Ewan McGaughey

• King's College London

The quality of democracy in our economy depends on the governance of capital, but Europeans are still deprived of real voice over their retirement money: the single biggest source of capital in the 21st century. This paper outlines three major problems facing EU pensions: precarious retirement, escalating inequality, and mounting climate damage. Th...

Concern has been growing, especially since the Viking and Laval opinions, that business rights are unjustly trumping democracy and labour rights. Those cases reviewed the proportionality of collective action by trade unions on the assumption that strikes infringed business rights to establish and provide services. But the Court of Justice never had...

What explains the election of the 45th President of the United States? Many commentators have said that Trump is a fascist. This builds on grave concerns, since Citizens United , that democracy is being corrupted. This article suggests the long term cause, and the shape of ideology is more complex. In 1971, an extraordinary memorandum of Lewis Powe...

Despite the glitzy rhetoric of techno‐utopia, the ‘gig economy’ presents no new issue for labour rights. Yet an unusually aggressive mode of business has developed: a kind of ‘technological management’ or ‘Taylorooism’. Its basis is the misrepresentation of employment status in the search for profit without responsibility and is seen in companies u...

In The Concept of the Employer (2015), Jeremias Prassl develops an elegant model for finding who bears labour and employment law duties. It offers a logical complement to the multi-factor test for determining who is an 'employee'. This is meant to ensure the effectiveness of social rights in employment, particularly where modern economic arrangemen...

Does UK corporate governance exclude the ultimate investor? Over the late twentieth century, most shareholding shifted from individuals to institutions. ‘Soft law’ indicates that institutional intermediaries must act in the interests of the ultimate client and follow instructions on how to vote shares. But case law and legislation is complex. This...

In 2012, the UK Chancellor of the Exchequer optimistically told his party conference: 'Owners, workers and the taxman. All in it together. Workers of the world unite.' Shortly after, the government said it would increase the minimum-living wage over the years to 2020. But to what extent is it true that everyone who works in the UK is 'in it togethe...

“We were all blind. All the conditions for national socialism were laid out...”A year before he passed away, the great labour lawyer, Otto Kahn-Freund, was interviewed by constitutional scholar Wolfgang Luthardt. His life as a young man came at one of the most extraordinary, and terrifying periods of German and world history. This interview was pub...

Over the last thirty years there has been a remarkable functional convergence in the way companies are run. Behind directors, asset managers and banks usually participate the most in setting the ultimate direction of corporations, as they have assumed the role of stewardship over shareholder voting rights. At the same time, an increasing number of...

Can behavioural economics help to make better labour law? This article traces the relationship between empirical work and legal thought, and focuses on new studies in behavioural economics and their potential implications for labour policy. Work by behavioural economists, and its implications, is discussed in four main fields of labour law policy:...

Why does codetermination exist in Germany? Law and economics theories have contended that if there were no legal compulsion, worker participation in corporate governance would be ‘virtually nonexistent’. This positive analysis, which flows from the ‘nexus of contracts’ conception of the corporation, supports a normative argument that codeterminatio...

A central issue in corporate governance is who elects the directors of FTSE100 or other large companies? Who gets the votes in our economy? This matters because, if unaccountable and in charge of 'other people's money', directors and institutional shareholders can be prone, as Adam Smith once wrote, to 'negligence and profusion': tending to make mi...

The government proposal to re-raise the fair dismissal qualification period by Ministerial Order to two years is vulnerable to judicial review, because it will have a discriminatory impact on people protected by the Equality Act 2010 and the EU Equality Directives. The House of Lords addressed the same issue in R (Seymour-Smith) v Secretary of Stat...

Chandler v. Cape plc decided that a parent company was liable for asbestos injuries of an insolvent subsidiary’s employee, because the parent could exercise control over the subsidiary. This article recounts the case’s facts, assesses the reasoning and elaborates the potential implications. It posits that this decision, aside from being based on so...

The EU Temporary and Agency Work Directive created a right of equal treatment on working time and pay for agency workers compared to direct workers. This article asks, what justifications are there for any different treatment? Using job security rights as an example, this article explores the framework for regulation of employment agencies and the...