Has New Labour reconfigured employment legislation?

This article compares the regulation of a typical work and access to unfair dismissal before and under New Labour. Using these examples, it questions whether either third way or traditional labour law discourse has captured the objectives and methods of past and present governments and legislatures in the labour law field. It also investigates the incidents of multi-level governance on domestic labour legislative practice. It suggests that normative contributions to labour law would be strengthened by greater interrogation and cognisance of the factors which have shaped UK labour legislation.