Social dialogue, laval-style

<p>Ever since the European Court of Justice delivered its Laval judgment on 18 December 2007, the name of this small Latvian company has become notorious. The sole mention of ‘Viking and Laval’ has become short-hand for those critical of a certain idea of Europe giving primacy to economic considerations to the detriment of ‘social Europe’. This article intends to go back to the original Laval judgment to reconstruct its history and deconstruct its myth.</p> <p>The Viking and Laval judgments have been criticized for using freedom of establishment and freedom to provide services respectively as ‘trumps’ against the fundamental right of freedom of association and collective action . What protection for the right to strike after what the Court decided, one was inclined to ask? Were we going to see social dumping become the norm, a race to the bottom that would see Eastern European workers compete against their Western counterparts by offering their low labour cost as their best asset? These are crucial questions and they have justly been discussed extensively elsewhere. This article considers the Laval judgment, and explores a different angle, by taking as its starting point Habermas’ theory of discursive practices as guarantees for a democratic outcome and offering the Swedish system of collective agreements as a substantiation of such practices. In this context, the article argues, the comprehensive dismissal by the Court of the carefully constructed and balanced system of social dialogue between management and labour is truly the most disturbing aspect of this controversial judgment. For all the supposed importance placed on discursive practices and social dialogue for the European social model, when confronted with a successful example of such model, the Court retreated in the familiar territory of hard law and statutory obligations. In doing so, it willfully misunderstood the function of collective bargaining, by effectively decoupling its process from its function, and leaving social dialogue with the hollow role of a deliberative practice devoid of any finality, the very openness of which both signifies and nullifies its democratic credentials.,</p&gt

Ugly, dirty and bad: working class aesthetics reconsidered

This article, taking at its starting point the work of Pier Paolo Pasolini, tackles the aesthetic of the working class as an object d'art: how is the aesthetic sense of those who do not belong to the working class, but claim a political interest in its destiny, engaged by the outward appearance of the working class? And, more specifically, has there been a shift from a sense of aesthetic appreciation to what this author perceives as revulsion towards Western working classes? Has our aesthetic gaze wandered off, in search of more distant objects? It is not our goal to answer these questions by means of a quantitative or qualitative sociological analysis, and to this extent, the answers have to be taken as given. The article argues that there is a displacement of our gaze towards the working classes in the developing world, resulting in yet another form of consumption (the campaigns for fair trade would not be so successful without the picture-perfect – and picture-perfect because so completely desolate and objectively poor – sweatshops and small children in the fields). This displacement is not at all innocent. The article will propose that there are legal consequences – by using, and subverting, Luhmann's remark on legal taste; political consequences, where displacement means invisibility and lack of voice; and social consequences, mirroring Pasolini's horror at the cultural genocide, and now looking at the desolate spaces it has left behind.<p></p> The article intends to focus on the aesthetic of the working class as an object d’art: how is the aesthetic sense of those who do not belong to the working class, but claim a political interest in its destiny, engaged by the outward appearance of the working class? And, more specifically, has there been a shift from a sense of aesthetic appreciation to what this author perceives as revulsion towards Western working classes? Has our aesthetic gaze wandered off, in search of more distant objects? It is not our goal to answer these questions by means of a quantitative or qualitative sociological analysis, and to this extent, the answers have to be taken as given. The article argues that there is a displacement of our gaze towards the working classes in the developing world, resulting in yet another form of consumption (the campaigns for fair trade would not be so successful without the picture-perfect – and picture-perfect because so completely desolate and objectively poor – sweatshops and small children in the fields). This displacement is not at all innocent . The article will propose that there are legal consequences – by using, and subverting, Luhmann’s remark on legal taste; political consequences, where displacement means invisibility and lack of voice; and social consequences, mirroring Pasolini’s horror at the cultural genocide, and now looking at the desolate spaces it has left behind

An ex vivo electroretinographic apparatus for the ml-scale testing of drugs to one day and beyond

When screening new drugs to treat retinal diseases, ex vivo electroretinography (ERG) potentially combines the experimental throughput of its traditional in vivo counterpart, with greater mechanistic insight and reproducible delivery. To date, this technique was used in experiments with open loop superfusion and lasting up to a few hours. Here, we present a compact apparatus that provides continuous and simultaneous recordings of the scotopic a-waves from four mouse retinas for much longer durations. Crucially, each retina can be incubated at 37 °C in only 2 mL of static medium, enabling the testing of very expensive drugs or nano devices. Light sensitivity and response kinetics of these preparations remain in the physiological range throughout incubation, displaying only very slow drifts. As an example application, we showed that barium, a potassium channel blocker used to abolish the glial component of the ERG, displayed no overt side effects on photoreceptors over several hours. In another example, we fully regenerated a partially bleached retina using a minimal quantity of 9-cis-retinal. Finally, we demonstrated that including antibiotic in the incubation medium extends physiological light responses to over one day. This system represents a necessary stepping stone towards the goal of combining ERG recordings with organotypically cultured retinas

