Litigious Policies and Access to Labor Court: Constraints and Resources in the Mobilization of the Law Against Discrimination in Europe

Some scholarly works on legal mobilization have highlighted the diffusion of litigious policies to address social problems in Europe, considering that a rights’ revolution was underway; others have identified sources of resistance to the diffusion of the mobilization of the courts as a mechanism for promotion of rights in Europe. European national agencies for equality, created in the 2000s to address discrimination issues, use litigation to produce social change, both at national and supranational levels. Their strategies, if not new, may tend to redefine legal mobilization against unlawful treatment in the workplace in Europe. In this paper, I analyze how the Belgian and the Swedish equality agencies resort to litigation. Although litigation policy at the organizational level has been studied in scholarly works, only a very few scholars have examined how labor configurations influence the use of labor courts. How do the interactions between labor unions and equality agencies frame legal mobilization in Europe? Referring to recent works on social structure and individual actor agency, this contribution aims to highlight organizations’ constraints and resources within different labor configurations, current anti-discrimination policies and legal culture. More broadly, this contribution aims to call into question the processes of transnationalisation and policy transfer from one country to another within the European Union.