Industrial Relations最新文献

This introduction assesses the international impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on work and employment. It outlines conceptually why industrial relations institutions matter for shaping policy choices across different countries. This includes countries in the Global South that are not covered by conventional varieties of capitalism theories. An important focus is what IR institutions and policies played a protective role in the decommodification of labor during the pandemic, notably short-time working (furlough) schemes, tripartite cooperative pacts, works councils, collective bargaining, and active labor market policies. IR institutions continue to matter, and the contributions in this Special Issue can inform future research.

This paper examines the role of lifelong learning in counteracting skill depreciation and obsolescence. We differentiate between occupations with more hard skills versus more soft skills and draw on representative job advertisement data that contain machine-learning categorized skill requirements and cover the Swiss job market in great detail across occupations (from 1950 to 2019). We examine lifelong learning effects for “harder” versus “softer” occupations, thereby analyzing the role of training in counteracting skill depreciation in occupations that are differently affected by skill depreciation. Our results reveal novel empirical patterns regarding the benefits of lifelong learning, which are consistent with theoretical explanations based on structurally different skill depreciation rates: In harder occupations, with large shares of fast-depreciating hard skills, the role of lifelong learning is primarily as a hedge against unemployment risks rather than a boost to wages. By contrast, in softer occupations, in which workers build on more value-stable soft-skill foundations, the role of lifelong learning instead lies mostly in acting as a boost for upward career mobility and leads to larger wage gains.

This study documents the productivity dynamics of remote work during the COVID-19 pandemic in Japan. The mean productivity at home has improved by more than 10 percentage points in the past year, although it is still approximately 20% lower than when working in the office. Selection effects and learning effects contributed almost equally to the productivity growth. Even after adjusting for additional working hours from reduced commuting, the conclusion of relatively low productivity at home remains unchanged. The percentage of employees who want to continue frequent remote work after the pandemic has increased substantially, despite its lower productivity.

Whereas there are recent papers on the effect of robot adoption on employment and wages, there is no evidence on how robots affect non-monetary working conditions. We explore the impact of robot adoption on several domains of non-monetary working conditions in Europe over the period 1995–2005 combining information from the World Robotics Survey and the European Working Conditions Survey. In order to deal with the possible endogeneity of robot deployment, we employ an instrumental variables strategy, using the robot exposure by sector in other developed countries as an instrument. Our results indicate that robotization has a negative impact on the quality of work in the dimension of work intensity and no relevant impact on the domains of physical environment or skills and discretion.

In this paper, we exploit a panel of industry-level data in European countries to study the economic impact of national reductions in usual weekly working hours between 1995 and 2007. Our identification strategy relies on the five national reforms that took place over this period and on initial differences across sectors in the share of workers exposed to the reforms. On average, the number of hours worked in more affected sectors fell, hourly wages rose, while employment did not increase. The effect on value added per hour worked appears to be positive but non-significant.

IR scholars reference intersectionality in relation to organizing, but the field lacks a theoretical construct. Based on 2 years of intimate data access, we examine the 2017 U.S. Women's March as a critical case of “intersectional organizing.” We ground this empirical case study in Critical Race and Intersectionality Theory to show how the intersectional organizing model employed by the Women's March handles identity-based fragmentation, with lessons for building a more inclusive labor movement.

This article analyses the role played by brands, producer-country governments, and unions in mitigating the impact of disruptions caused to garment supply chains by COVID-19 in Cambodia, Indonesia, and Myanmar. Its findings challenge brand-centric accounts, highlighting the need for more serious consideration of the dynamic, relational nature of labor governance—and, in particular, of the role of the state–labor nexus in determining producer-country unions' ability to exercise strategic agency within global supply chains.

This article examines the process of informalization of work in platform food delivery work in the UK. Drawing on qualitative data, this article provides new analytical insight into what drives individual formal couriers to both supply and demand informalized sub-contracted gig work to undocumented migrants, and how a platform company enables informal work practices through permissive HR practices and technology. In doing so, this article shows how platform companies are enablers of informal labor markets and contribute to the expansion of hyper-precarious working conditions.

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused labor market disruptions at an unprecedented scale and is akin to a stress test for industrial relations institutions. Drawing on a large-scale (n = 6111) study of German employees, we empirically investigate whether and how the two institutions comprising Germany's dual system of employee representation—works councils and collective bargaining—have delivered on their protective potential and mitigated the impact of the pandemic on workers. We demonstrate that employees in representative environments fare better on a range of protective outcomes.

We analyze the relationship between occupational gender composition and gender discrimination in recruitment and investigate whether there is hiring discrimination against men in female-dominated occupations. We do this with a large-scale field experiment where we submitted more than 12,000 job applications for 12 occupations in Australia, varying the gender of the applicants. Men received around 50% more callbacks than women in male-dominated occupations, while they received over 40% fewer callbacks in female-dominated occupations.