Key to the recovery of industrial relations post-covid and the form this takes is the development of a green economy and securing a just transition to a carbon-free world. Global and European union organisations play an increasingly active role in global climate and just green transition politics. This paper addresses the range of their interventions, the challenges to developing policy...
- Facts such as globalization, changing production and management
techniques, and flexibility have created new forms of employment. One
of these forms of employment is home-based work. Home-based work,
which existed before the 19th century, when the industrial revolution
was experienced, did not disappear with the increase in
mechanization, but was transformed. According to...
This paper investigates how wages can be governed in the EU and what the role and effects of different dimensions of industrial relations systems are. More specifically, we investigate the ‘vertical dimension’, which connects the supranational locus of European policy-making and shaping to national organizations in a top-down fashion. We also investigate the role of the ‘horizontal dimension’,...
The effects of platforms on employment conditions have been primarily analyzed through the lenses of their interactions with labour market regulation and in isolation with the product market regulation (PMR). Studies in IR tradition suggest that PMR is crucial for understanding employment outcomes (Gall et al. 2011). PMR limits competition between companies based on wages and working standards...
This paper is concerned with the multiple lines of labour divisions unfolding under the Code on Social Security Code (2020) through varying definitions of workers, different payment scales, different accessibility to social security and the reproduction and intersection with social divisions of caste, class and gender. By looking at the implications of the Act on the process of collective...
The urgency of environmental action preceded the covid crisis but an inclusive transition to a greener society has become a key feature of recovery plans in Europe. The necessity of a green transition also concomitantly appeared as an opportunity to reframe and rethink debates around industrial relations and union identities (Thomas, Doerflinger, 2020).
In that context, this study provides a...
The paper, after an analysis of the recent policies adopted by the European Commission during the pandemic with the purpose of relaunching the environmental ethic able to protect public health, wants to demonstrate how industrial relations can give an effective answer to the welfare systems’ sustainability problem. For the Italian case, the public redistributive policy in support of...
Nonstandard forms of employment commonly involve precarious conditions of labour. Given such challenges, trade unions are expected to fight against the use of (precarious) nonstandard employment. However, in reality, some unions refuse to represent nonstandard workers.
This study aims to explore why unions fail or even refuse to represent nonstandard workers by revisiting the...
This paper reports on attempts at a formal reinstatement and potential extent of sectoral bargaining taking place in Ireland. Ireland had a system of sectoral bargaining since 1946 (known as Joint Labour Committees, JLCs), of which there was 16. Sectoral bargaining in Ireland was not widespread but confined to specific low paid and vulnerable occupations (Ó’Riain, 2014). However, the system...
Before the Covid-19 crisis, we had already reflected upon the need to reconsider methods and means of exercising union rights precisely in the context of digital work (S.Donà, M.Marocco, 2019).
On the basis of these considerations we had already begun to outline an initial proposal regarding the use of information technology in exercising the right to meet – and the subsequent delocalization...
Throughout 2020, the Spanish Government initiated the process of regulating all activities related to platform work with the purpose of 'chasing the fraud of bogus self-employment'. Somewhat surprisingly, this initiative was met by a substantial wave of protest from the workers who the government proclaimed to be attempting to protect. In this light, the present research explores the arguments...
This paper proposes a sector-sensitive approach to the analysis of the devising and implementation of employers’ strategies on making pay information more transparent. In the UK and further afield, national regulations have been introduced to make public information on pay and other pay-related elements (bonuses, professional profiles grouping, use of pay scales, etc.) more transparent. To...
Economic fluctuations have different consequences for the wages of different demographic groups. Understanding what drives these consequences is important for policies that aim to support both economic stability and equal pay.
The role of observable characteristics (e.g., education, age, part-time work) for the gender wage gap is extensively analyzed in the literature, but the role of labor...
The field of industrial relations (IR) and social movement studies (SM) have rarely entered into a dialogue. Kelly’s mobilization theory has been one of the few successful attempts to integrate the two fields of study by providing a framework for the analysis of micro processes of mobilizations. In the light of the new conflicts that are emerging in the context of the gig and precarious...
The impact of the Covid-19 crisis on work and employment differs considerably across countries largely reflecting variations in employment institutions regulating actor engagement and state strategies. Notwithstanding a range of differences, comparative capitalisms (CC) perspectives persistently uncover distinctive patterns of variation between Liberal Market Economies (LMEs) and Coordinated...
