Worlds of Labour: Introducing the Standard-Setting, Privileging and Equalising Typology as a Measure of Legal Segmentation in Labour Law

Abstract The Standard Employment Relationship (SER) in industrialised countries is associated with strong protection for employees who fulfil its criteria but tends to neglect those who do not. Although the theoretical concept of SER has had repercussions around the world, its global empirical incidence and the variation of regulatory patterns associated with it have not been scrutinised so far. Comparative quantitative research in labour law has mainly focused on the overall level of employment protection in the countries of the Northern Hemisphere. Against this background, we ask how legal segmentation in labour law, that is, the exclusion from and gradation in employment protection which seems to be connected with the SER, can be conceptualised and measured in a global perspective. Drawing on leximetrics, a method to measure and quantify norms, we make use of and extend existing data sets such as the Centre for Business Research Labour Regulation Index (CBR-LRI) and Employment Protection Legislation Index (EPLex) in order to grasp the nature of legal segmentation. We identify three main functions of individual employment law in the protection/segmentation context: the standard-setting (S), the privileging (P) and the equalising (E) functions. We develop the SPE-employment law model on the assumption that the three functions are mutually independent in normative terms. The SPE typology offers a genuinely new perspective for comparative labour regulation research, making it possible to see the differentiation of patterns of legal segmentation and their path dependencies in 115 countries. First findings on a global scale show that in 2013 no fundamental difference between the levels of regulation in the Global South and North can be found. Moreover, familiar patterns can be observed such as a tendency to stable and low protection levels in liberal welfare states, and a tendency to universalist types of regulation in former socialist countries.