BUIRA History of Industrial Relations Study Group

Popular Unity: The Lessons of Chile - 50 Years On

Salvador Allende, Chile’s first Socialist President, was elected 50 years ago, in September 1970. Supported by Popular Unity governments, he embarked on a radical programme to socialise his country’s economy and redistribute its wealth, while fully respecting its democratic institutions and rule of law. However, powerful opponents both inside and outside Chile soon began to destabilise the country, and his government was overthrown in a brutal coup in September 1973, which led to the murder, torture, disappearance and exile of tens of thousands of Chileans.

 To mark the momentous anniversary of Allende’s election, and to celebrate the enduring hope of democratic socialism, we are delighted to announce our next Seminar which we shall conduct through Zoom/ MS Teams:

 17.00-18.45 Tuesday 22 September, on line

For further details and/or to reserve a place, please e-mail Michael Gold (m.gold@rhul.ac.uk) or Linda Clarke (clarkel@wmin.ac.uk). We will then send you the link shortly before the seminar.
 
Programme:
17.00-17.15: Welcome and introduction: Michael Gold and Linda Clarke (Chairs)

17.15 – 17.45: Francisco Dominguez 

Allende's Chile: State and Revolution

Since the coup against Allende in 1973, Latin American has experienced decades of turmoil, neoliberal transformation, regional integration efforts, and massive economic and political aggression from the United States. Popular Unity's defeat notwithstanding, the Chilean experience under Allende continues to be inspirational with key Latin American political and social agents for change who draw both negative and positive lessons for revolutionary transformation processes elsewhere in the region. The argument is no longer focused on peaceful or armed revolution, but on the constitutional transformation of state bodies as enabling legitimate acts conducive to the desired revolutionary change in the economy, society and polity. This talk will examine these issues.

17.45 – 18.15: Fernando Duran-Palma and Miguel Urrutia

Opening up the great avenues: workers, unions, and the struggle against neoliberalism in Chile (1979-2019)

After four decades of neoliberalism, and echoing the prophetic words of Salvador Allende in his last address to the nation,¹ millions of Chileans took to the streets in October 2019 to demand the construction of a better, more equal, and dignified society. We argue that Chile’s current social upheaval is, in no small measure, a mass uprising of the world of work which, in turn, can be traced back to the protracted development of what we call ‘insurgent unionism,’ or the variety of emerging forms of collective action and organisation that remarkable groups of ‘precarious’ workers have built from below, and with which they have routinely challenged the neoliberal order, ever since the dark days of the Pinochet dictatorship. In this presentation, we will examine the origins, main features, as well as the promises and limitations of this alternative form of unionism.

¹ “Workers of my country, I have faith in Chile and its destiny. Other men will overcome this dark and bitter moment when treason seeks to prevail. Go forward knowing that, sooner rather than later, the great avenues will open again where free men will walk to build a better society. Long live Chile! Long live the people! Long live the workers!” (Salvador Allende, 11 September 1973)

18.15 – 18.55: Discussion

18.45: Close

*****

Our speakers:

Dr Francisco Dominguez is head of the Research Group on Latin America at Middlesex University. He is Secretary of the Venezuela Solidarity Campaign. Francisco came to Britain in 1979 as a Chilean political refuge and has been active on Latin American issues, about which he has written and published extensively. He is co-author of Right -wing politics in the New Latin America, Zed Books.

Dr Fernando Duran-Palma is Senior Lecturer at the School of Organisations, Economy and Society, University of Westminster. He has published on Chilean industrial relations, trade unionism, and labour reform. He was Principal Investigator of the project ‘Varieties of Collective Action and Organisation by Atypical and Precarious Workers in Latin America’ funded by the University of Westminster’s Strategic Research Investment Fund, and upon which this presentation is partly based. He coordinates the Argentina-Chile research Network on Collective Action and Organisation by Precarious Workers, and is currently involved in a comparative study of forms of collective action in the recycling networks of Chile and Argentina.

 Dr Miguel Urrutia is Assistant Professor at the Department of Sociology of the University of Chile. He has published more than 20 scientific papers and book chapters on Chilean trade unionism and politics, and recently directed the translation of Workers and Labor in Globalized Capitalism (Maurizio Atzeni, ed.). In 2019, he was a Visiting Fellow at the Center for Workforce Futures, Macquarie University, and is currently Principal Investigator of the project ‘Trade Union Action in Chile and its Insertion in Global Production Networks.’

Michael Gold/ Linda Clarke

24th August 2020

NTWE CfP 'The ‘new’ social relations of digital technology and the future of work'

24th August 2020

New Technology, Work and Employment in the era of Covid-19: the contribution of the journal and its past publications to the current debate

New Technology Work and Employment have published a virtual special issue 'New Technology, Work and Employment in the era of Covid-19: the contribution of the journal and its past publications to the current debate'. The special issue includes a new introductory review article by Andy Hodder 'New Technology, Work and Employment in the era of COVID‐19: reflecting on legacies of research' and 15 key past articles which are now free to access.  https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/toc/10.1111/(ISSN).0268-1072.New-Technology-Work-and-Employment-in-the-era-of-Covid-19

18th August 2020

The 39th International Labour Process Conference ‘Security in Work? The workplace after COVID-19’ University of Greenwich, 12-14 April 2021

The International Labour Process Conference 2021 will be hosted by the University of Greenwich on April 12-14^th (with online contingency plans) - details can be found on https://www.ilpc.org.uk/.

Submission of new abstracts will open on 23rd August 2020 -  The final deadline for new abstract submission is 31st October 2020.

18th August 2020

New film out about the United Voices of the World union

18th August 2020

Book: International & Comparative Employment Relations

18th August 2020

Webinar Invitation from China University of Labor Relations, Beijing: The COVID-19 Pandemic: Implications for Labour Policies & Labour Markets in Australia -- Perspectives on Governmental, Employer & Union Policies & Practices.

We invite you to a webinar: The COVID-19 Pandemic: Implications for Labour Policies & Labour Markets in Australia -- Perspectives on Governmental, Employer & Union Policies & Practices. It might be of interest to some of your students, including your Chinese ones.

Speaker Professor Greg Bamber, Director, International Consortium for Research in Employment & Work, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia.

20 Aug 2020 at 12.00 hrs BST; 19.00hrs China time; 21.00hrs Melbourne time.

Webinar will use VooV software that is similar to Zoom; if you do not already have, get at: https://voovmeeting.com/download-center.html?from=1001

Install the software in advance, enter your mobile phone number to get a code to complete the installation. To log in, enter meeting number: 832773009.

Meeting is at: https://meeting.tencent.com/s/NgUO4P9hnXVX

Webinar will be in English, with Chinese translation. 

China University of Labor Relations Host: JeffQiao@sina.com

18th August 2020

Professor Frank Burchill OBE

In very sad news for the industrial relations community, Professor Frank Burchill passed away on Saturday, 18 July 2020, after a short illness.
Frank was highly respected by his colleagues in the academic, practitioner and wider industrial relation community.

In 1989, after 22 years with the Department of Adult Education, Frank was appointed Keele’s first Professor of Industrial Relations and established a Department of HRM and Industrial Relations and ultimately a full-time undergraduate programme, full-time Masters’ degrees and a Doctorate programme. Many people from the industrial relations community benefited and, indeed, had their lives changed, by being educated and enlightened as students in Frank’s Department. The Department provided a proper robust social science education, in the best sense of the meaning.

In 1999, Frank stepped down from the Headship of the Department because he had been appointed by the Secretary of State at the Home Department – then Jack Straw – to conduct an inquiry into industrial relations procedures in the then UK Fire and Emergency Service.

Frank also conducted extensive practical industrial relations work as a Deputy Chairman of the UK Central Arbitration Committee, and with Acas.

In 2009 he went to Tasmania, where his wife Alice had been appointed to work for the Tasmanian Department of Health and Human Services, later becoming CEO.
Frank returned to the UK in 2012, and continued to teach at various universities and to do Acas work. In 2009 he was awarded an OBE in the Queen's Birthday Honours List for Services to Acas.

Sincere condolences to Alice and the family from BUIRA.

21st July 2020

BUIRA Executive Committee Elections and virtual Annual General Meeting

20th July 2020

Homeworking Rockets: New Evidence

20th July 2020

Fair Care Work: A Post Covid-19 Agenda for Integrated Employment Relations in Health and Social Care

13th July 2020

CfP 'Comparative Impacts of the COVID-19 Crisis on Work and Employment' IR: A Journal of Economy and Society

Comparative Impacts of the COVID-19 Crisis on Work and Employment

Call for Papers for Special Issue

Industrial Relations: A Journal of Economy and Society

Guest Editors

Tony Dobbins, University of Birmingham, UK t.dobbins@bham.ac.uk

Stewart Johnstone, University of Strathclyde, UK Stewart.johnstone@strath.ac.uk

Marta Kahancová, Central European Labour Studies Institute, Slovakia marta.kahancova@celsi.sk

Ryan Lamare, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA rlamare@illinois.edu

Adrian Wilkinson, Griffith University, Australia Adrian.wilkinson@griffith.edu.au, Visiting Professor, University of Sheffield, UK

COVID-19 is a global public health and socioeconomic crisis (Dobbins, 2020). As such, it is distinct from economic crises like the Great Depression or the 2008 global financial crisis (Johnstone et al., 2019), not least of which is because work had to be primarily reduced or reallocated, not expanded (Barrero, Bloom, and Davis, 2020). Notable exceptions are among those workers able to work from home, and essential front-line workers in health, food production and retail who continue to expose themselves to the virus (Koebel and Pohler, 2020) to keep society functioning by supporting human life (Winton and Howcroft, 2020).