Versatile bipolar temperature controller for custom in vitro applications

Effective temperature control is crucial in many studies of isolated biological tissues, with preparations often requiring specialized holding chambers. In these situations, the design flexibility and optimizations offered by a custom made temperature controller may be preferable over a commercial model. We present a versatile controller for heating and cooling applications, providing simple step-by-step instructions to mathematically model your specific system and optimize controller parameters. The apparatus uses analog components and linear stages to simplify circuit comprehension and customization, achieving fast transitions with small static errors and overshoots over a wide range of temperatures without readjustment. A fully featured rackable enclosure is complemented by two temperature probes based on the LMT70A linear microchip sensor (for the control loop and for bath monitoring). BNC outputs provide scaled probe signals for continuous temperature data acquisition. The maximum achievable power output of the controller is -23.5 W/+22.0 W (-4.7 V/+4.4 V, \ub15.0 A), sufficient to bring a well designed holder for standard 35 mm chambers from 23 \ub0C up to 37 \ub0C in ~1 min and down to 3 \ub0C in ~4 min. Any biologist with some technical prowess should be able to follow our instructions from modeling to assembly and calibration

Connexin 36 expression is required for electrical coupling between mouse rods and cones.

Rod-cone gap junctions mediate the so-called "secondary rod pathway", one of three routes that convey rod photoreceptor signals across the retina. Connexin 36 (Cx36) is expressed at these gap junctions, but an unidentified connexin protein also seems to be expressed. Cx36 knockout mice have been used extensively in the quest to dissect the roles in vision of all three pathways, with the assumption, never directly tested, that rod-cone electrical coupling is abolished by deletion of this connexin isoform. We previously showed that when wild type mouse cones couple to rods, their apparent dynamic range is extended toward lower light intensities, with the appearance of large responses to dim flashes (up to several mV) originating in rods. Here we recorded from the cones of Cx36del[LacZ]/del[LacZ] mice and found that dim flashes of the same intensity evoked at most small sub-millivolt responses. Moreover, these residual responses originated in the cones themselves, since: (i) their spectral preference matched that of the recorded cone and not of rods, (ii) their time-to-peak was shorter than in coupled wild type cones, (iii) a pharmacological block of gap junctions did not reduce their amplitude. Taken together, our data show that rod signals are indeed absent in the cones of Cx36 knockout mice. This study is the first direct demonstration that Cx36 is crucial for the assembly of functional rod-cone gap junctional channels, implying that its genetic deletion is a reliable experimental approach to eliminate rod-cone coupling.We thank Drs. Klaus Willecke and Karin Dedek for generously donating Cx36^ +/del[LacZ] founder mice to establish a colony in Pisa. Intramural funding was provided by the University of Pisa to L.C. and C.G. and by the Ministero dell’Istruzione, dell’Università e della Ricerca (2010599KBR_003) to C.G

Mouse rods signal through gap junctions with cones

Rod and cone photoreceptors are coupled by gap junctions (GJs), relatively large channels able to mediate both electrical and molecular communication. Despite their critical location in our visual system and evidence that they are dynamically gated for dark/light adaptation, the full impact that rod–cone GJs can have on cone function is not known. We recorded the photovoltage of mouse cones and found that the initial level of rod input increased spontaneously after obtaining intracellular access. This process allowed us to explore the underlying coupling capacity to rods, revealing that fully coupled cones acquire a striking rod-like phenotype. Calcium, a candidate mediator of the coupling process, does not appear to be involved on the cone side of the junctional channels. Our findings show that the anatomical substrate is adequate for rod–cone coupling to play an important role in vision and, possibly, in biochemical signaling among photoreceptors

A cambrian origin for vertebrate rods

Vertebrates acquired dim light vision when an ancestral cone evolved into the rod photoreceptor at an unknown stage preceding the last common ancestor of extant jawed vertebrates (~420 million years ago Ma). The jawless lampreys provide a unique opportunity to constrain the timing of this advance, as their line diverged ~505 Ma and later displayed high morphological stability. We recorded with patch electrodes the inner segment photovoltages and with suction electrodes the outer segment photocurrents of Lampetra fluviatilis retinal photoreceptors. Several key functional features of jawed vertebrate rods are present in their phylogenetically homologous photoreceptors in lamprey: crucially, the efficient amplification of the effect of single photons, measured by multiple parameters, and the flow of rod signals into cones. These results make convergent evolution in the jawless and jawed vertebrate lines unlikely and indicate an early origin of rods, implying strong selective pressure toward dim light vision in Cambrian ecosystems

Greening Investment Law

This thesis investigates the relationship between investment law and the power of states to produce and implement environmental measures. Through a strictly legal approach, and by situating the issue within the framework of public international law, this project endeavours to find avenues for the incorporation of environmental legal obligations within the investment legal regime. The thesis examines the main substantive protections granted to investors by the system of bilateral and multilateral investment instruments, before considering the ways in which, through express provisions, general conflict rules, and procedural means, tribunals can take environmental law into account. This taxonomy is tested in the third part of this work, through the analysis of the jurisprudence issuing from investment tribunals in disputes containing an environmental element