Labour law in Africa//

Acronym:

LABAFRICA

Funding:

Departement CHANGES University of Bordeaux

Project's holder:

Associated team:

Gretha UMR 5113 / LAM UMR 5115

Duration:

6 years - January 2020 - December 2025

Abstract:

The labour laws of African States have been the subject of a great deal of research work. And yet the field is facing a paradoxical situation. Even though this work has been ongoing since the beginning of the 20th century, the employment-related legal situation in these States remains largely unknown. The reasons for this paradox are commonly acknowledged. The descriptions of labour laws are very often book-based. The notions and concepts used to describe labour laws in African States are largely borrowed from European legal tradition. Thus, the reference to French legal concepts remains strong in the French-speaking African States. Beyond the sole issue of the legislation and employment-related legal systems, these shortcomings are not without their impacts on the categories addressed by the social sciences. The reference to “informal working” is, in this regard, emblematic of the methodological difficulties. Our project is to refresh the understanding of labour law and labour relations more widely through a realistic approach to labour laws “in action”. The first step in our research will be to look at the situation regarding labour legislations in the West-African subregion.

Our research project is structured around three activities. The first consists in taking stock of the current state of knowledge on labour law. Initially this involves bibliographic studies over a long period stretching back through the 20th century in order to get a grasp of situation in the colonial and post-colonial periods. On a more contemporary level, the research notebook https://labafrica.hypotheses.org/ will be the medium for the publication of legal news on legislative, administrative and judicial changes in labour law in the West-African subregion. These “news” reports are intended to make up for the lack of accessible data on these States and developments there.

The second activity is more immediately methodological. As part of a seminar, a series of workshops will be organised aimed at putting to the test the descriptive categories commonly used to discuss African labour law. The seminar activities will give rise to publications on the blog, as well as to recordings of certain sessions being made available online.

A third activity will concern the development of empirical research on the making of employment-related justice. It will give rise to the publication of accounts by actors involved in the functioning of the justice systems: judges, prosecutors, lawyers, labour inspectors and trade unionists. Based on an awareness of the importance of the formatting of legal knowledge in order to be able to mobilise labour law, a second perspective involves studying the construction of legal opinion within these legal systems.  Within this framework we will report on both the training of legal officers and lawyers in the universities and the specificities of the PhDs on African labour law, which are marked by the high level of mobility of the students, in particular to France, Germany and Belgium.