The right to care in the workplace

Abstract

A sustainable society within planetary limits requires structural changes. A right to care can be an important contribution for this transition. This article analyses how labour law could contribute to recognising and implementing a right to care. It focuses on individual rights to flexibility in the workplace. Examples from German law are used to demonstrate how legal theories of the juridical form help to explain the conceptual problems in aligning these individual rights with collective bargaining and representation. The article discusses how supplementing individual rights with positive duties to establish open search processes could foster open-ended processes involving a variety of stakeholders, putting all existing infrastructures and routines up for a discussion of possible options, modifications, or alternatives. Finally, it defends this utopian approach in view of the realisation that the world we live in makes it hard to imagine that such fundamental steps to emancipation can really be realised.