COVID's Impacts on the Field of Labour and Employment Relations

摘要

The field of labour and employment relations covers work and employment from the perspective of workers, as distinct from the management-oriented field of HR. The COVID-19 crisis that spread across the globe in the early months of 2020 deeply affected employment and work in almost all sectors of the global economy. Already, many academic publishers in the field are demanding that articles and book manuscripts address it. More fundamentally, these developments pose challenges to some core assumptions of our field. Our field focuses on collective action by workers as a central means of improving work. The current situation shows its continued importance but raises fundamental questions about its nature and future. The legal frameworks for work regulation and collective bargaining have long been under attack across the advanced industrial democracies from changes in the economic and political environments. Traditionally the field has been locked into economic-heavy models of bargaining power which suggests that workers will have little power in a period of extreme unemployment. This crisis seems likely to provide new challenges to that approach. New directions may be more rooted in symbolic/moral power (Chun, 2011) and associational or relational power resultant from coalitions with a wider array of social justice and activist groups – such as the recent campaign for a $15 minimum wage (Hannah, 2016). The workplace has been the traditional site for organizing workers and exercising power, as well as the basis for solidarity. COVID has accelerated a growing dispersal of work that threatens this model. Some have explored more ‘transient’ types of solidarity (Heckscher and McCarthy, 2014), but there is as yet little clarity on whether these can sustain collective action and commitment over time. Some worker activism has continued to involve traditional in-person demonstrations even during the pandemic; but attention has swung towards tools of online organizing and protest that have been developing over the past decade. Unions have often been slow to incorporate these tools in their existing structures, but the COVID crisis raises the stakes. Labour-management cooperation has been an important theme of Employment Relations for over a century (Kochan and Rubinstein, 2000). Cooperative institutions are more established in Northern Europe than in the USA, yet everywhere they have been side-lined or ignored in initial unilateral responses by companies. But there have been exceptions. In the USA, some healthcare partnerships have mobilized around safety issues, redeployment, and process improvement. Evidence emerged from K-12 schools in New Jersey that districts with mature collaborative relations responded to the crisis with remarkable flexibility, creativity, and cooperation in adjusting to the crisis. Such cases will be a rich trove for future research. Government has always had a crucial role in shaping labour relations. Governments in the EU and the USA have taken divergent paths in dealing with the economic disruption of COVID. Europe has generally tried to protect existing jobs through short-term work, while the USA has tolerated much more job loss, cushioned by extension of unemployment benefits (Atlantic Council, 2020). The current crisis will provide opportunities to develop the debates between classical economists, who generally argue that the former approach will allow the economy to adapt more quickly to change, and those in our field who counter that maintaining stable employment relations is not only more humane but will enable companies and workers to rebound more quickly from the crisis. What models of employment relations at the firm or country level did a better job at protecting the health of healthcare and other essential workers and the incomes and living standards of low wage workers? Have unions or other forms of worker voice improved outcomes for workers in this moment? Have new forms of solidarity developed in th