Objective - The aim of the article is to discuss the concept of immigration within the context of immigration policies, theories and research, and to discuss the challenges faced by the diversity-inequality framework. The research question is to evaluate the inequality caused by the policies towards immigrants and the prejudiced attitudes of the local people in the lives of immigrants. How...
This work is based on the Italian administrative data (source: Ministero del Lavoro e delle Politiche Sociali) resulting from the applications submitted to access specific tax benefits on the Performance-Related Pay (PRP) collectively established at firm or territorial level. This gives the database its originality since there are still no census data on the firm level bargaining in Italy. ...
The knotty problem of self-employment representation is one of the most current challenges for industrial relations and a litmus test of the inclusive capacity of Western democratic capitalisms towards the disruptive labour market transformations.
European trade unions have been dealing with the increase in self-employment in both skilled and unskilled sectors. Unions have chosen different...
Examining the relationship between unions and technological and economic change becomes a more difficult task when the firm's size is smaller due to the greater difficulties that trade unions may encounter in organizing their representation activities in the context of SMEs. Several factors make it more challenging to organize trade unions in SMEs, such as: the presence of relationships...
Employers struggling with labour shortages, retention and competence mismatches may opt for the implementation of innovative strategies towards attracting workers. This paper will use the "good employer" lens to shed light on the practices undertaken by employment agencies posting workers in EU countries. These employers’ actions are the result of internal policies of the companies aimed at...
The crisis of industrial relations was not generated by the coronavirus pandemic, but the progressing division of the global production process during the last generation has undermined working regulations of the nation states. In response to this evolution, the International Labour Office, reminiscent of its origin in the 1919 Peace Treaty of Versailles, has taken a great step forward at a...
National systems have provided unions with stronger institutional power resources by comparison to the EU structures governing the Single Market. In aviation, EU governance rules empowered Ryanair to defeat all European pilot unions, regardless of the different national varieties of structural, associational, or institutional power resources they were relying on. Notwithstanding, in December...
The Swedish wage-setting system has transformed over the last four decades. Tariff-based yearly pay raises and collective agreed general wage increases have been replaced by individual and differentiated wage setting, and yearly compensations are based on performance-related pay raise. Performance appraisal is thus a means to systematically (e)valuate both what the employee has achieved and...
Recent years have witnessed intense debate around digitalisation and its potential impact on work and employment. A key question is whether trade unions are able to shape the use and implementation of digitalisation so that workers benefit. Much extant literature focuses on the ‘platform’ economy and organising ‘gig’ workers. The industry 4.0 debate takes in established manufacturing...
From the start of COVID-19 pandemic, healthcare work has been identified as one of high-skilled key occupations with a high proportion of migrant professionals (Fasani and Mazza, 2020). In the UK, prior to the pandemic, health professional bodies expressed concerns over migrant workforce shortages and staff retention in the field of nursing due to Brexit (RCN, 2020); during the pandemic...
International migration is a quintessentially a global issue, as well as a European one, which has become a highly divisive source of conflict at national, European and global levels, as well as a rallying cry for social movements and parties of the extreme right. At the national level, migrant and labour market regimes are constantly being adapted to the challenges associated with demographic...
The theme of the revitalization or renewal of union action has been at the centre of the industrial relations debate for many years (see Moore 2010; Gumbrell-McCormick and Hyman 2013; Schnabel 2013; Baccaro and Howell 2017; Vandaele 2018). Among the possible strategies for this purpose (Frege and Kelly 2004), the literature has mainly focused on organizing (Clawson 2003; Hurd et al. 2003;...
The current COVID-19-pandemic sends negative and unexpected shocks to the labour markets. The consequences of the corona-pandemic for the labour markets are not yet to be overseen, but the negative effects will be serious and long lasting. A central feature of the Nordic model is the collaboration between workers and employers at the workplace. The model has proven to be particularly effective...
The debate on job quality in worker cooperative is characterised by two different poles. Some contributions tend to focus on job satisfaction and intrinsic dimensions of job quality, highlighting how they are generally higher in cooperatives compared to capitalist firms because of their democratic character which translates into a peculiar organisational and managerial ethos. Other...
