Labour Law and the Utopia of the Commons

Abstract

Abstract This chapter discusses the commons as a real utopia, contrasting their characteristics with the main justifications of labour law. Despite affinities being rooted in the common critique of the public-private divide, collaborative commons question the material premises and the main normative assumptions of labour law in both its individual and collective dimensions. Nonetheless, labour law scholars and the labour movement can learn a lot from the idea of justice in collaborative commons. Collaborative commons, and their grassroots normativity, are leading a renewed, more effective, and far more convincing twenty-first-century response to problems of labour and environmental justice; a response that retraces, under modern conditions, the early forms of solidarity that unions promoted at the onset of industrial capitalism.