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On the occasion of the official ‘retirement’ of the eminent labour law scholar Antoine Jacobs, a number of his colleagues – themselves well-respected in the field of labour law and industrial relations – have assembled this volume of essays to manifest the breadth and variety of this great professor’s work. The authors pay particular attention to the tension, always present in Jacobs’s critical research, of traditional values with an acute awareness of emerging realities. He approached labour law, not merely as a series of static issues concerning workers and employers, but as an evolving discipline that persistently challenged its socio-political context. Among the wide range of issues considered in this collection – all of them prominent in Jacobs’s work – are the following:

• the right to work;
• the right to strike versus the freedom to strike;
• the role of the European Union in national labour law;
• transnational collective bargaining;
• social security issues;
• labour law and the social teaching of churches;
• bankruptcy;
• ‘atypical’ work;
• temporary agency work;
• discrimination on the basis of age;
• corporate social responsibility;
• European labour law after the Lisbon Treaty;
• the historical formation of the labour contract;
• labour law after the current economic situation; and
• damages and industrial action.

The authors provide detailed analyses and descriptions of trends in these and other matters central to the law of labour and industrial relations, even as they discover (or rediscover) underlying principles that bear witness to the vitality of their field in a rapidly ‘globalizing’ world. Practitioners, academics, regulators, and policymakers will all find rich material here.