The Right to Work: Legal and Philosophical Perspectives
本文探讨是否应设立法律保障的工作权，分析工作对工人的价值、法律保护的必要性以及国家和雇主的相应义务，对劳动法、政治哲学和社会学研究者有参考价值。
‘Everyone has the right to work’. These words from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights open the Foreword written by the late Sir Bob Hepple to this informative collection on whether we should have a legally enshrined right to work. Hepple notes how the right to work has ‘assumed enormous importance’ with the global growth in unemployment since the 2007 financial crisis. Beyond explaining why the debate over the right to work matters today, Hepple provides useful historical context for its scholarly origins in British labour law, namely findings from the 1970s of a systematic correlation between poverty and unemployment by the British sociologist Peter Townsend. There are three reasons why the topic of the right to work is important. First, it leads us to reflect on the significance of work to workers, raising questions of whether the value of work is instrumental to the achievement of further objectives or life plans, or whether work is to be regarded as intrinsically valuable. The answer to the first question ties in with a second concern, which is whether the value of work is such that it should be protected via the instrumentation of a legal right which is clearly defined and judicially enforceable, or whether approaches via social and economic policy are sufficient to give workers fair access to work and protection in work. Third, if we recognise a right to work, we must consider the correlative duties that the state and employers have to fulfil.