INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS JOURNAL最新文献

The UK state has collected data on strike activity for over a century, to inform public policy on industrial relations. This involved creating and maintaining a consistent and reliable data set, despite inevitable limitations and funding pressures. Yet how the Office for National Statistics now constructs and presents its statistics on strikes, collected through the Labour Disputes Inquiry, has been radically transformed. Two revisions to the definition of a ‘stoppage’, departing from International Labour Organisation resolutions, have broken the consistency of this longstanding series. The most egregious is that a multi-employer strike (such as in health or education), or a multi-union strike, no longer constitutes just one but multiple stoppages (of each employer and of each union), resulting in an ‘explosion’ of recorded stoppage numbers. Weaknesses in data collection and presentation compound these difficulties. Not only are the dimensions of the 2022–2023 strike surge misrepresented, but the historic role of strike statistics in informing public policy is now undermined. Recommendations are made on how to improve the ONS's published strike data.

This review paper examines the state of IR research in SSA and establishes a future research agenda—a context that has had limited coverage in global IR literature. Following the Preferred Reporting Items method for conducting Systematic reviews and Meta-Analyses, we reviewed 52 IR studies published in 43 journals between 2013 and 2023 that covered 16 countries in SSA. Analysis of the studies revealed five core areas of IR research: union militancy, new form of union activism and democratisation, union fragmentation, tripartism and externally driven neoliberalism. Further analysis identified four emerging themes: colonial and historical legacies, overrepresentation of the South African context, and theoretical and methodological challenges linked to researching IR in the region. Despite regional variations between Francophone, Lusophone and Anglophone Africa, our review contends that regardless of the country-specific orientation and history, IR in SSA is entangled with colonisation, decolonisation, institutional democratisation, economic informality and precarious labour politics. These findings have significant implications for IR research and policy, particularly on the advancement of decent work and regeneration of trade unions in SSA.

We illustrate the exploitation in the relationship between Uber and its drivers by aligning their work with the characteristics of neo-villeiny. Two different legal developments in response to irregulation (or the lack of effective regulation) in similar institutional contexts emerge. While Uber drivers in the United Kingdom now have worker status, dysregulation (by which we mean regulation that exacerbates the problem it seeks to resolve) in Ontario has established neo-villeiny in law.

While the need for a transformation to tackle climate change is no longer contested, competing visions about the future have taken the front seat in political debates. Previous research on stakeholders in the European Parliament and the German Bundestag identified opposing views relating to green growth, degrowth and post-growth. In relation to trade unions, these have recently been discussed conceptually to some extent, but empirical work on the topic has hitherto been absent. Drawing on 25 semi-structured interviews with representatives of Germany's DGB trade unions, we find that, despite their strong support for a green growth narrative and official opposition to post-growth thought, the majority of interviewees sketched out concrete visions for a just future that in some respects aligns with post- or a-growth positions. In line with post-growth discourses, trade union officials described an economy that allows for ‘a good life’ and ‘good work’, based on principles of co-determination, secure and well-paid jobs ensured by collective bargaining, income, wealth and inheritance tax reform and a stronger, more active role of the state. Findings suggest that despite German labour unions’ shared opposition to the term post-growth or degrowth, there is significant overlap in terms of concrete goals and policy proposals.

This paper adopts a moral economy framework to analyse the unique and collective experience of remote work during the UK pandemic lockdowns. Through analysis of qualitative interviews with workers based at home during periods of lockdown, we explore how this offered workers a new opportunity to evaluate a particular type of work extensification experienced when working onsite. We found that workers gained clarity over ‘preparing-for-work’, commuting and other unpaid labour as unfairly burdening nonwork time and social goods like family, health and leisure. We expand on the idea of tertiary time to suggest that hybrid work, despite its potential drawbacks, is viewed by workers as a way to regain some control over this area of their lives. By examining this in terms of the concept of lay normativity, our analysis draws out the importance of personal needs and emotional connections. We identify how, during the pandemic's extreme circumstances, a new opportunity for evaluation emerged that facilitated the development of a new sentiment around tertiary time devoted to the commute and preparation for work.

This study analyses the relationship between academic capitalism and employment precarity. Drawing on two cross-national sources of survey data, we compare academics' experiences with job insecurity and related stress in Australian and Canadian universities during the COVID-19 pandemic. Although these two countries are similar liberal market economies, Australian higher education has embraced academic capitalism to a greater extent than in Canada. Against this backdrop, our study focuses on the moderating role of ‘soft income’ from international tuition fees and the use of contingent labour in explaining cross-country differences. We find that international tuition played a role in heightening job insecurity and associated stress, particularly in the Australian universities due to their greater reliance on this source of income. However, these outcomes converged for ‘permanent’ and ‘casual’ academics in Australia but diverged in Canada. We contend that the cross-national differentiation is likely due to the weaker job protections afforded to permanent academics in Australia.

This paper addresses the puzzle of how and why multi-employer bargaining has revived as a policy idea given the apparent dominance of neoliberalism. Multi-employer bargaining has emerged as a solution to problems caused by failed neoliberal policies. These solutions have been generated and disseminated through a process of vertical ‘new knowledge’ transfer between international, regional and national governance levels, which local actors have mobilised to influence policy debates and outcomes. We develop these arguments using case studies of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development's changing position on collective bargaining, the European Union Minimum Wage Directive 2022 that encouraged multi-employer bargaining, and bargaining reforms implemented in 2022–24 in Australia. We contribute insights to power resource theory regarding how new knowledge as a distinct form of ideational power is operationalised vertically across different governance levels to resolve localised labour problems.