Labour law and environment: the need for limits. (A look from Europe and Spain)

Abstract

The alteration of the relationship between humanity and nature within the framework of the global extension of the market economy and free enterprise has the effect of continuous economic growth that threatens the biosphere and endangers the human species itself, in a process that is accompanied by an increase in economic and social inequality in the world and the erosion of fundamental social rights. In this context, the role of law, and especially labour law, must be to impose limits on the actions of markets and companies in order to contain this drift of devastation and degradation of social democracy. The multidimensionality of the notion of sustainability - environmental, social and economic - pursues this objective through its concretisation in different forms of production of norms and rules analysed in the text, as well as through the reformulation of some classic elements of the normative group of occupational health and safety, through the extension of the binding force of the right to occupational health and the extension of the space of the working environment to the environment, configuring a new transit between the situations derived from the employment relationship and the condition of citizenship.