While legislation protecting employees exists in most advanced countries, the notion of who actually is an employee has become unstable. Moreover, the decentralization of traditional collective bargaining is clearly under way everywhere, and the all-important balance between workers¿ security and employers¿ flexibility continues to change radically, either retreating toward individual statutory rights or seeking new forms of employee representation.

Labour Law in Motion reprints sixteen reports originally submitted to the seventh Comparative Labor Law Seminar (Tokyo Seminar) sponsored by the Japan Institute for Labour Policy and Training in March 2004. Eleven expert authors describe the situation in their respective countries with regard to issues such as the following:

criteria used to determine whether a person is an employee;
what categories of non-employee exist, and what measure of statutory protection is afforded to such persons;
variations in the concept of employee among labour law, tax law, and social security law;
regulation of terms and conditions of employment;
the forms and legal nature of employee representation;
current trends in deregulation or `re-regulation¿ of labour laws;
mechanisms permitting deviation from legal norms; and,
the manner and extent of labour law intervention in the labour market.
All eleven authors emphasize recent and ongoing changes in their countries¿ labour laws and evaluate the factors that have contributed to such changes. Each author concludes that reform of traditional labour laws is indeed necessary. However, the book as a whole clearly demonstrates that the content of such reform differs from country to country, particularly in the extent to which labour law entrusts the regulation of working conditions to the market.