Employee Happiness and Labour Law

Centre Members: Glenn Patmore
Research Staff: S. Koehne

Job satisfaction has been a recurrent theme in newspapers and other popular media for many years. Yet its promotion through the regulation of the workplace remains elusive. While efficiency and power balancing are widely accepted as twin objectives of labour law, this project researches the introduction of a third new objective: the promotion of workplace happiness. The project also examines how works councils in Europe might provide one manner in which this objective could be implemented in a concrete way. Glenn Patmore gave presentations on this topic to the Conference of the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics, Washington DC, July 2004, and to the Australian Labour Law Australian Conference, Sydney, September 2004.