The crisis has had devastating effects on the world of work, globally. Many countries experienced massive shocks to employment, rising unemployment, and decreased labor force participation (Eurofound, 2020; ILO, 2020). However, effects of the crisis have been unevenly distributed across societies, and likely vary according to country institutions, cultures, politics, demographics, and other characteristics (Adolph et al., 2020; Hale et al., 2020; Mora and Schickler, 2020). For example, Adams-Prassl et al., (2020) outline survey data from the UK, US and Germany revealing that the labor market impacts of COVID-19 differ considerably across these countries. Employees in Germany, with its Kurzarbeit short-time work scheme, were less likely to lose their jobs due to the crisis; at least in the short-run. Within countries, impacts vary by sector, and accentuate existing racial, gender, and class inequalities. Workers in alternative work arrangements and in jobs not conducive to working from home are more likely to experience cuts in working hours and income, or redundancy. Early analyses suggest less educated workers and women (Adams-Prassl et al., 2020) as well as low-income workers (Koebel and Pohler, 2020) are most affected by the crisis.

Looking to the future, COVID-19 could lead to widespread restructuring of the way work is performed. The crisis may accelerate the use of technologies in industries and occupations that were not previously impacted by digitalization. The crisis could also facilitate emergence of new jobs because of growing demand for particular services and/or new approaches to organization of the economy. 2

The purpose of this Special Issue is to focus attention on the work- and employment-related implications of the COVID-19 crisis. We have a preference for papers that adopt a comparative lens by exploring the heterogeneous impacts of the crisis and responses to the crisis across different countries, sectors, organizations, employers and workers. We invite papers that make novel theoretical and/or empirical contributions that help us understand the current crisis and papers that develop insights to help navigate future crises and the future of work and employment post-crisis.

Some questions that may be explored in this special include, but are not limited to:

▪ What are the implications and impact of the crisis on the world of work from the perspective of different groups of workers?

▪ What have been the implications of the crisis on key aspects of the employment relationship, such pay and working conditions, workforce reduction, employee voice, health and safety, and labor-management relations?

▪ How did employers restructure and reorganise employment practices during the evolving crisis, and which of these practices are likely to remain post-crisis?

▪ How have trade unions and employee representatives responded to changing employment practices? What has been the involvement of trade unions and employee representatives in the design of policy measures to mitigate the effects of the pandemic on workers? How do their responses differ across countries with different industrial relations systems and welfare states?

▪ How and why have employer responses to the crisis varied in relation to economic, political, social, cultural, and other contextual issues?

▪ How have government, employer and worker responses to the work and employment-related impacts of the crisis compared with previous economic downturns?

▪ How have the effects of the crisis and government policy responses varied internationally, reflecting different labor market and employment relations institutions? Are there differences, for example, between co-ordinated market economies and liberal market economies, or countries severely/mildly impacted by the pandemic?

▪ Which employment relations theories and frameworks can best help us explain and understand the impact of the COVID-19 crisis on work and employment?

▪ What are the implications for the future of work and employment, especially for workers?

▪ What are the possibilities for a new politics, and related, labor and social policies, that can improve workers’ lives?

Submission Process

Interested contributors will first submit a long abstract (max. 1,000 words). The abstract should clearly outline the research question or purpose of the proposed paper, as well as how the paper contributes to our understanding of the impacts of COVID-19 on work and employment. The abstract should also include a brief description of the empirical analysis used and/or an illustration of the theoretical/conceptual model to be developed. Questions or any other communication about the purpose and process of the special issue should be directed to any of the guest editors via email. However, we will not provide editorial 3

assistance for long abstracts. The long abstracts should be sent via email to Dr. Ryan Lamare (rlamare@illinois.edu) by August 31, 2020.

Guest editors will then choose a subset of abstracts and invite full papers from authors. The deadline for submission of full papers will be December 31, 2020, via Manuscript Central. All invited papers submitted by this date will undergo double-blind review by two reviewers. Note that there is no guarantee that invited papers will be accepted for publication. Based on the blind reviews and extent to which the papers meet the aims and scope of the special issue, a subset of invited papers will be selected for the special issue. Because publication of the special issue is scheduled for the second half of 2021, only papers that can be accepted with minor revisions will be considered.

References

Adams-Prassl, A., Boneva, T., Golin, M. and Rauh, C. (2020). Inequality in the Impact of the Coronavirus Shock: Evidence from Real Time Surveys. Cambridge-INET Working Papers, No 18.

Adolph, C., Amano, K., Bang-Jensen, B., Fullman, N., & Wilkerson, J. (2020). Pandemic politics: Timing state-level social distancing responses to COVID-19. medRxiv Working Paper. https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.30.20046326v1.full.pdf

Barrero, J., Bloom, N., & Davis, S.J. (2020) COVID-19 is also a reallocation shock. NBER Working Paper #27137. https://www.nber.org/papers/w27137.pdf

Dobbins, T. (2020). COVID-19 and the Past, Present and Future of Work. Futures of Work, Issue 13, 5th May. Bristol: Bristol University Press.

https://futuresofwork.co.uk/2020/05/05/covid-19-and-the-past-present-and-future-of-work/

Eurofound (2020). COVID-19. Dublin: European Foundation for the Improvement of Living and Working Conditions. https://www.eurofound.europa.eu/topic/covid-19

Hale, T., Angrist, N., Kira, B., Petherick, A., Phillips, T., & Webster, S. (2020) Variation in government responses to COVID-19. Oxford: BGS Working Paper Series. https://www.bsg.ox.ac.uk/sites/default/files/2020-04/BSG-WP-2020-032-v5.0_0.pdf

ILO (2020). ILO Monitor 2nd edition: COVID-19 and the world of work. April 7. Geneva: ILO.

Johnstone, S., Saridakis, G., & Wilkinson, A. (2019). The Global Financial Crisis, Work and Employment: Ten Years On. Economic and Industrial Democracy, 40(3), 455–468.

Koebel, K., and Pohler, D. (2020). Labor markets in crisis: The causal impact of Canada’s COVID-19 economic shutdown on hours worked for workers across the earnings distribution. Canadian Labour Economics Forum Working Papers Series, No. 25 (Spring/Summer).

Mora, C.G., & Schickler, E. (2020) Racial minorities more at risk in the workplace and the economy. Berkeley IGS Release #2020-06. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1kd7h0sc

Winton, A. and Howcroft, D. (2020. What COVID-19 tells us about the value of human labour. Manchester Policy Blogs, April 7th. University of Manchester.

13th July 2020

Engaging with employers to reduce workplace inequalities for parents and carers: the case of the flexible working toolkit

WEI webinar on Wednesday 15^th July at 3pm

Engaging with employers to reduce workplace inequalities for parents and carers: the case of the flexible working toolkit

Liz Atkinson, Senior project officer

Rebecca Harris, Employer engagement officer

Greater Manchester Centre for Voluntary Organisations 

Hosted by the Work and Equalities Institute, in this webinar Liz Atkinson and Rebecca Harris from the Greater Manchester Centre for Voluntary Organisation will discuss the approach of the GMCVO to promoting flexible working for parents and carers who are returning to the workforce in Greater Manchester. The session will introduce the flexible working toolkit that GMCVO have co-produced with a range of employers and Returners in the Greater Manchester region. Issues of how the content and design of the toolkit were developed as well as future issues of how to measure its impact, and its increased relevance in the post-lockdown workplace, will all be discussed. This will be an interactive session and will be of interest to anyone interested in gender inequality, flexible working and how to increase the impact of their research using co-production methods with employers.

You can learn more about the toolkit here.

Please register on Eventbrite. You will receive a Zoom invitation closer to the webinar.

6th July 2020

The CIPD Applied Research Conference is going digital and the call for papers has been extended to 31 July 2020!

We're delighted to announce that the CIPD Applied Research Conference (ARC) is going digital, and the call for papers has been extended to 31 July 2020.

The digital conference will take place on 20-21 January 2021. The conference is an annual meeting place for academic researchers and practitioners working in people management, employment policy and related fields.

Benefits of taking part

By submitting a paper, you can help shape the content of the conference. You'll be able to share your research with peers and HR practitioners, publish your research following the conference, and be eligible for the Professor Ian Beardwell Prize with £1,000 for best applied research paper.

