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To celebrate International Workers’ Day (May Day) we have organised an online exhibition to showcase some of the policy briefs realised by students of Labour Law in Context (LA3A6) over the years.

These group policy briefs are part of the assessment for the module and aim to encourage students to engage with current labour law debates and learn about policy writing as a tool for legal change. For students this is also an opportunity to value the importance of teamwork, negotiate positions, and work towards a common goal.

Dr Serena Natile, module convenor for Labour Law in Context, told us:

International Labour Day was proclaimed at the , where delegates adopted a resolution for a great international demonstration of workers ‘in all countries and in all cities’ to collectively demand to limit the duration of the working day at eight hours (eight-hour day movement), and it was formally recognised as an annual event in 1891. While some forms of labour celebrations existed before the 19^th century, the history of Labour Day is often traced back to Australia where in 1856 stonemasons in the state of Victoria decided to organise a day (initially 21 April) of complete work stoppage together with meetings and entertainments as a demonstration for the eight-hour working day.[1] It was the American Federation of Labour who proposed the date of 1^st May to commemorate a general strike which had begun on 1 May 1886 and culminated in the Haymarket Square Affair (although in 1894 President Cleveland decided to take distance from the socialist ideas associated with May Day, and moved Labour Day to the first Monday of September).

Labour Day is now regarded, although with some differences across countries, as a celebration of the international labour movement made by the plurality of workers’ struggles everywhere, struggles for better working conditions but also against exploitation, imperialism, and militarism. It is an occasion to commemorate the workers who suffered and fought in the past and to unionise workers in the present. As Rosa Luxemburg says in her essay on ‘As long as the struggle of the workers against the ruling class continues, May Day will be the yearly expression of these demands.'

This online exhibition aims to shed light on contemporary workers’ struggles, highlighting the role of policy in contributing to labour rights. In these policy briefs students assess the limits but also the potential of the law to address the asymmetries of power and the structural inequalities embedded in the regulation of ‘work’, nationally and transnationally. Most briefs centre the voices of workers at the margins of the law, who are often not recognised as ‘workers’ in legal terms, and for this reason excluded from labour law protection or relegated to precarious working arrangements. They include sex workers; dancers in night clubs; domestic workers; au-pairs; migrant care workers; nurses and other healthcare workers (particularly post-pandemic); seasonal migrant workers; workers in global supply chains; work done by prisoners and migrants in detention centre; unpaid internships; and new forms of gig economy labour such as food delivery riders and other platform workers. The briefs recognise how socioeconomic categories such as gender, race, class, age, disability, and migration status are structurally linked to different forms of work, working conditions, and economic security. All the briefs provide recommendations to implement reforms to tackle issues of pay, working time, protection against dismissals, discrimination, and to strengthen access to trade unions and collective labour rights including the right to strike. Some briefs propose more radical changes in terms of welfare protection and redistribution of resources such as maximum wage and the establishment of a Wage Equity Commission to reduce the wage gap. In some of the first policy briefs for the module (not included in this exhibition) students anticipated changes that are now part of the Employment Rights Act 2025 (such as guaranteed hours and income for workers on zero-hours contracts, protecting the right to strike undermined by the Trade Union Act 2016, and improving statutory sick pay and other basic rights for vulnerable workers). The more recent briefs engage with these changes but also tackle very current issues such as the right to disconnect and the impact of restructuring and redundancies in UK higher education.

View the Online Exhibition