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European labour law has an unmistakable influence on national law. This applies even more to the case-law of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), as it has implications for the application of European law in the Member States and with it the interpretation of national law. This book contains a collection of standard judgments that every labour lawyer should know. In addition, each section contains a number of judgments that have proved to be of particular interest for most of the EU Member States’ jurisdictions, or that have determined the discussion to a large extent on the respective topic of labour law. This collection of cases is unique because it is the only one that focuses solely on EU labour law and because each of the topical sections is provided with an introductory text in which the case-law is put in broader EU context. Consequently, for every legal practitioner this book offers easy access to CJEU case-law in order to assess whether and to what extent a particular judgment can be of importance for a case at hand.

Do human societies from around the world exhibit similarities in the way that they are structured, and show commonalities in the ways that they have evolved? These are long-standing questions that have proven difficult to answer. To test between competing hypotheses, we constructed a massive repository of historical and archaeological information known as “Seshat: Global History Databank.” We systematically coded data on 414 societies from 30 regions around the world spanning the last 10,000 years. We were able to capture information on 51 variables reflecting nine characteristics of human societies, such as social scale, economy, features of governance, and information systems. Our analyses revealed that these different characteristics show strong relationships with each other and that a single principal component captures around three-quarters of the observed variation. Furthermore, we found that different characteristics of social complexity are highly predictable across different world regions. These results suggest that key aspects of social organization are functionally related and do indeed coevolve in predictable ways. Our findings highlight the power of the sciences and humanities working together to rigorously test hypotheses about general rules that may have shaped human history., This work was supported by a John Templeton Foundation Grant (to the Evolution Institute) entitled “Axial-Age Religions and the Z-Curve of Human Egalitarianism,” a Tricoastal Foundation Grant (to the Evolution Institute) entitled “The Deep Roots of the Modern World: The Cultural Evolution of Economic Growth and Political Stability,” Economic and Social Research Council Large Grant REF RES-060-25-0085 entitled “Ritual, Community, and Conflict,” an Advanced Grant from the European Research Council under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme Grant 694986, and Grant 644055 from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme (ALIGNED; www.aligned-project.eu). T.E.C. is supported by funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (Grant Agreement 716212).

This paper analyses the experiences of employees in different-sized employment units for 10 EU member states in three EU policy areas. Each of the policy areas represents a different EU governance tool: directives (health and safety); education and training (the Open Method of Communication); and the reconciliation between work and family life (soft law). The analysis is based on data provided by the European Labour Force Survey. It finds that while there are few differences between employment experiences in different-sized units in the area of health and safety, employees in micro and small-sized enterprises are less likely to take part in education and training, and have flexible working hours, than those in medium and large employment units. The increase of such employment units, one of the aims of EU policy, therefore has an unintended consequence for EU employment rights.

This paper presents a new model and optimization method for balancing in the Universal Smart Energy Framework. We address the problem of minimizing the error between the forecasted and the actual load in the power system that arise from the uncertainties of renewable energy production. The algorithm acts on multiple levels within the hierarchical energy market structure of the framework, where the levels correspond to different stakeholders. While pursuing the global objective, the stakeholders also have their own economic interests. The optimal solution is obtained as a result of iterative interactions between the stakeholders, namely, the Balance Responsible Party (BRP), the aggregators, and the Distribution System Operator (DSO). To illustrate the algorithm, we provide an example simulation.

The Bangladesh ready-made garment industry has recently been affected by a number of terrible accidents, with the collapse of the Rana Plaza on 24 April 2013 as the deadliest garment-factory accident ever known. Under the pressure of renewed attention to the role and responsibilities of multinational corporations (MNCs) take responsibility for what happens in those factories, two initiatives have been adopted. These initiatives involve leading brands of European origin and North-American origin. With these initiatives the MNCs claim to strengthen their corporate social responsibility (CSR) regarding those factories. From a regulatory perspective, they represent cases of transnational private regulation (TPR). Although CSR and TPR have become increasingly popular, these initiatives have been perceived with mixed enthusiasm, since they are adopted in a legal vacuum. Consequently, they raise questions about their legal status, their legitimacy and their implementation and compliance mechanisms. These same questions will be discussed in this article concerning the Bangladesh initiatives, in order to discern if they have the potential to contribute to improving safety and working conditions in the Bangladeshi garment industry, or if they are rather forms of window-dressing.

Ever since its constitution the ILO has developed and maintained a system of labour standards in order to create decent work all over the world. With the globalisation of the economy multinationals have gained an important position in furthering these labour standards throughout their value chains. From a regulatory point of view this development has resulted in a panoply of law and law-like initiatives within the global space in order to implement the labour standards. Much is already known about these initiatives from an individual and isolated perspective. Yet, little is known about their interactions in the global space. Whereas the concept of global space acknowledges the coexistence of different regulatory forms serving different roles, the concept of hybrid structures acknowledges the fact that these regulations interact in several configurations. The aim of this contribution is to map the main regulatory initiatives, to analyse their different roles in the global space of labour standards and to analyse in which configurations they interact. The findings of this analysis provide a more advanced and comprehensive understanding of the regulation of labour standards on the global level.

The collapse of the Rana Plaza in Bangladesh on 24 April 2013 resulted in the death of over 1,100 workers and many more injured workers. Consequently, it has again raised the debate about the social responsibility of multinational companies (MNCs) for their full production chain. European and North-American MNCs have responded to this with the adoption of two agreements. Although these agreements have been welcomed, being transnational private agreements, from a legal point of view, they raise some questions, especially about their legal status. This paper describes in brief the main legal challenges of these transnational, private agreements and how they can be (partially) be met. Secondly, the two agreements are analysed to what extent they meet those challenges. The paper concludes with some general considerations about their promises and limits to actually make a difference.

Joke and humour publications are a severely understudied area of the world of late-Ming book culture. Taking imprints from the Wanli reign period (1573–1620) as a starting point, this dissertation undertakes a preliminary investigation into late-Ming humour compilations. It looks at the publication of humour as a historical phenomenon, rather than from a literary standpoint, to see how this group of books fitted into the publishing and intellectual scene of their day. Towards this aim, the dissertation leans mostly upon the paratextual materials of humour publications, such as prefaces, titles and annotations. These were spaces in which compilers and publishers communed with their faceless, anticipated readership, and as such can be used to yield information about how these compilations were viewed on both sides. Experimenting by temporarily putting aside modern notions of “the joke” in favour of contemporaneous terms used by the publications themselves, the dissertation sketches the boundaries around a broader genre of ‘humour compilations’, thereby reconstructing a genre of publications that were connected in the eyes of Ming publishers and readers, yet has been obscured by subsequent systems of categorisation. It spotlights the ambivalence that surrounded humour as an appropriate topic for publication and the measures taken by compilers and publishers to counter such attitudes. The dissertation also sheds light upon how this group of texts identified with and drew upon precedents from previous dynasties and developed its own set of traditions through an in-depth look at the Ming sequels to the Aizi (“Master Ai”) tradition of Warring States-themed humour, which originated in the Song period. A preliminary discussion on the ‘Dongpo vogue’ in late-Ming publishing reveals the omnipresence of Song dynasty literatus Su Shi in Ming humour publications while simultaneously demonstrating how this group of texts reflected and interacted with the fashions and concerns of the times.