Submission and selection
 

We welcome papers on a wide range of subjects around the themes of work, employment and people management, including:

• COVID-19 - impact on work and employment
• Equality, diversity and inclusion 
• Employee voice and empowerment
• Health and well-being
• New technologies at work
• and more!

We invite two types of submissions:

• Research paper:original empirical research
• Evidence review:systematic review or rapid evidence assessment

Papers will be selected for:

• relevance to the contemporary world of work, employment and people management;
• appropriate and robust methods;
• contribution to knowledge and understanding of the field;
• and drawing out practical implications of the research.

​
Details of the submission process are available here.

6th July 2020

Ending Despotism at Work after the Coronavirus: How Power Operates in Flexible Workplaces

You and your network are invited to the above webinar by Dr  Alex J. Wood , University of Birmingham & University of Oxford, Tuesday 21 July 2020 at 16:00 - 17:00 PM Melbourne time (GMT+10) i.e. 07.00-08.00 BST. 

If you wish to attend by Zoom, please register ASAP via this  LINK  or paste into your browser:  https://www.monash.edu/business/events/webinar-how-power-and-despotism-works-in-flexible-workplaces# .

Organisers:  International Consortium for Research in Employment & Work  and  Monash Business Digitalisation Research Network , Monash Business School, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia.  

Co-hosts: Professors Greg Bamber & Fang Lee Cooke. 

This Webinar considers the impact of flexible scheduling on managerial power and workplace control. When we understand paid work as a power relationship, Alex argues, we see how precarious scheduling constitutes flexible despotism. He has published a book, Despotism on Demand: How Power Operates in the Flexible Workplace. The Webinar and the book are in memory of University of Cambridge Faculty of Economics Montague Burton Emeritus Professor of Industrial Relations William Brown CBE (1945–2019); a former BUIRA President; a former visitor to Monash University.

6th July 2020

Call for proposals to host the next ILERA European Regional Congress in 2022

Dear ILERA Executive Committee members, representatives of European ILERA National Associations, and colleagues,

I hope that this e-mail finds you all well.  In this difficult time of the Covid-19 pandemic, research and dialogue on labour and employment relations and current challenges in the labour market is more important than ever. ILERA strives to maintain its activities, and only last week the ILERA Regional Congress for the Americas was held, after an impressive transition from a regular congress to be held in Toronto to a stimulating and active online conference.

I contact you know with a call for proposals to host the next ILERA European Regional Congress in 2022. The last, 12th, European Regional Congress was successfully organized in Düsseldorf, Germany, in September 2019 on the theme of 'Perspectives of Employment Relations in Europe'.

Previous European Congresses have taken place as follows:

·        11th ILERA European Regional Congress, Milan, Italy, 8-10 September 2016

·        10th ILERA European Regional Congress, Amsterdam, Netherlands, 20-22 June 2013

·         9th IIRA European Regional Congress, Copenhagen, Denmark, 28 June - 1 July 2010

·         8th IIRA European Regional Congress, Manchester, UK, 3-6 September 2007

·         7th IIRA European Regional Congress, Lisbon, Portugal, 7-11 September 2004

·         6th IIRA European Regional Congress, Oslo, Norway, 25-29 June 2001

·         5th IIRA European Regional Congress, Dublin, Ireland, 26-29 August 1997

·         4th IIRA European Regional Congress, Helsinki, Finland, 24-26 August 1994

·         3rd IIRA European Regional Congress, Bari, Italy, 23-26 September 1991

·         2nd IIRA European Regional Congress, Herzlia, Israel, 13-17 December 1987

·         1st IIRA European Regional Congress, Vienna, Austria, 25-27 September 1984

The proposal should contain a maximum of 10 000 characters including spaces, and cover at least the following:

- tentative congress theme, programme and structure
- organization (organizers/organizing team and related associations, and organizational experience and capacity)
- location, possible venue, size/number of participants, and other logistics
- tentative timing of the congress

If you have any questions you are welcome to contact the ILERA Secretariat at ilera@ilo.org.

The proposal should be sent to ilera@ilo.org by August 26 at the latest.

The ILERA Executive Committee will assess the proposals, and make a decision on the host and location of the next European Regional Congress in September.
 
With thanks in advance and very best wishes,

Mia Rönnmar,
President of ILERA

6th July 2020

Women in Industrial Relations: Wine and Webinar

The Industrial Relations Society of Victoria (IRSV), Australia, invites you to attend our Women in Industrial Relations event - Wine and Webinar - with guest speaker: Sharan Burrow General Secretary of the International Trade Union Confederation  Thursday 9 July 2020 17:00 hrs Melbourne time (GMT+10).  08:00hrs BST, so in the UK it might be a cuppa and Webinar! Sharan Burrow was elected General Secretary of the ITUC in 2010 and was re-elected in 2014 and 2018. Prior to this, she held the position of ITUC President since its Founding Congress in 2006 and the position of ICFTU President since 2004. Sharan is the first woman to have held any of these positions.   In 2000, Sharan was the second woman to be elected President of the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) and the first woman to be elected President of the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions Asia Pacific Region Organisation.  She has served as a member of the Governing Body of the International Labour Organisation and a member of the Stakeholder Council of the Global Reporting Initiative.  As part of her ILO responsibilities, Sharan chaired the Workers’ Group of the Sub-Committee on Multinational Enterprises.  From the ITUC's headquarters in Brussels, Sharan will be speaking on the gendered impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, which will be followed by a Q and A session.  This will provide the opportunity for IRSV members and friends to ask Sharan any questions.  Although we can't meet in person, please grab a wine or a cuppa and join IRSV members online for what promises to be an engaging discussion with Sharan Burrow. Although this is an IRSV Women in Industrial Relations event, all are welcome to register. For further details and to register click here or paste into your browser: irsv.asn.au/Public/Events/Event_Display.aspx?EventKey=77F3BDFA-16A1-493A-BFD8-2FB851534520 Organiser: Industrial Relations Society of Victoria,   Australia    Katie Sweatman <ksweatman@irsv.asn.au> may be able to help with registration, if necessary.

6th July 2020

Covid-19 : Contact/Call Centre Workers in Scotland

This report analyses the responses of 510 contact centre workers in Scotland and the hazards they face from exposure to SARS-CoV-2 and the disease Covid19. Extensive evidence of serious dangers, including no or inadequate social distancing, face-to-face contact, hotdesking, problems with HVAC (Heating Ventilation and Air Conditioning) systems. The report combines primary evidence with a critical review of including an extensive literature consisting of reports, academic articles, practitioner and government guidance. It concludes with an extended discussion section exploring the implications, Finally, a recommendations' chapter identifies important steps that should be taken to ensure contact workers' safety.

Read the report by Phil Taylor here: https://strathprints.strath.ac.uk/72600/

25th June 2020

CfP 'Climate Change and Industrial Relations’ Special Issue: Journal of Industrial Relations, Vol.64(4), September 2022

Journal of Industrial Relations (JIR)

CALL FOR PAPERS

‘Climate Change and Industrial Relations’

Special Issue: Journal of Industrial Relations, Vol.64(4), September 2022

Organisers and Special Issue Guest-Editors:

Dr Frances Flanagan, University of Sydney Business School, Australia

Dr Caleb Goods, University of Western Australia, Australia

The objective and aim of the special issue

Industrial relations and anthropogenic climate change are deeply entwined phenomena. Climate change is the product of work. Human labour is necessary at the point of fossil fuel extraction and is crucial in its manufacture into the products and infrastructures that underpin modern, emissions-intensive societies. Future shifts to low-carbon societies are similarly dependent on human labour, without which the vast programs of reconfigured transportation, housing, energy, cities, health and agricultural systems that are necessary to return humanity into a ‘safe operating space’ cannot be realised. Questions of how different forms of work are valued, organised, and regulated are thus inseverable from environmental policy: we can neither understand the environmental and social contexts for the continued promulgation of emissions-intensive practices, nor imagine and promote their alternatives, without grappling with industrial relations.

Industrial relations, in turn, have been profoundly shaped by fossil extraction processes, and the vast global production networks such fuels underpin, in the past and the present. Modern trade unions were born with the industrial revolution, and with them practices for the exercise of collective power and paradigms of rights, law, value and regulation that continue to inform the organisation of work today. More than two centuries of emissions are also shaping the nature of work in a direct physical sense, by destabilising the ecological conditions for its safe performance, changing the places that are available for human habitation and labour, and rendering the myriad systems that are crucial to work – from food supply to stable geopolitics – more precarious and crisis-prone. 2/

The scope, themes and topics to be addressed by the special issue

For this special issue, ‘Climate Change and Industrial Relations’, we invite papers that aim to advance scholarship on the mutuality of climate change and industrial relations, and add to our understanding of the ways in which climate changes shapes industrial relations, and the ways in which industrial relations shapes climate change.

