Book Review: European Employment Law: A Systematic Exposition by Riesenhuber, Karl

Abstract

European Employment Law: A Systematic Exposition is volume 4 of the Ius Communitatis series, a well-known series that covers the most important topics in the ‘Europeanisation’ of law, such as European Union (EU) company, consumer, migration, criminal, social security and also employment law. The present volume, first published in 2012, represents a timely revised second edition after nearly a decade. The author of this remarkable volume is Karl Riesenhuber, Professor of several fields of law at Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Germany, who managed to compile it with the support of his (research and study) assistants. It needs to be stressed that the volume does not concern, and is demarcated from, comparative employment law of EU Member States. Instead it relates to EU primary law and many sources in secondary legislation, as well as the growing body of case law of the Court of Justice of the EU. The volume is structured so as to provide the relevant European complement to a traditional legal area, one of the cornerstones of national legal systems that is quite substantially influenced by European law. It covers the complete scope of European employment law up to March 2021 and is divided into five thematic parts, namely, foundations, conflict of laws, protection of personality rights, and the largest parts concerning individual and collective employment law. Parts on protection of personality rights and individual employment law are further divided into several chapters, the former into chapters on anti-discrimination law and data protection, and the latter into chapters concerning employment conditions, workers’ safety and health, atypical forms of employment, protection of specific groups of workers and employee protection in business restructuring and insolvency. For those who already know the first edition of the book, the revised second edition has, therefore, retained the basic structure of the entire work and has remained largely unchanged along with the structure of most of the chapters. Nevertheless, the new edition is nearly 200 pages longer with additions almost throughout, especially due to the new developments in CJEU case law and (legal) scholarship, such as journals, commentaries and handbooks as well as numerous monographs and articles on individual topics. The sheer size difference also reflects the inclusion of novelties due to legislative changes in the past decade. The (new) second edition takes account of the 2018 reform of the Posting of Workers Directive, the further development of the Written Statement Directive into the Transparency Directive, the new Whistleblower Directive, and the further developed Parental and Carers’ Leave Directive (all from 2019). Moreover, the Company Law Directive as Book Reviews