Race, Legal Form and the Labour Contract Professor Diamond Ashiagbor1

This lecture was delivered by Professor Diamond Ashiagbor, as part of the Current Legal Problems Lecture Series 2023-24. Professor Ashiagbor would like to thank Professor Kerry Rittich (University of Toronto); many of the ideas in this lecture have emerged through joint research and discussions with Professor Rittich.
Speaker: Professor Diamond Ashiagbor (University of Kent)
Chair: Professor Nicola Countouris (UCL Laws)
About the lecture
The dominant legal form for governing work relations in the UK, the standard employment relationship, provides a historically specific mode of capturing social and economic relations of labour within market economy. However, these economic relations can only be ‘seen’ by law when they take the form of legal relations between individual subjects, in this case, the contract of employment governing a bilateral relationship between worker and employing entity. Much else - the inequality of bargaining power between the parties, the broader structures within which the bilateral relationship exists, the unpaid work of social reproduction, the colonial extraction which makes the paid work possible - is invisible for the purposes of legal form. Thus, the gendered and racialised origin of the labour contract is erased, and the legal form itself systematically excludes certain groups from the scope of labour law.
This lecture tracks the continuing effects of linking employment protection rights, collectively bargained standards, and entitlements within the Keynesian welfare state to the standard employment relationship which co-evolved alongside vertically integrated firms, industrial trade unions and the welfare state. It contributes to critical analysis of legal forms adopted within racial capitalism, as well as to the empirical study of social relations of work.
Workers who are perhaps most in need of social and labour law protection are most likely to be excluded from its scope: those subject to non-standard arrangements which lack the ongoing promise of future work (e.g. ‘zero hours’ contracts); or which are mediated via a third party (e.g. agency work); or which take place within the ‘household workplace’. There is a racialised ‘clustering’ in contemporary labour markets, with Black and minority ethnic workers and those of migrant origin increasingly subject to precariatisation, dominating the occupational periphery even when located in the geographic core. This lecture explores how, for racialised and migrant workers, this exclusion from the standard employment relationship mirrors the history of racialised exclusion from institutions of social citizenship, tracing contemporary continuities with colonial and postcolonial legal forms.