We encourage authors to develop their own interpretations of this mutuality, but they may consider the following:

Labour, capital and states in the making and maintenance of fossil fuel hegemonies

• • How have unions, employers and states participated in the making and sustaining of fossil fuel hegemonies?
• • In what ways do fossil fuel identities, gender, worker solidarities and class interrelate?
• • What role have ‘crises’ played (including environmental, industrial, health, financial and their inter-relation) in enabling actors to create and sustain fossil fuel hegemony?
• • How has control over the labour process, and IR laws around issues such as bargaining, industrial action, health and safety been used to potentially sustain fossil fuel hegemonies?
• • What are the main drivers of the fossil economy?

Labour, capital and states in contesting fossil fuel hegemonies

• • What challenges and opportunities do unions face in forging solidarities with environmental organisations in contesting fossil fuel hegemonies?
• • How do environmental, gender, industrial and class identities interrelate?
• • What role can international labour movements and institutions play around climate issues?
• • What are the strengths and limitations of concepts which attempt to bridge labour and environmental issues, such as ‘just transitions’; ‘energy democracy’, ‘climate justice’, the Green New Deal and the UN Sustainable Development Goals?
• • What solidarities and strategies have been most effective in engendering change for the benefit of workers and the environment?

Rethinking labour regulation for climate-changed workplaces: rights, responsibilities and institutions

• • What does attentiveness to climate change mean for the way states can and should regulate the employment relationship?
• • Where and how can workers be empowered to act collectively in response to environmental issues at work? (e.g. workplace health and safety, bargaining, ‘emergency leave’, relative work value, ability to bargain for environmental issues, heat stress).
• • How is ‘green’ labour (including the work involved in ecological repair and maintenance) valued, organised and regulated?
• • Has the climate emergency triggered changed perspectives on work value and ‘skill’?

3/5

Varieties of (fossil) capitalism? States and regulation of labour and environment in comparative perspective

• • How does fossil extraction and emissions complicate our view of comparative political economy?
• • Are there emerging political economic patterns as to how climate change and labour are embedded in fossil fuel capitalism?
• • How do regimes of migration, gender, labour and environmental regulation interact?
• • What is happening to industrial relations in the peripheries and borderlands that are made by capital and climate?
• • How are global production networks changing in the face of climate and other crises?

Submission to the special issue process:

Abstracts of between 500-1,000 words should be submitted to the Guest Editors (see contact details below) by 30 September 2020. The full paper to be submitted online to the JIR for peer review by 14 May 2021. All submitted abstracts will be examined by the Guest Editors for suitability for the special issue.

All submitted papers must be based on original material and not under consideration by any other journal or outlet. All manuscripts are reviewed initially by the Guest Editors and only those papers that fit within the aims and scope of the special issue and meet the academic and editorial standards of the journal, are sent out for external review. All papers will undergo a full double-blind review process and will be evaluated by the Guest Editors of the special issue and at least two independent reviewers.

Symposium:

Questions related to the content and logistics of the symposium should be directed to the Guest Editors (see contact details below). While participation in the symposium is not a mandatory condition for submissions to this special issue, we strongly encourage it. The guest editors aim to host a digital symposium on 17 February 2021 (exact format to be determined).

Those who are successful will be expected to submit their full paper (formatted to JIR standards) for discussion by 3 February 2021 so that papers can be distributed (in pdf format) to other participants to read prior to the symposium. 4/5

Special issue – Timeline:

• • 30 September 2020 – Submission of abstracts to the guest editors
• • 16 October 2020 – Confirmation/acceptance of abstract and invitation to submit full paper
• • 3 February 2021 – Full paper submission for presentation at Symposium
• • 17 February 2021 – Symposium
• • 14 May 2021 – Full original papers to be submitted online to the JIR for peer review
• • 31 March 2022 – Accepted papers to be finalised/submitted online to the JIR

 Publication of the special issue, JIR Vol. 64(4), September 2022

Guidelines for contributors – Summary:

− The length of the full manuscript (including references, tables etc.) should be around 10,000 words (max). Please note that it would not be possible for us to consider papers for publication unless they are within the standard length (so longer papers are not possible to publish nor is a large number of tables/figures possible to include).

− The anonymised manuscript should include a separate title page: with the author(s) affiliation and full contact details: full name of author(s), institutional affiliation, postal and email addresses (noting the corresponding author). Authors to also provide a brief biographical note (100 word limit/author) to the title page.

− The manuscript should include a brief abstract (150-200 words) and keywords (4-5 words).

− The manuscript should follow the Harvard (author, date) system of referencing, with ‘endnotes’ (if necessary and kept brief) rather than ‘footnotes’.

− For the full JIR submission guidelines and style guide, please consult the JIR website at http://jir.sagepub.com

5/5

JIR online submission process:

The Journal of Industrial Relations (JIR) is hosted on SAGE Track, a web based online submission and peer review system powered by ScholarOne Manuscripts. Simply visit http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/jir to login and submit your article online.

How to submit a manuscript to the JIR online?

1. Navigate to the JIR’s ScholarOne Manuscripts site at http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/JIR

2. If you are not already registered, you will need to register with the system first to submit a manuscript.

3. To register, click the Create Account tab for new users.

4. Supply the requested information.

5. You will need to enter information in fields marked with a "req."

6. Please take note of the user ID and password you create, for future use to log into the system.

7. Once your account is created, click the link to log in.

8. To submit a manuscript, click the Author Center link, and then select Click here to submit a manuscript.

IMPORTANT: Please check whether you already have an account in the system before trying to create a new one. If you have reviewed or authored for the journal in the past year it is likely that you will have had an account created.

Contact details:

Organisers and Special Issue Guest-Editors:

Dr Frances Flanagan

University of Sydney Business School, Australia

Email: frances.flanagan@sydney.edu.au

Dr Caleb Goods

UWA, Australia

Email: caleb.goods@uwa.edu.au

Journal of Industrial Relations (JIR):

JIR Editorial Office

Email: business.jir@sydney.edu.au

***

25th June 2020

Virtual symposium honouring Bruce Kaufman

A virtual symposium was held on June 17, 2020 honouring the contributions of Bruce Kaufman (Georgia State University), and featured presentations by John Kelly, Dionne Pohler, Mark Bray, David Lewin, and Daphne Taras. An edited video has been made available for anyone to watch: https://youtu.be/rgFx74QXEfo . This symposium was organized by John Budd, Rafael Gomez, and Daphne Taras as part of the  the 10th International Labour and Employment Relations Association Regional Congress of the Americas.

25th June 2020

Work on Demand workshop, 2nd July 2020

15th June 2020

Making Britain the best place in the world to work; how to protect and enhance workers' rights after Brexit ... and coronavirus

The final version of this policy discussion paper by Keith Sisson has now been published and is available at:

https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/wbs/research/irru/wpir/

15th June 2020

Survey: People’s Experiences of the Lockdown in the UK and Belgium During the COVID-19 Pandemic

9th June 2020

LERA Seminar “Implications of COVID-19 for Workers: International Comparisons of Government, Employer and Union Policies and Practices" 4 June 2020: 3pm

BUIRA’s US sister, Labor & Employment Relations Association (LERA) is hosting a series of free webinars Employment Relations During the COVID-19 Pandemic. These will all be on Thursdays as one-hour sessions that begin with comments by leading experts (5 minutes each), followed by open dialogue. The aim is to deepen understanding of employment relations matters during the pandemic. The one below might be of particular interest to members:

4 June 2020: 3pm British Summer Time: LERA International and Comparative Interest Section

“Implications of COVID-19 for Workers: International Comparisons of Government, Employer and Union Policies and Practices”

Speakers: · Fang Lee Cooke (Monash University, Australia) · Greg J. Bamber (Monash University, Australia and Newcastle University, UK) · Martin Behrens (Institute of Economic and Social Research (WSI) of the Hans-Böckler-Foundation, Germany) · Harry Katz (Cornell University)

Fang will cover China; Greg will cover Australia; Martin will cover Germany; Harry will cover USA. Moderator: Janice Bellace (University of Pennsylvania)

If you wish to participate, it is essential to register; click on this link or paste the link into your browser: https://lera.memberclicks.net/lera-webinar-series--ler-during-covid-19

1st June 2020

CERIC 15th Anniversary Webinar Series June-July 2020

The Centre for Employment Relations, Innovation and Change (CERIC), based at the University of Leeds, is a focal point for research and knowledge transfer around the changing dynamics and future of work, employment and labour markets. It is the largest interdisciplinary group of social scientists working in this field in the UK. CERIC was founded in 2005, and this webinar series forms part of our 15^th year anniversary activities and celebrations ahead of the anniversary report, due for publication later in the Summer. The seminar series showcases a diverse range of research interests within the Centre while also reflecting our sustained record of research on themes of social inequalities, voice and representation and digital futures of work. We hope you will be able to join us for these webinars and look forward to lively and stimulating debate.

