Comparing labour laws in the EU Internal Market – a social actor perspective

The discipline of comparative labour law suffers from a dual disciplinary crisis: comparative law may seem irrelevant if nation states are pushed back by ever accelerating globalization, and labour law may be rendered irrelevant by the digitalised economy. Since states are becoming interdependent instead of superfluous, and work remains a dependent quantity, there is a future for comparative labour law. This future requires an even higher degree of interdisciplinarity with a strong recovery of disciplinary (doctrinal) research. A social actor centred approach can adequately depict the reality of labour law and policy in multilevel polities, such as the European Union. A comparative project relating to collective labour rights in the EU internal market is introduced as an example for this methodology.