Research Project: Industrial action and the peace obligation on the internal market in Europe – a comparative project assessing consequences of the ECJ’s Viking and Laval jurisprudence
Dates: April 2010 - November 2011
The theme of the future of industrial relations in the EU is very topical in the aftermath of the judgments Laval and Viking in the EU Court of Justice.
This project will focus specially on remedies and economic sanctions for unlawful action, as this is a field where not much comparative research has been done yet. Also, national traditions differ widely here. Thus, it is crucial to consider the relation of any concept of unlawfulness of industrial action at national level and at EU level. The question in such a situation is of course whether there are any EU specific sanctions in such a case – a question to which the Swedish Labour Court gave a positive answer in its final judgment in the Laval case (December 2009). The research hypothesis is that most EU Member States have restricted the possibilities to claim economic damages for industrial action. Thus, it would be surprising if EU law would demand to establish sanctions for the same.
This small project shall lay the base by providing information on remedies for “unlawful” industrial action at national levels in Belgium, the Netherlands, France, Italy, the United Kingdom, Spain, Portugal, Poland, Hungary, Germany, Austria, Finland, Denmark and Sweden, and how it relates to the national labour market system more generally. It also aims to initiate a discussion on how international instruments can be interpreted in this context.
Project Publications
The results of the project will be published in an edited collection.
Principal Investigator
Dagmar Schiek for Leeds purposes (providing expertise on German and Austrian Labour Law).
The project is led by Prof Jonas Malmberg (Uppsala).
Other Staff Involved
The project is led by the Universities of Uppsala (Professor Jonas Malmberg) and Stockholm (Professor Niklas Bruun, University of Helsinki, Finland, University of Stockholm, Sweden)
The following further persons are involved:
- Professor Filip Dorssemont (Universite Catholique Louvain, Belgium)
- Dr. Sylvaine Laulom (University of St Etienne, France)
- Professor Antonio Lo Faro (University of Catania, Italy)
- Dr Claire Kilpatrick (London School of Economics)
- Magdalena Nogueira (Autonomous University of Madrid, Spain)
- Joanna Unterschutz (Solidarnosc, Poland)
Funding
The Swedish Council for Working Life Research (FAS)