1. 3 June, 4 - 5.30pm: Charles Umney ‘Creative placemaking and the cultural projectariat: Artistic work in the wake of Hull City of Culture 2017’. Link to a meeting. Password: 185897

2. 10 June, 1 - 2.30pm: Helen Norman ‘Does paternal involvement in childcare influence mothers’ employment trajectories during the early stages of parenthood in the UK?’ Link to a meeting. Password: 659420

3. 17 June, 4 - 5.30pm: James Brooks, Irena Grugulis and Hugh Cook ‘Remembering to remember and learning to forget: unlearning in the UK fire and rescue service’. Chair – Dr Charles Umney. Link to a meeting. Password: 940123

4. 24 June, 4 - 5.30pm: Andy Charlwood ‘Do Unions Cause Job Dissatisfaction? Evidence from a Quasi-Experiment in the United Kingdom’. Link to a meeting. Password: 992011

5. 1 July, 4 - 5.30pm: Gabriella Alberti ‘The value of work in the pandemic: new insight into the post-Brexit regulation of migration’ Link to a meeting. Password: 903756

6. 8 July, 4 - 5.30pm: Danat Valizade and Jennifer Tomlinson: ‘Gender, ethnicity and the stratification of career pathways in the legal profession of England and Wales‘ Link to a meeting. Password: 510250

7. 15 July, 4 - 5.30pm: Presenter to be confirmed ‘Title TBC’ Link to a meeting. Password: 833040

8. 22 July, 4 - 5.30pm: Xanthe Whittaker ‘Title TBC’ Link to a meeting. Password: 477914

9. 29 July, 4 - 5.30pm: Meenakshi Sarkar ‘The Sociology of Human capital and the Economics of Cultural capital’ Link to a meeting. Password: 531197

1st June 2020

Nominations for Academy of Social Sciences Fellows

26th May 2020

Futures of Work COVID-19 SPECIAL ISSUE

26th May 2020

Online conference 50th anniversary of the Equal Pay Act 1970

Join The Equality Trust for this interactive online conference, bringing together a range of speakers to share their insights and explore how we can get organised to finally win equal pay during this challenging period.

About this event

Women, particularly those in low-paid work and the gig economy, are already some of the hardest hit economically by the COVID-19 crisis. Winning equal pay is more important now than ever before.

Join us on Friday 29th May to mark the 50th anniversary of the Equal Pay Act 1970, the landmark legislation which made equal pay for equal work a legal right for all. This conference will give participants the opportunity to explore the challenges of winning equal pay from a range of perspectives and begin taking action wherever they are.

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/50-years-is-long-enough-gender-inequality-and-the-fight-for-equal-pay-tickets-103910140026?fbclid=IwAR1h1y92Xfya6Z0Tnem4Z9J3MIH9TSU1x_j_5a37vJBeFREOPsbQAnd-XxA

Guest speakers

• Diana Holland - Assistant General Secretary, Unite the Union

• Hilary Wainwright - Editor, Red Pepper

• Dr Jo Grady - General Secretary, University and College Union (UCU)

• Sam Smethers - Chief Executive, Fawcett Society

• Alexia Hendrickson - Senior Campaign Manager, Pay Justice

• Dame Moya Greene - Founder, #MeTooPay

• Rachael McIlroy - Senior Research Lead, Royal College of Nursing

• Professor Geraldine Healy - Queen Mary University

• Dr Anne Laure Humbert - Director, Centre for Diversity Policy Research and Practice at Oxford Brookes University

• Dr Wanda Wyporska - Executive Director, The Equality Trust

• More speakers to be announced shortly

Guest facilitators

• Sian Elliott - Women’s Equality Policy Officer, Trades Union Congress (TUC)

• Jane Holgate, Professor of Work and Employment Relations, University of Leeds

• Kym Oliver & Jumoke Abdullahi - Co-Founders, The Triple Cripples

• Tom Schuller - Author, The Paula Principle: Why Women Lose Out at Work

• Imogen Richmond-Bishop - Research, Advocacy, and Communications Manager, Just Fair

• Victoria Jones - National Officer, FDA

• Paul Day - Director, Pharmacists' Defence Association (PDA)

• Dr Fenella Porter - Co-Director of Women's Rights and Gender Justice, Oxfam GB; Co-Founder, RED Learning Cooperative
  

• Ian Manborde - Equality and Diversity Organiser, Equity

Event details

This online conference will take place on Friday 29th May from 10:00 to 13:00, and will feature a mix of plenary speakers and small group breakout discussions.

Please let us know if you have any accessibility needs so we can work on making this space as inclusive as possible. If you have any questions, please contact Rianna Gargiulo, Campaigns Officer, at rianna.gargiulo@equalitytrust.org.uk.

Once you have completed the sign-up form, you will receive an email confirmation. The day before the event you will receive an email with sign-in details. This is a free, open event and we encourage people from different communities, political backgrounds, and walks of life to attend.

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/50-years-is-long-enough-gender-inequality-and-the-fight-for-equal-pay-tickets-103910140026?fbclid=IwAR1h1y92Xfya6Z0Tnem4Z9J3MIH9TSU1x_j_5a37vJBeFREOPsbQAnd-XxA

26th May 2020

Support schemes under microscope

Jill Rubery looks at whether UK government support for workers in the wake of the crisis is as generous as it sounds. Professor Jill Rubery is Director of the Work & Equalities Institute at Alliance Manchester Business School.

https://www.alliancembs.manchester.ac.uk/news/support-schemes-under-microscope/

26th May 2020

New Book: 'Despotism On Demand: How Power Operates in the Flexible Workplace'

Despotism on Demand draws attention to the impact of flexible scheduling on managerial power and workplace control. When we understand paid work as a power relationship, argues Alex J. Wood, we see how the spread of precarious scheduling constitutes flexible despotism; a novel regime of control within the workplace.

Wood believes that flexible despotism represents a new domain of inequality, in which the postindustrial working class increasingly suffers a scheduling nightmare. By investigating two of the largest retailers in the world he uncovers how control in the contemporary "flexible firm" is achieved through the insidious combination of "flexible discipline" and "schedule gifts." Flexible discipline provides managers with an arbitrary means by which to punish workers, but flexible scheduling also requires workers to actively win favor with managers in order to receive "schedule gifts": more or better hours. Wood concludes that the centrality of precarious scheduling to control means that for those at the bottom of the postindustrial labor market the future of work will increasingly be one of flexible despotism.

Video Abstract: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_rdGQwPSRis&t=1s

Blog: https://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/ending-despotism-at-work-after-coronavirus/

Praise: 

"Despotism on Demand is brimming with ambition and imagination. Based on outstanding fieldwork, it rises above many such ethnographies in its theoretical sophistication."

Michael Burawoy, University of California, Berkeley

"This impressive book on working conditions in the on-demand economy deserves to be widely read. Alex J. Wood provides a lucid and nuanced account of how precarious scheduling has become central to managerial control in this growing sector."

Judy Wajcman, London School of Economics and Political Science

Paperback UK £20.99: https://www.combinedacademic.co.uk/9781501748882/despotism-on-demand/

Paperback US $26.95; ebook $12.99 https://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9781501748882/despotism-on-demand/#bookTabs=1

26th May 2020

New article: Does modernizing union administrative practices promote or hinder union revitalization? A comparative study of US, UK and Australian unions

New early view open access article: ‘Does modernizing union administrative practices promote or hinder union revitalization? A comparative study of US, UK and Australian unions’, Clark, P. F., Bamber, G.J., Whitehead, P. V., Gray, L. S., Cockfield, S. & Gilbert, K., British Journal of Industrial Relations, doi.org/10.1111/bjir.12526

https://doi.org/10.1111/bjir.12526

11th May 2020

Implications of COVID-19 for Workers: International Comparisons of Government, Employer and Union Policies and Practices

BUIRA’s US sister, Labor & Employment Relations Association (LERA) is hosting a series of free webinars Employment Relations During the COVID-19 Pandemic. These will all be on Thursdays as one-hour sessions that begin with comments by leading experts (5 minutes each), followed by open dialogue.  The aim is to deepen understanding of employment relations matters during the pandemic. The one below might be of particular interest to members:

4 June 2020: 3pm British Summer Time: LERA International and Comparative Interest Section

“Implications of COVID-19 for Workers: International Comparisons of Government, Employer and Union Policies and Practices”

Speakers:

• Fang Lee Cooke (Monash University, Australia)
• Greg J. Bamber (Monash University, Australia and Newcastle University, UK)
• Martin Behrens (Institute of Economic and Social Research (WSI) of the Hans-Böckler-Foundation, Germany)
• Harry Katz (Cornell University)

Fang will cover China; Greg will cover Australia; Martin will cover Germany; Harry will cover USA.

