Temporal Autonomy and the Protective Individualisation of Working-Time Law: The Case of Overtime Work

ABSTRACT

As part of recent endeavours in legal scholarship to assess the relevance of labour law to modern working life, efforts have been made to evaluate the capacity of working-time laws to respond to workers' needs. This article contributes to this work by examining attempts to advance temporal autonomy in regulatory measures, focusing on the notion that workers should be entitled to refuse to work overtime. It first examines the literature on work organisation that has highlighted the role of overtime in generating unpredictable working hours, and outlines why traditional models of working-time regulation are incapable of responding to this problem. The article then reviews the recent trend towards enhancing autonomy by offering individuals entitlements to adjust their working hours, concluding that rights to refuse overtime hold some promise and that the conception of temporal autonomy that underlies them can inspire additional regulatory techniques to address unpredictability in working hours.