The Influence of the EU on UK labour law: Before and After Brexit

This article examines the influence of the EU over UK labour law, before and after Brexit. It compares the influence of the EU within the internal market with that under the UK–EU Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA) agreed in December 2020. It focuses both on the different mechanisms through which labour law standards may be enforced before and after Brexit, and, in particular, on the extent to which the internal market case law of the Court of Justice (CJEU) may be utilised by labour lawyers seeking to apply the ‘level playing field’ provisions of the TCA. Given the structure of the EU Treaties and the TCA, arguments for high labour standards within the EU and in trade agreements signed by the EU, are more likely to be successful not where they are based on autonomous social arguments, but instead where labour and trade law arguments are combined.