Moderator: Janice Bellace (University of Pennsylvania)

If you wish to participate, it is essential to register; click on this link or paste the link into your browser:

https://lera.memberclicks.net/lera-webinar-series--ler-during-covid-19

11th May 2020

Covid-19 and Call/Contact Centre Workers: Intermediate Report

11th May 2020

WES Editors - call for application

The BSA and WES have opened up a call for applications to join the Editorial Team. This is the first time that individual rather than institutional applications are being considered, reflecting the realities of the current climate.  We have kept the number of people joining the team open so that as many good candidates as possible can be offered a place. Applicants should be in good scholarly standing in an appropriate academic discipline and ideally have some previous association with WES. 

WES has a tight Editorial Team of approximately 12 colleagues doing the day to day editorial work and working with our Editorial and Associate Boards developing the journal. The culture within WES is to offer a generous and developmental editorial process for the 600 submissions we receive each year. We work in a highly collegial way as a team and with our 65 Board members to maintain this culture, despite the challenges of a year of strike action and now the Coronavirus crisis. The Editorial team meets, now virtually, on a regular monthly/bimonthly basis and team members are also expected to attend our Board meetings and conference, however those will be organised in the future. We are embarking on a period of internationalisation and navigating the development of Open Access within academic publishing - presenting us with interesting challenges and formulating new ways of working.   

It might be hard to imagine taking on a substantial commitment to an editorial role at this time, but we have kept this application process flexible so you would start your tenure ideally from September but only when you are able and would be mentored by experienced team members during your first year. If you are interested in applying and would like to have an informal conversation with one of the Editors in Chief please contact us by email and we can arrange a call.

You are also welcome to contact Alison Danforth at the BSA for more information about the role and the BSA.

Elizabeth Cotton e.cotton2@herts.ac.uk

Eleonore Kofman e.kofman@mdx.ac.uk

Ian Roper i.roper@essex.ac.uk 

Alison Danforth alison.danforth@britsoc.org.uk

Call for Editors: https://www.britsoc.co.uk/opportunities/

Deadline for applications: 3 June 2020

1st May 2020

Policy Discussion Paper: Making Britain the best place in the world to work: how to protect and enhance workers' rights after Brexit ... and coronavirus

For a copy of the paper summarised below, please email 

keithsisson@hotmail.co.uk

Best wishes

Keith Sisson (Industrial Relations Research Unit, University of Warwick)

Making Britain the best place in the world to work: how to protect and enhance workers' rights after Brexit ... and coronavirus

Abstract

The UK government’s promise in the Queen’s Speech of 19 December 2019 to protect and enhance worker’s rights after Brexit has taken on new urgency in the light of the coronavirus pandemic, the inadequacy of the present framework being exposed for all to see. A Ministry for Employment and Social Affairs and a specialist social partnership body like the Low Pay Commission are needed to ensure that these rights are regularly reviewed and updated to reflect changing circumstances. Effective enforcement mechanisms are a must, which means a well-funded enforcement agency and requiring businesses to take responsibility for what happens in their supply chains, with provisions for social licensing as well as mandatory due diligence. The government also needs to improve the evidence base for decision making about workers’ rights including a regular survey of management policies and practices based on the internationally renowned Workplace Employment Relations Survey. Overall, the task will make sense to more people if the government uses the language of 'fairness’.

1st May 2020

COVID-19 Call Centre Research

20th April 2020

BJIR Books to Review

Dear colleagues

I am not able to physically send out book for review but I am negotiating e-copies of books for review in the British Journal of Industrial Relations.

If you are interested in reviewing these books then do please let me know j.holgate@leeds.ac.uk. Please also indicate when you might be able to complete the review.

Best wishes

Jane Holgate

Handbook of the Politics of Labour, Work and Employment. Edited by Gregor Gall, Visiting Professor of Industrial Relations, University of Leeds, UK https://www.e-elgar.com/shop/gbp/handbook-of-the-politics-of-labour-work-and-employment-9781784715687.html

Workers’ Self-Management in Argentina: Contesting Neo-Liberalism by Occupying Companies, Creating Cooperatives, and Recuperating Autogestión (Brill and Haymarket, 2020). Workers’ Self-Management in Argentina is Volume 199 of the Historical Materialism Book Series.

Neufeind, M., J. O’Reilly and F. Ranft (2018) (eds.) ‘Work in the Digital Age: Challenges of the Fourth Industrial Revolution’ (London: Rowman and Littlefield). https://policynetwork.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/Work-in-the-Digital-Age.pdf

Youth Employment Edited by Jacqueline O'Reilly, Clémentine Moyart, Tiziana Nazio and Mark Smith
https://policy.bristoluniversitypress.co.uk/youth-employment

20th April 2020

Ending Despotism at Work after the Coronavirus - Join Alex J. Wood for a Virtual Book Launch and Q&A

Ending Despotism at Work after the Coronavirus - Join Alex J. Wood for a Virtual Book Launch and Q&A

- Despotism on Demand: How Power Operates in the Flexible Workplace - 

May 15th, 2020 5:30pm BST (12:30pm EST, 9:30am PST)

“Despotism on Demand is brimming with ambition and imagination. Based on outstanding fieldwork, it rises above many such ethnographies in its theoretical sophistication.”—Michael Burawoy, University of California, Berkeley

“This impressive book on working conditions in the on-demand economy deserves to be widely read. Wood provides a lucid and nuanced account of how precarious scheduling has become central to managerial control in this growing sector. As such ‘flexible despotism’ constitutes an important new source of inequality.”—Professor Judy Wajcman, London School of Economics

Despotism on Demand draws attention to the impact of flexible scheduling on managerial power and workplace control. When we understand paid work as a power relationship, argues Alex J. Wood, we see how the spread of precarious scheduling constitutes flexible despotism; a novel regime of control within the workplace.

Zoom details will be sent out once you book a free ticket.

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/ending-despotism-at-work-after-the-coronavirus-join-alex-j-wood-for-a-virtual-book-launch-and-qa-tickets-102553129170

40-minute online talk followed by 20-minute Q&A session

Alex J. Wood is Lecturer in the Sociology of Work at the University of Birmingham and a Research Associate at the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford. Follow him on Twitter @tom_swing.

ATTENDEES, SAVE 30% • USE CODE 09FLYER

In the United States order online at cornellpress.cornell.edu or call 800 848 6224

• In Canada email info@codasat.com

• In the UK, Europe, Asia, Middle East, Oceania & Africa save 30% on website orders at combinedacademic.co.uk

Use discount code CS09FLYER

17th April 2020

Book reviews for the BJIR: New Media Unions Organizing Digital Journalists

Dear colleagues

I hope you are doing fine in this difficult time.

I am not able to physically send out book for review but I am negotiating e-copies of books for review in the British Journal of Industrial Relations.

If you are interested in reviewing this boo then do please let me know. Please also indicate when you might be able to complete the review.

 New Media Unions Organizing Digital Journalists By Nicole S. Cohen, Greig de Peuter

https://www.routledge.com/New-Media-Unions-Organizing-Digital-Journalists/Cohen-Peuter/p/book/9781138327115

Best wishes

Jane Holgate

17th April 2020

BUIRA 70th Anniversary Conference 2020 Postponed Until Next Year.

Unfortuantly, we've had to postpone BUIRA 70th Anniversary Conference 2020 until next year. Manchester have kindly already offered to host us again in 2021 for what we're sure will be an amazing conference! 

We'd like to thank everyone for their great abstracts our all the speakers who agreed to give plenaries. This year's conference would've been the biggest since our records begin, and we hope that you'll attend next year.

We also hope that we might be able to do a smaller event in the autumn to celebrate BUIRA's 70th year. We'll keep you posted on these developments. 

Until then stay safe and soldiarity

19th March 2020

Capital and Class Symposium 'Emerging forms of worker collectivism among the precariat'

16th March 2020

WES 2020 CALL FOR PAPERS

Have you submitted your abstract for the Work, Employment and Society Conference 2020?  If not, abstract submission will close on Friday, 27 March 2020.
https://www.britsoc.co.uk/events/key-bsa-events/bsa-work-employment-and-society-conference-2020/
Dramatic changes in the dynamics of work have fragmented the fabric of people’s lives, impacting on health, relationships and communities; for many, destroying the self-efficacy and social connections that extend dignity and a sense of citizenship.  

It is against this backdrop that the Work, Employment and Society Conference 2020 (WES 2020) takes place in Cardiff, Wales. As the birthplace of the NHS, and with a long history of political and worker activism, Wales provides the perfect setting to reconnect, reactivate and reimagine the sociality of work. 

WES 2020 invites discussion about the dignity of people at work; and how work and employment affects people’s lives, health, relationships and sense of citizenship.   

Alongside paper presentations, reflecting the venue, we call for short films, art-work, photographic displays, music and theatrical performances that ignite the senses and (maybe) show work in a different light. The stages, screens and walls of the venue are open to imagination, and the trying out of something new.

Also, new for WES 2020, we invite ‘On the Front Line’ presentations. The aim is to hear the ‘voice of the worker’ and their experiences of work and employment. This might involve workers as co-authors or co-presenters, or workers might be embodied within the presentation; through audio, photograph, art, film or other creative means.

