Three levels of labour law: The European, national and sectoral regulation of nonstandard employment in France, Germany, Italy and the United Kingdom

The deregulation of nonstandard employment has long been considered an important strategy to face the challenge of high unemployment in Western Europe. However, its alarming growth in recent years and increasing concerns about the precariousness of these jobs have triggered a series of studies analyzing the (national) politics of nonstandard employment (cf. Palier and Thelen 2010; Eichhorst and Marx 2011; Emmenegger et al. 2012). However, research has largely overlooked the multi-level structure of regulatory politics in the field of nonstandard employment. Labour law, long the sole prerogative of policy-makers at the nation-state level and strongly influenced by long-lasting national labour law traditions, has increasingly become a field of permanent activity of the European Union and in particular the European Court of Justice, both with regard to the definition of minimum standards for nonstandard employment through EU Directives as well as the creation of opportunities for new forms of nonstandard employment through the development of the single market. In parallel, nation-states have undergone a process of decentralization, increasingly allowing the social partners to derogate from national regulations by means of plant-level or industry-level collective bargaining. Hence, the regulation of nonstandard employment has become a policy field plagued by multiple and partly conflicting logics, in which policy-makers have considerable freedom to pursue their political goals, while facing constant pressure to increase the flexibility of the labour market to allow for employment growth. In this paper, we analyze the politics of nonstandard employment taking into account the complex multilevel structure of policy-making. In particular, we analyze the interplay between interest groups, national governments, national labour courts and the European Union in the regulation of fixed-term work and temporary agency work in four long-time EU member states with very diverse labour law traditions.