The capabilities approach: A panacea for labour law’s ills?

Review essay of: Brian langille, The Capability Approach to Labour Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019)

In recent years, there has been a tendency to view the subject of labour law and its goals through the prism of philosophy, and political philosophy in particular. A veritable ‘cottage industry’ has sprung up devoted to this task. In this paper, I analyze the arguments presented by various authors in a book recently published under the editorship of Professor Brian Langille on The Capability Approach to Labour Law, which makes an important contribution to labour law scholarship. I make the point that the capabilities approach – a theory belonging to political philosophy – is undoubtedly a useful instrument insofar as it enables labour lawyers to sell the claims and arguments that the subject is attempting to make, but that if it is presented as an ostensibly univocal foundation, it is unlikely to stack up. Instead, by abstracting its partial and pluralist base, capabilities can be reconceptualised as only one justification for particular labour laws, serving alongside many other political philosophies. In this way, a veritable patchwork quilt of different foundations for specific labour laws can be stitched together. This paper then goes on to make some preliminary observations as to how such a fabric could be embroidered in a coherent and systematic manner.