We also welcome suggestions for Special Sessions or events on any topic that matters for work and the lives of workers. The topic should relate to the Aims and Scope of the journal Work, Employment and Society and the conference theme: this might involve staging a debate on a controversial topic, challenging orthodoxy or highlighting a misunderstood concept or practice.

Abstract submission deadline:  Friday, 27 March 2020

Please note: In order to submit an abstract, you will be required to create an account on the BSA website first.  You do not have to hold BSA membership in order to submit an abstract.  If you already have an existing account on the BSA website, please use those credentials to login. Please contact the BSA Membership Team if you experience any difficulties.

16th March 2020

PhD Scholarship: Work & Employment Relations (broadly defined)

PhD Scholarship: Work & Employment Relations (broadly defined)

University of Limerick - Kemmy Business School

https://www.jobs.ac.uk/job/BZI514/phd-scholarship-work-and-employment-relations-broadly-defined

Applications are invited for a full-time 4 year PhD scholarship commencing Sep/Oct 2020 in the area of work and employment relations, to be supervised by Professor Tony Dundon. The candidate will develop their specific proposal and areas of interest include, but not limited to: new technology and skills; the role of trade unions and union organising in the gig-economy; employment and digital labour platforms; social dialogue and worker voice for freelance/digital platform workers; and/or questions of employment regulation under new modes of capitalism.

Literatures of interest to candidates may include those that question the many claims about the future of work destroying jobs (see Spencer, 2017); the re-shaping of skill and labour power (see Thompson, 2019); the role of the state in (de)regulating worker rights (see Bales et al, 2018; Taylor,  2019); digital labour platform types (see Howcroft and Bergvall-Kareborn, 2019); labour market precarity (Rubery et al, 2019); emerging questions of voice yet also how employees are coerced into ‘silence’ (see Hickland et al, 2020); and a re-evaluation of disciplinary boundaries to study and examine such developments in the field of employment and HRM (see Godard, 2014; Dundon and  Rafferty, 2018; Budd, 2020; Kaufman, 2020). References available here

Applications are invited from candidates with Degrees / Master’s degrees that have a knowledge base in industrial relations, labour process, sociology of work, labour law, heterodox economics, critical management, human resources, social psychology, and/or employment regulation.

The scholarship will cover EU level fees and a stipend of €1,000 per month for years one to four on a full time basis. Scholarship holders are expected to undertake a limited amount of formative academic duties in addition to pursuing their doctoral studies.

Application Procedure

Applicants should hold a minimum 2.1 first degree and preferably a Masters qualification in a relevant discipline area and have a strong interest in the areas of work and employment studies described above. Applicants should submit the following:

• A completed application form (downloaded here)
• A 2000 word research proposal (e.g. research questions/aims, literature review, methodology, potential research impacts)
• a full CV, including the names and addresses of two referees

Applications should be sent by email to: Rebecca Gachet, Kemmy Business School, rebecca.gachet@ul.ie

Shortlisted candidates may be invited to interview.

Informal inquires may be made to Professor Tony Dundon (tony.dundon@ul.ie)

Closing date for receipt of applications is 5 pm on Friday, May 1^st 2020.

16th March 2020

CANCELLATION: Work and Equalities Institute Third Annual Lecture

Restrictions on international travel have meant that our speaker, Professor Fang Lee Cooke, is no longer able to join us on Tuesday 24^th March. With this in mind we have taken the decision to cancel the WEI annual lecture, with a view to rescheduling later in the year.

We apologise for any inconvenience caused and we will be in touch once we have confirmed a new date. 

If you have any questions please do not hesitate to contact us at WEI@manchester.ac.uk

16th March 2020

postponement of CENTRAL LONDON BUIRA SEMINAR: Higher education, marketisation, REF/TEF & employment relations

For further details and to reserve a place, contact Linda Clarke (clarkel@wmin.ac.uk)

16th March 2020

Lectureships at Essex Business School

16th March 2020

BUIRA endorsement of BSA statement on UCU industrial action

BUIRA endorses BSA statement on UCU industrial action. BUIRA would like to extend our support to and endorse the statement published by the British Sociological Association on 18th February 2020. Read the BSA statement here https://es.britsoc.co.uk/bsa-statement-on-strike-action-2/

BUIRA supports members who are affected by the forthcoming UCU strike action. Like the BSA, BUIRA will honour the digital picket line, and not tweet, retweet or send promotional emails during the strike period (20th February-20th March inclusive).

19th February 2020

DATE CHANGE BUIRA IR History Assessing the ILO Friday 6th March

PLEASE NOTE: CHANGE OF DATE AND TIME!

Due to the UCU strike, this seminar has been rescheduled to Friday 6^th March

BUIRA History of Industrial Relations Study Group

Assessing the ILO and its history, with

Professor Marcel van der Linden (International Institute of Social History) and

Dr Rebecca Gumbrell-McCormick (Birkbeck College)

Friday 6 March 2020, 10.30am-12.30pm followed by buffet lunch

Room C279, University of Westminster Business School, 35 Marylebone Road, London NW1 5LS (opposite Madame Tussauds, nearly opposite Baker Street tube)

For further details or to reserve a place, please email Michael Gold (m.gold@rhul.ac.uk) or Linda Clarke (clarkel@wmin.ac.uk).

Programme:

10.15-10.30: tea/coffee and biscuits

10.30: Welcome: Michael Gold and Linda Clarke (Chairs) followed by:

Marcel van der Linden:  The ILO: a critical appraisal after one hundred years

The question I want to raise is straightforward: How can we appraise the record of the ILO since its founding in 1919? What are the results and future prospects of its efforts? Is the organization truly inconsequential, a "90-pound weakling,” a "toothless tiger," as critics have argued?  These questions are difficult to answer. Not only because of the variegated history of the ILO, rife with ongoing controversies, but also because the literature on the subject is overwhelming.  I will argue that the first half century of the ILO consisted of “fat years”, in which regulating the global labour market achieved limited but clear progress, and that the second half century was a time of “lean years”, when the ILO accomplished less. I will illustrate this by showing how the relative attainments from the period until around 1970 were subsequently weakened. Unless it manages to reinvent itself in the near future, the organization is now in danger of further marginalization.

Rebecca Gumbrell-McCormick: The ILO and the International Labour Movement

The international labour movement has played a major role in working within the ILO structures, promoting the adoption of new international labour standards, and pushing for their full implementation. The international trade union bodies, which were instrumental in the founding of the ILO in 1919, have helped to shape it and provide it with reliable interlocutors. Drawing on previous work on the ITUC and the international labour movement more generally, Rebecca will focus on the role of the ITUC and its associated bodies (including the GUFs) in a) the development of new labour standards, focusing particularly on the Domestic Workers’ Convention, b) on its role in the resolution of the long-running conflict over the right to strike, and c) on the broader issue of the relations between the two bodies: have the international trade unions become overly dependent, even symbiotic, with the ILO, and what are the differing views within the global labour movement on these relations? Should they be changed, in the light of a new, more independent and campaigning approach to the global labour movement?

6pm: Close (followed by drinks until 6.00pm)

The speakers:

Marcel van der Linden is Honorary Fellow and former Research Director of the International Institute of Social History (Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences),

Rebecca Gumbrell-McCormick is a senior lecturer in the Department of Management, Birkbeck College, University of London

Followed by buffet lunch.

18th February 2020

Researching the future of work and equality in uncertain times

18th February 2020

13th Equality, Diversity and Inclusion International Conference 6 - 8 July 2020

14th February 2020

ILR Review’s latest issue honours a former president of BUIRA’s US sister (Labor & Employment Relations Association): Professor David Lipsky of Cornell University.

• Editorial Essay: Introduction to a Special Issue on Conflict and Its Resolution in the Changing World of Work: Honoring Professor David Lipsky, Harry C. Katz, Guest Editor [open access]

14th February 2020

Building your research profile and career planning

10th February 2020

BUIRA History of Industrial Relations Study Group: Assessing the ILO and its history

Assessing the ILO and its history, with

Professor Marcel van der Linden (International Institute of Social History) and

Dr Rebecca Gumbrell-McCormick (Birkbeck College)

Thursday 5 March 2020, 4.00-6.00pm

Room C379, University of Westminster Business School, 35 Marylebone Road, London NW1 5LS (opposite Madame Tussauds, nearly opposite Baker Street tube)

For further details or to reserve a place, please email Michael Gold (m.gold@rhul.ac.uk) or Linda Clarke (clarkel@wmin.ac.uk).

