This book originates in the research project ‘New discourses in labour law’, funded by the Research Council of the European University Institute and co-ordinated by Silvana Sciarra. This research project is concerned with the interaction between the employment law and policy of the European Union and the employment laws and policies of the Member States of the Union. (Limits upon resources and opportunities have required us to be somewhat selective between member states and to decide upon which ones to focus most profitably.) The project takes as its starting point the idea that formulations of law and policy amounting to new discourses in labour law might be emerging from this interaction between law and policy created at the federal level of the Community as a whole and the laws and policies of individual Member States.

These discourses might be new ones in two distinct though inter-related senses: a procedural sense and a substantive sense. They might be new in the procedural sense that they emerge from a novel institutional process, namely that of increasingly intense interaction between law- and policy-makers at the two levels, the trans-national and the national ones. They might also be new in the substantive sense that the particular normative approaches which emerge from that process of interaction might be significantly different in their content from those taken by Member States in the absence of EU intervention.