A number of complex legal relationships fall under the heading of industrial relations, including the legal status, rights, and obligations of trade unions and employers’ organizations, collective bargaining and collective agreements, the representation of employees at plant and enterprise level (including joint consultation and, where it exists, codetermination and other forms of workers’ participation in management, even to the extent of workers’ representation on company boards), and the prevention and settlement of various types of labour disputes in general and of strikes and lockouts in particular. Regarding such matters as the representative character and capacity of trade unions, their legal status, the obligation to recognize and bargain with them, the enforceability of collective agreements, the scope of activities permitted to trade unions, and their obligations in contract and tort, there are wide variations both in the extent to which they are subject to legal rules and in the content of such rules.

In the United States, for instance, there is a considerable body of law on these subjects, the most important enactments being the National Labor Relations Act and the Labor Management Relations Act of 1947 (the Taft-Hartley Act). In the United Kingdom the law has hitherto remained marginal to most of these trade union issues, except for legislation of 1871, 1875, and 1906, which had provided certain “immunities” (or “privileges,” as they are sometimes called) for trade unions, particularly in connection with trade disputes. Legislation enacted in the early 1980s restricted some of these immunities or privileges, the trend being to expand the role of law in labour-management relations to reduce the increasing disruption caused by industrial conflict in a complex society.

In the late 20th and early 21st centuries, industrial associations and libertarian think tanks in the United States promoted legislation and initiated court cases aimed at limiting the political and economic power of unions. So-called right-to-work laws, eventually adopted in several states, prohibited unions from charging agency fees to nonunion workers to defray the cost of collective bargaining on their behalf. Several states also severely restricted or prohibited collective bargaining by public (state) employees. Although the U.S. Supreme Court, in Abood v. Detroit Board of Education (1977), unanimously endorsed mandatory agency fees in the public sector (provided that they were not used to support union political or ideological activities), that precedent was later overturned in Janus v. American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (2018), in which the Court declared that nonunion employees must affirmatively consent to paying agency fees.

The administration of labour law

Another feature of labour law involves the organization and functioning of administrative authorities such as labour departments, labour inspection services, and other organs of enforcement. Administration of the law also encompasses the operation of labour courts and other bodies for the settlement of grievances arising from existing contracts or collective agreements and of industrial disputes arising between labour and management.

The principal problem in many countries is to relate the process of labour administration and its special intimacy with labour and management to overall economic and social planning in a manner that gives proper weight to social considerations in economic policy. This problem falls mostly outside the scope of labour law, but its solution does depend in part on the extent to which labour law provides for and secures effective standards of administration.

Special categories of workers

Labour law includes many provisions for particular occupational or other groups. These sometimes appear as special parts of a general code, special legislation, or provisions that limit specific legislative provisions with regard to particular groups. These special provisions are common and important in mining, transportation (and in particular maritime transport), commercial occupations, and agriculture. Cutting across these broad sectors of economic activity are the traditional legal distinctions made in some countries between blue-collar workers and salaried employees and certain newer distinctions, such as that between employees who earn annual salaries and have rights of tenure and persons with no such rights engaged and remunerated on a monthly, weekly, or even daily basis.