The EUI Human and Fundamental Rights Working Group and the Constitutionalism and Politics Working Group host an online event featuring a presentation and discussion of Professor Virginia Mantouvalou's (UCL) new book.
About the book:
When discussing exploitation in workplaces, governments typically deploy a rhetoric of personal responsibility: they place attention on employers who take advantage of workers, or on workers who choose non-standard, precarious work arrangements. On this account, the responsibility of the state is to address the harm inflicted by private actors. This book questions that approach and develops the concept of 'state-mediated structural injustice at work': a phenomenon which manifests when legislation that has an appearance of legitimacy, in fact has very damaging effects for large numbers of people and results in structures of exploitation at work. Using a series of examples such as migrant workers, captive workers, people under welfare conditionality schemes, and other precarious workers, Mantouvalou shows how the law creates these structures of injustice, entrenching long-term, standard, and routine exploitation. She also assesses these examples against human rights principles, including civil, political, economic, and social rights. The ultimate aim of the work is to show that these structures routinely lead to workers' exploitation which may in turn give rise to state responsibility for human rights violations and to argue that there is a pressing need for reform.
About the author:
Virginia Mantouvalou is Professor of Human Rights and Labour Law at UCL, Faculty of Laws. She has published extensively on workers' exploitation, structural injustice, prison labour, privacy and free speech at work, protection from unfair dismissal, the right to work, the rights of domestic workers and other migrant workers, welfare conditionality and modern slavery. Her recent monograph, Structural Injustice and Workers’ Rights (OUP 2023), was funded through a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship. Her latest co-edited book, Structural Injustice and the Law (with Jonathan Wolff), is forthcoming with UCL Press in 2024. Her research has appeared in leading journals, such as the Modern Law Review, the Journal of Law and Society, Theoretical Inquiries in Law, the Industrial Law Journal, and the Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy. Virginia is articles Co-Editor of the Modern Law Review, member of the editorial board of the Stanford Studies in Human Rights, Co-Editor of the UK Labour Law Blog and the Studies in Law and Social Justice, and was Joint Editor of Current Legal Problems. She has held visiting positions at Georgetown University Law Centre in Washington DC and the Université Libre de Bruxelles. She has worked as Specialist Advisor to the UK Joint Committee of Human Rights and a consultant of the Council of Europe and the ILO. She is also Chair of the NGO Kalayaan, working on the rights of migrant domestic workers.