Demougin et al. (2018) argue that employer organizations have adapted to changing socio-economic contexts by developing within and across three different roles, namely the role as industrial actor, political actor and service provider. In this paper, we make use of the analyses by Demougin et al. in order to look into the role of Norwegian employer organisations (N-EO). As in other countries,...
The emergency caused by COVID-19 –virus has caused a profound stagnation in the creative industry, particularly in activities in arts and culture. The losses in event economy are cumulated in catering and tourism services as well as in services of technology. Government measures have been addressed to the creative industry for promoting survival over the emergency with resilient patterns of...
Declining unionization in many countries have motivated studies to get a better understanding of what factors that influence the decisions of young workers to join trade unions. In particular, it is interesting to examine the role of union membership in close family. It is widely recognized that individual choices are affected by intergenerational transmission of preferences regarding political...
The pandemic has contributed to a strong spread of remote work (Eurofound, 2020) together with connected risks, in particular psycho-social risks related to the use of technologies in unconventional working environments (Popma, 2013). During the pandemic, observations in this regard have grown (Rigotti et al., 2020), identifying the main psychosocial consequences of a widespread and prolonged...
When communicating with members and the broader public, unions must strike a balance between mobilizing workers against employers and a ‘social dialogue’ approach emphasizing compromise and negotiated results. However, using social media, grassroots groups with alternate readings of worker-employer relations can now draw on a much larger and stronger platform to create dissent in resistance to...
Network governance approach combines market, hierarchy, and relational forms of coordination (Provan & Kenis 2008) by focusing on an interplay between actors within an organisational field, where their roles differ based on the external institutional conditions of the field that in turn affect the mode of governance. This approach draws from both sociology and organisational studies by using...
Global Value Chains (GVCs) are today a major driver of employment, and yet GVCs jobs are very often precarious, unstable, and informalized. How can we explain the persistence of such informalization dynamics within modern, globalized, production processes?
If earlier GVC approaches focussed on firm-firm relations overlooking labour and employment, later perspectives showed that asymmetrical...
A growing literature on the impact of new technologies on the transformation of the work process is emerging, that stresses the role of the combination of technological and organisational changes as drivers of transformation in terms of human-machine relationship. While comparison across countries starts to be undertaken, relatively less attention has been devoted to study how heterogeneity...
This paper analyzes the cycle of worker contention at Amazon logistics in Italy and Germany, trying to see the variation in the forms of mobilizations and the role of traditional unions (CGIL and Ver.Di) in a key multinational restructuring urban logistics. Data collected on protest event coverage, interviews with key informants and documents produced by unions and worker organizations will...
Since it has been platformized, food delivery sector is characterized by a transnational wave of unionization which has not only made their worker a symbol of precariousness, but it has also led to crucial achievements. In this sense, considering the high institutional involvements that has make possible to achieve results such as the recent agreement signed with Just Eat, Italy seems to be at...
The developments since the outbreak of the ‘Great Recession’ led to increasing EU’s commodifying interventions in wages and workers’ rights. What was therefore the strategy followed by organised labour vis-à-vis the EU’s new economic governance (NEG) regime?
Historically, the European Trade Union Confederation (ETUC) has been in favour of further European integration. Jacques Delors' pledge...
Debates on the future of work often concentrate narrowly on technological change and automation of jobs, whereas other important forces of change are overlooked. In this paper we discuss what consequences digital technological change, interacting with other global megatrends such as demographic change, green transition and globalization, will have for Nordic labour markets and work life...
In early 2021, one year after the Covid-19 outbreak, immunization campaigns started. Countries are investing as many resources as possible – financial, political, logistic, organisational – first to produce and/or access vaccines and then to inoculate them. We consider the latter and focus on vaccination programmes in the UK and Italy. Specifically, we examine the different approaches that key...
The COVID-19 pandemic introduced a series of challenges to the function of the labour market: from shutting down whole sectors of the economy and the subsequent furloughing of staff to the rise of flexible forms of employment, and from the use of technologies in managing the new spatio-temporal realities to the psycho-economic effects of the crisis to workers.
Since the early days of the...
Increased use of precarious employment contracts is a growing issue for workers in higher education institutions (HEIs) internationally. In 2020 the first UK national lockdown due to COVID-19 coincided with the end of national industrial action in the sector by the University and College Union (UCU). Emerging from industrial strike action over precarious contracts, workload and pensions, the...
