During the Fordist period of industrial production in the big enterprise, the employment contract, as defined by the States' labor law, was the predominant form of labor relation regulation, but today this contract has to compete with two other forms of regulation. On the one hand, enterprises prefer other forms of mobilizing the work force and replace some of the employment contracts by commercial contracts; on the other hand, enterprises adopt their own labor regulation, for examples codes of conduct which contain norms for all their workers, without taking into consideration the legal nature of their relationship. This new form of regulating labor relations through codes of conduct can be a useful complement to traditional labor law, which often seems inadequate because of organizational changes in the enterprise. Nevertheless, we have to admit that these texts, adopted by enterprises, by the social partners or by non governmental organizations, may cause problems of legitimacy and of efficiency, because their legal value remains uncertain. In order to avoid a weakening of worker protection, and in order to clarify the place of these codes of conduct among the other labor law sources, it is therefore important to guarantee that these codes will not replace traditional labor law norms and that their adoption will allow workers' participation.
