REGULATING PRECARIOUS WORK: LESSONS FROM SOUTH AFRICA, AUSTRALIA, AND THE UNITED KINGDOM FOR NIGERIAN LABOUR LAW REFORM

Abstract

This article undertook a comparative analysis of the legal frameworks governing precarious work and triangular employment relationships in Australia, South Africa, and the United Kingdom, with a view to identifying transplantable lessons for Nigerian labour law reform. The study examined the conceptual foundations of precarious work and non-standard employment, situated the analysis within International Labour Rights Theory, and assessed how each comparator jurisdiction addressed the structural vulnerabilities created by casualization and outsourcing. The article found that Nigeria’s Labour Act, which contained no express definition of a “casual” or “outsourced” worker, allowed employers to perpetually classify workers as casual through rolling short-term contracts, thereby denying them statutory entitlements. By contrast, Australia’s Fair Work Act evolved through judicial and legislative oscillation toward a “Same Job, Same Pay” regime that delivered direct pay-parity outcomes for labour hire workers. South Africa’s Labour Relations Act, as amended in 2014, introduced a deeming provision under section 198A that converted labour broker placements exceeding three months into direct employment with the client enterprise, a position affirmed by the Constitutional Court in the Assign Services decision. The United Kingdom relied principally on judicial doctrine, articulated in Autoclenz and Uber BV v Aslam, to pierce contractual labels disguising dependent work, complemented by the Employment Rights Act 2025’s protections for zero-hours and agency workers. The study established that each jurisdiction, despite persistent enforcement challenges, embedded substantive protections into statute or binding precedent rather than leaving them to inconsistent adjudication, a sophistication absent from Nigeria’s framework. The article concluded that Nigeria’s continued reliance on judicial improvisation represented a structural choice sustaining a disadvantaged underclass of workers, and recommended definitional reform, statutory conversion thresholds, equal-treatment obligations, and a unified enforcement agency modelled on the UK’s Fair Work Agency as a coherent pathway toward reform.