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In labour law scholarship, there appears to be something of a fashion lately for utopian thinking. At Harvard Law School, the Clean Slate Project proposes a ‘fundamental redesign’ of US labour law; ‘a new labor law that is capable of empowering all workers to demand a truly equitable American democracy and a genuinely equitable American economy’.1 In the final chapter of his recent book, Data and Democracy: Advanced Technologies, Labor Law and the New Working Class, Brishen Rogers presents a vision of a ‘much more sustainable economy’, sketching ‘far-reaching sets of reforms’ that would ‘extend democratic norms and practices deep into the spheres of production and distribution’.2 In the UK, the Institute of Employment Rights’ more programmatic Manifesto for Labour Law, endorsed by the UK Labour Party when it was briefly under the leftwing leadership of Jeremy Corbyn, proposes a set of labour laws and a corresponding system of work relations that can also be seen to have a utopian flavour to them, especially at a distance of a few years.3 There, too, labour law is cast as potentially transformative, with the potential to revolutionize ‘the world of work for millions of people, reduce inequality, and build a strong, resilient, future-proofed economy’.4 Like Rogers and the Clean Slate team, the Manifesto authors aim not only to inform policy debates but also to inspire collective action and lobbying efforts, providing readers with a vision of a world that is worth fighting for. To the list, we can now add this impressive collection edited by Nicolas Bueno, Beryl ter Haar, and Nuna Zekić, in which utopian thinking is explicitly conceived of as method. The assembled authors are invited to imagine utopias that embody solutions to current socioeconomic and environmental challenges and crises; utopias that offer readers ‘ideas about how a future world of work that is more human-centered and green may look like and what implications such a world holds for labour law’.5 The results are wide-ranging, with the authors turning their attention to such questions as the potential benefits that new technologies could bring to workers, creating more equal work relations and more freedom;6 how value might be accorded to ‘non-market’ work, including unpaid care work and other social practices that aim to protect social and natural resources;7 and the role of labour law in ‘post-work’ communities, where workers might enjoy not only the right to a basic income but a ‘fundamental right to laziness’.8 When we consider the freedom that utopian thinking can offer scholars—to imagine a labour law and a corresponding economy and society that are radically different to what we have now—its current popularity is perhaps unsurprising. In imagining utopias, scholars can untether themselves from the detail and even the broader structures and principles of the current law and simply sidestep the potentially paralysing question of how to get there from here.9 The worse things are, and the more convinced scholars become that radical change is necessary, the more attractive utopian thinking is therefore likely to become. Today, many of us seem to have reached precisely that conclusion. The first decades of this new century have witnessed a global financial and economic crisis, a global pandemic, steeply rising sea-levels and air temperatures, rising economic inequalities within and between nation-states, and the sometimes violent suppression of workers’ rights and other civil rights and political freedoms. In the face of such monumental challenges, piecemeal and incremental reforms become patently inadequate and the argument gains force that not only new rules but new objectives—new values—are needed. Radical change appears not only desirable but perhaps even possible. Though the fashion for utopian thinking in labour law scholarship is a new one, it has precursors, as new fashions often do, in earlier times and in the writings of foundational scholars in the field. In the immediate aftermath of the First World War, Hugo Sinzheimer depicted a system of labour law, which secured for labour the fundamental right to manage working relations and the economy as a whole, together with capital, with parity rights and powers.10 At a time when revolutionary workers’ councils were still engaged in violent street battles with the reactionary Freikorps, this vision was even included in the new Constitution of the Weimar Republic.11 The terms of the article in question were never fully implemented, however, and Otto Kahn-Freund later recalled that he had always read them ‘a little bit the way one reads Alice in Wonderland’;12 never as a realistic programme for law reform. For all his own legal scepticism, however, for which he became well-known, Kahn-Freund’s early writings on British labour law also cast the system in the best possible light, underplaying its many shortcomings.13 In the famous trilogy of works from the 1950s, we are presented with an image of industrial relations and the law that is strongly normative, if not truly utopian.14 Like Sinzheimer before him, Kahn-Freund wrote these in a post-war context in which it felt possible or even necessary to propose and to build ‘the just city’, as WH Auden put it, consigning to ‘[y]esterday all the past’.15 Labour Law Utopias recalls the work of Sinzheimer and Kahn-Freund not only in its normative ambitions but also in the importance it accords to current debates in the fields of socioeconomics and political economy. Two bodies of work, in particular, are highlighted by the editors, dealing respectively with post-growth economies and post-productive labour. Each of these raises questions that strike at the very heart of the purpose and meaning of work and labour law, today and in the future, and the authors are to be congratulated for addressing them in such imaginative and productive ways. Ruth Dukes Edinburgh, UK September 2023
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