring and firing’. We find no evidence to support this hypothesis. Finally, it analyses the trend in workers’ bargaining power through various indicators, and finds such power to be unambiguously declining. Thus, the study finds no empirical support for the two conventional arguments put forward to explain employment stagnation in the organised sector of the Indian labour market.

In this paper we outline and critique legal approaches to poor mental health at work in the UK. We argue that the current legal framework is not ‘fit for purpose’. Overall, the existing framework promotes a problematic model that is ineffective because each element, individually and as part of the whole, fails to adequately engage with the nuanced realities of the relationship between undertaking paid work and suffering poor mental health. It is, we suggest, disjointed because it has evolved from a patchwork of provisions, each with different foundations, motivations, ambitions and flaws. The need for a re-focus, and what this might entail, is considered, and the capacity of a model centred on addressing workplace mental health as a manifestation of broader notions of vulnerability is explored.

This article investigates how the Chinese labour law system has helped to reproduce capitalist hegemony, i.e. the ethico-political, moral and cultural leadership of the ruling class. Based on intensive fieldwork in the Pearl River Delta and 115 interviews with migrant workers, this article shows that the labour law system has exercised a double hegemonic effect with regards to capital–labour relations and state–labour relations. Through normalizing, countervailing, concealing and transmuting mechanisms, the labour law system has been able to buffer both the market economy and the party-state from workers’ radical and fundamental criticism. However, the double hegemony mediated through the labour law system has influenced the Chinese migrant workers in an uneven manner: some of them have granted active consent to the ruling class leadership; some have only rendered passive consent; and some have refused to give any consent at all.