Employment Relations and Transformation of the Enterprise in the Global Economy

This book contains a selection of papers from the Thirteenth International Conference in commemoration of Marco Biagi, held at the Marco Biagi Foundation in Modena, Italy on 19 and 20 March 2015. The Conference brought together insights from labour law, economics, organisational theory and sociology, focusing on the relationship between the rapidly evolving structure of the enterprise, that affects both its formal and functional patterns, and the major pressures which labour relations are subject to, prompted by modern socio-economic processes, favoured by technological development and accentuated by the global crisis. The papers selected for this volume address the issues broadly referred to above along three strands of analysis. The first part tackles, in a legal perspective, the problem of identifying the exact nature of the employment relationship and the corresponding legal rights and responsibilities under an increasingly complex framework of reference. The second part focuses on transnational business practices characterized by peculiar actors and organizational patterns, such as multinational companies, global supply chains and the like, and on the way such phenomena impact on the system of sources of labour law. The third part addresses the peculiar problems arising in small and medium enterprises, which trigger the quest for new regulatory provisions and techniques, which provide adequate protection to workers in SMEs with relations with powerful companies, at the same time avoiding to place unnecessary burdens on the weakest players.