Badges of modern slavery

Notwithstanding the 19th century formal abolition of slavery as legal ownership of people, modern slavery and forced labour have not been consigned to the past. In fact, their existence is more widespread, and made more difficult to tackle due to the lack of formal, legal criteria. This article suggests that reference to the past, historical institutions reveals seven ‘badges of slavery’ that are helpful in identifying occurrences of modern slavery and forced labour. These are: humiliation, ownership of people, exploitation of the vulnerable, lack of consent, terms and conditions of employment, limits on the power to end the employment relationship, and denial of rights outside the work relationship. These aspects constitute modern slavery as such, and thus distinguishes it from other instances of exploitative employment relations, however problematic. In addition, even where the label of modern slavery is misplaced, the identification of particular badges of slavery in contemporary employment relations may assist in highlighting their troubling facets

Flexicurity outside the employment relationship? Re-engineering social security for the new economy

The existing social insurance model was devised during the Beveridge era, which was premised on ‘male breadwinners’ and full-time employment. Since then, flexible labour markets have resulted in the erosion of the standard employment relationship and a rise in self-employment and other entrepreneurial forms of work. “Atypical” work, including zero hour contracts and agency work, have fragmented the labour contract and denied workers employment status. When coupled with forced self-employment in the gig economy, it is arguably the case that flexible labour markets demand equally flexible protections if the new ‘entrepreneurial’ workers are to fulfil their productive capacities. And yet, the social insurance system has not adapted to these changes. The concept of ‘flexicurity’ has been utilised with varying degrees of success in different European countries to make adaptations to production and labour market systems. The aim of this chapter is to re-examine social security aspects of this formula in order to re-calibrate the scope of social protection in developed economies in order to benefit all labour market participants. The chapter examines the legal and philosophical nature of social insurance as a species of social rights based on universal human rights that guarantee participation in the production and distribution of society’s welfare. The transformation of social and employment policy to manage the risks in the new economy will require a re-configuration of the institutions of social protection to re-align techniques of intervention with the nature of the risks they are intended to cover

Objective properties from subjective quantum states: Environment as a witness

We study the emergence of objective properties in open quantum systems. In our analysis, the environment is promoted from a passive role of reservoir selectively destroying quantum coherence, to an active role of amplifier selectively proliferating information about the system. We show that only preferred pointer states of the system can leave a redundant and therefore easily detectable imprint on the environment. Observers who--as it is almost always the case--discover the state of the system indirectly (by probing a fraction of its environment) will find out only about the corresponding pointer observable. Many observers can act in this fashion independently and without perturbing the system: they will agree about the state of the system. In this operational sense, preferred pointer states exist objectively.Comment: 5 pages, 1 figure, extensive changes, presentation improve

It ain’t necessarily so: a legal realist perspective on the law of agency work

Analysis of UK employment and labour law is often characterised by a curious dissonance. The overarching narrative mandates that labour law is a countervailing force to the inequality of bargaining power, embedded with values and assumptions concerning the nature of employment relations and the role of labour law. And yet, labour law jurisprudence tends to treat with respect, and seeks to decipher, abstract statutory concepts and tests derived from judicial pronouncements as if they were, indeed, a ‘brooding omnipresence in the sky’. This paper seeks to bridge that gap, by offering a legal realist account of the legal doctrine that governs the employment of agency workers, focusing on the ‘necessity’ and ‘sham’ tests. It assesses the legitimacy of importing legal tests from one (commercial) context to another (employment) context; questions the courts’ protestations that their use is mandated by precedent; and outlines the real implications for the status and rights of agency workers in the UK