Labour Law and legal Globalization

On the subject of the transformations of law and “globalization” there is now a significant scientific bibliographic production. This area of scientific debate is a hot topic and jurists have taken note for some time now of “globalization”, with a tendency to divide themselves between those who underline (in a more or less resolute manner) new aspects and those instead who prefer to underline the aspects of continuity between the present legal scene and the preceding one, and between the ways of comprehending them. “Globalization” presents itself as a very powerful mutagenic agent (or teratogen) of the traditional legal systems or, at least, of their traditional image which forces to redefine the meaning traditionally attributed, from legal positivism, to the legal borders of legal and political organizations. The problem is indeed a “global” problem (as the name suggests) but it isn’t, or it no longer is simply, for the new theorists of “legal globalization”, a problem of international law (as the “global” legal questions might appear to be). In other words, it isn’t merely a problem about the limitation of the external sovereignty of nations, but a problem that attacks the internal sovereignty itself, breaking it up and transforming the nation in one among many actors of the political scene, without any privileged role and forced to meet with the choices of the other non state actors, foremost the transnational economic companies that condition it and take away from it more and more powers of directive in the economic field. Hence economic globalization, and with it, a more general process of political and cultural globalization caused by it, are beyond the state’s control, mainly because they constitute a process that moves forward through accidental stages, not entirely programmed and the result of the interaction of many agents who are more or less aware. And this seems to involve also deep changes in the legal field, as globalization transforms the traditional configuration of space and time of the case in point and of the legal systems, modifying the legal interactions according to “horizontal” or “net-like” logic. The consequence being the crisis of legislation as privileged source of law, made inefficient by the viewpoint of short termism, that is the indifference towards the future and by the exclusive attention to the short term results, typical of the financial economy. Born to satisfy a security logic, aimed to plan the future withdrawing it to the arbitrariness of choices and uncertainties, the law is not able to agree with the logic of opportunities that gives up the planning of the future, in the name of a continuous freedom of making choices and of a one dimensional time horizon that centralizes the present. Hence a more “pragmatic” concept of the institutions, valued favorably all the more when capable of proceeding by trial end error. But also a continuous attack to the rule of law, the undesired side effect of which might be the sacrifice of the certainty of law.