Collective Action and Fundamental Freedoms in Europe: Striking the Balance
本书比较研究了七个欧洲民主市场经济国家如何通过法律界定集体行动（如罢工）的边界，并探讨欧盟法对罢工权的间接影响，对劳动法学者和政策制定者理解不同法律环境下的权利平衡有参考价值。
It is widely recognised that comparative legal studies need to be undertaken with great care; facile comparisons of differing substantive legal provisions on what appear to be the same issues risk neglecting crucial aspects of the wider environment—economic, social or political—within which they have effect. Although excluded from the European Union‘s legislative competence, now by Article 153(5) of the Treaty on the Functioning of the EU, national regulation of the scope of the right to strike or take other forms of collective industrial action has become an issue of considerable importance within the context of European Union law as a result of the decisions of the European Court of Justice in the Viking and Laval cases at the end of 2008. These decisions provide a form of de facto indirect regulation of the ‘right to strike’ in its widest sense to include other forms of industrial action, through decisions on the limits imposed on it by rights and freedoms that are recognised and regulated by European Union law. (The academic commentary on these decisions is extensive; see inter alia A. C. L.Davies (2008) 37 ILJ 126.) Quite apart from this issue, the extent to which and the way in which national legal systems recognise and delimit the boundaries of lawful industrial action is a matter on which collective labour lawyers ought to be interested for at least two reasons. Such comparative studies provide both a means to understanding different legal approaches and techniques and also an appreciation that ‘the right to strike’ both can be and arguably needs to be recognised, respected and regulated in different ways in order to be appropriately provided for in the particular legal environment found in different countries. This book is one such study covering seven European countries, all democratic market economies.