Programme:

3.30-3.50pm: Tea/ coffee/ refreshments

3.50-4.00: Welcome: Michael Gold and Linda Clarke (Chairs)

Marcel van der Linden:  The ILO: a critical appraisal after one hundred years

The question I want to raise is straightforward: How can we appraise the record of the ILO since its founding in 1919? What are the results and future prospects of its efforts? Is the organization truly inconsequential, a "90-pound weakling,” a "toothless tiger," as critics have argued?  These questions are difficult to answer. Not only because of the variegated history of the ILO, rife with ongoing controversies, but also because the literature on the subject is overwhelming.  I will argue that the first half century of the ILO consisted of “fat years”, in which regulating the global labour market achieved limited but clear progress, and that the second half century was a time of “lean years”, when the ILO accomplished less. I will illustrate this by showing how the relative attainments from the period until around 1970 were subsequently weakened. Unless it manages to reinvent itself in the near future, the organization is now in danger of further marginalization.

Rebecca Gumbrell-McCormick: The ILO and the International Labour Movement

The international labour movement has played a major role in working within the ILO structures, promoting the adoption of new international labour standards, and pushing for their full implementation. The international trade union bodies, which were instrumental in the founding of the ILO in 1919, have helped to shape it and provide it with reliable interlocutors. Drawing on previous work on the ITUC and the international labour movement more generally, Rebecca will focus on the role of the ITUC and its associated bodies (including the GUFs) in a) the development of new labour standards, focusing particularly on the Domestic Workers’ Convention, b) on its role in the resolution of the long-running conflict over the right to strike, and c) on the broader issue of the relations between the two bodies: have the international trade unions become overly dependent, even symbiotic, with the ILO, and what are the differing views within the global labour movement on these relations? Should they be changed, in the light of a new, more independent and campaigning approach to the global labour movement?

6pm: Close (followed by drinks until 6.00pm)

The speakers:

Marcel van der Linden is Honorary Fellow and former Research Director of the International Institute of Social History (Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences),

Rebecca Gumbrell-McCormick is a senior lecturer in the Department of Management, Birkbeck College, University of London.

10th February 2020

Final Day for Submission of BUIRA Conference Abstracts

27th January 2020

Member discount: Exploring Trade Union Identities, Union Identity, Niche Identity and the Problem of Organizing the Unorganized’ by Bob Smale

Use discount code RSETU20 on Bristol University Press website (below) to benefit from a 25% discount on your purchase of the new publication by Bob Smale, ‘Exploring Trade Union Identities, Union Identity, Niche Identity and the Problem of Organizing the Unorganized’. The code expires 07/02/2020.

Please note that this code is only for use of BUIRA MEMBERS IN THIS LISTING and not for wider circulation (including social media, mailing lists and booksellers). The discount code referenced is intended for individual purchase via Bristol University Press website only, and is for use by the attendees of special events or close colleagues and friends. Please do let us know if you have any questions or queries on the above.

Use your discount code at: https://bristoluniversitypress.co.uk/exploring-trade-union-identities

About the book: The labour market has changed over recent decades and so have trade unions with mergers, rebrandings, dissolutions and new unions being formed. The question is, how well positioned are unions to organize the unorganized? With more than three quarters of UK workers unrepresented, the growth of precarious employment and the gig economy this topical new book reports up-to-date research on union identities and what is termed ‘niche unionism’, while raising critical questions for the future.

27th January 2020

MIDLANDS LABOUR & EMPLOYMENT RELATIONS SOCIETY (MLERS) Meetings

We are pleased to welcome the following speakers to the MLERS series

6:30-8pm, 11th February 2020

The British Dietetic Association, 3rd Floor, Interchange Place, 151-165 Edmund St, Birmingham B3 2TA (near Snow Hill Station)

Davide Pero, University of Nottingham

Indie Unionism, Organizing and Labour Renewal: Learning from Precarious Migrant Workers’

This paper examines the organizing practices of indie unions – the emerging grassroots unions co-led by precarious migrant workers. It draws on an embedded actor-centred approach involving extensive multi-sited ethnography. The paper shows how workers normally considered unorganizable by the established unions can build lasting solidarity and associational power and obtain material and non-material rewards in the context of precarity, scarce economic resources and a hostile environment. Here, I argue that the organization of workers into ‘communities of struggle’ geared towards mobilization facilitates their empowerment, effectiveness and social integration. The paper contributes to labour mobilization theory by redefining the concept of organizing in inclusionary terms, so that the collective industrial agency of precarious and migrant workers organizing outside the established unions can be adequately recognized and accounted for.

6:30pm-8pm, 10th March 2020

The British Dietetic Association, 3rd Floor, Interchange Place, 151-165 Edmund St, Birmingham B3 2TA (near Snow Hill Station)

Marek Korczynski

‘The Art of Labor Organizing: Participatory Art and Migrant Domestic Workers’ Self-Organizing in London’

There has been an upsurge of interest regarding how actors engage with art within organizational processes.  However, scholars have tended not to study the role of art within contemporary collective labor organizing.  This paper focuses on how participatory art may support flat, participative labour organizing, particularly among marginalized, relatively powerless workers.  We present an ethnographic account of how art practices are deeply embedded within the flat organizing processes of Justice For Domestic Workers, a self-organizing group of migrant domestic workers in London.  We reflect on this case to theorise the art of flat organizing, an ideal type of a set of participatory art practices that are compatible with and supportive of flat labour organizing.

27th January 2020

1 Week Left to Submit BUIRA Conference Abstracts

One week to go until the call for papers closes!

BUIRA 70th Anniversary Conference 2020: The past, present and future of industrial relations and the politics of work

30th June to 2nd July 2020

Extended Deadline for submission of abstracts: Monday, 27^th January 2020

Plenary Speakers:

Judy Wajcman http://www.lse.ac.uk/sociology/people/judy-wajcman

Anne McBride https://www.research.manchester.ac.uk/portal/a.mcbride.html

Gail Hebson https://www.research.manchester.ac.uk/portal/gail.hebson.html

Jane Holgate https://business.leeds.ac.uk/research-ceric/staff/521/jane-holgate

Sian Moore https://www.gre.ac.uk/people/rep/faculty-of-business/sian-moore

Kirsty Newsome https://www.sheffield.ac.uk/management/staff/kirsty_newsome/index

Jean Jenkins https://www.cardiff.ac.uk/people/view/610450-jenkins-jean

Call for papers 

BUIRA turning 70 presents a good opportunity to reflect on the past, present and future of industrial relations. Despite facing recent challenges, the field of industrial relations continues to be a vital topic of academic and practitioner enquiry. Issues that have long been central within the study of industrial relations, such as pay, collective bargaining, rights at work, employee representation, national and transnational forms of regulation, health and safety, job (in)security, precarity, and workplace conflict are highly prominent within many current political and academic debates. Understanding the politics of work, grounded in a critical social science tradition, is crucial for academics and policy makers alike.  

IR continues to face a tough institutional environment. In the university, ‘HRM’ and ‘people and work’ has overtaken ‘industrial relations’ in the nomenclature of courses and modules. Within organisations and workplaces, trade unions continue to struggle to maintain a presence and voice for workers. While many university departments may nevertheless offer critical perspectives on work and employment, there is concern that the way ‘HRM’ is taught in some business schools may lack a sufficient diversity of perspectives and critical engagement with hegemonic neoliberalism. This in turn could lead to a potential ‘immiseration’ of the subject matter, and an inability to prevent or address trends such as the spread of precarious work, and the growing problem of in-work poverty (Dundon and Rafferty, 2018). At the same time, IR scholarship is often accused of being theoretically weak, suffering from a descriptive, and institutional bias, i.e. focusing on the dwindling institutions of trade unions and collective bargaining (Kelly, 1998). 

Where are we now? How have we got here, and what should the future of the field look like? Reflecting on historical developments in industrial relations is crucial in order to ground and contextualise current developments in the world of work. History matters in helping us to understand the changing nature of industrial relations, and yet is often overlooked in modern accounts of work relations. It is also important to reflect on pressing current issues such as the impact of austerity and the crisis in an increasingly financialised world. What have been their consequences for public sector industrial relations? What is the impact of patterns of precarious work and non-standard employment relationships on the changing nature of work and employment, skills and the quality of work? Across all of these questions, issues of social class, equality and diversity remain more relevant than ever before. Looking to the future, one key question concerns the extent to which unions can play an active role with social movements to tackle climate breakdown. 

We welcome empirical (both quantitative and qualitative), analytical, conceptual and methodological papers that concern any area of industrial relations, or fields cognate to industrial relations. We would particularly appreciate submissions from early career researchers and doctoral students. Papers concerning topics under the following headings will be particularly welcome:

• Reflections and challenges for Equality and Diversity, and challenging the gender pay gap
• The consequences of new technology, digitalisation and the growth of platforms for work and industrial relations
• Climate breakdown and industrial relations
• Comparative industrial relations
• Political economy of work (e.g. austerity, financialisation, fragmentation, flexibilisation and inequality)
• New forms of collective action in the workplace, and new agents of resistance
• The rise of populism/nationalism and industrial relations

Submission details

Abstracts of papers should be submitted here:

 https://bham.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_0iYSk4W03DvrkDr 

Abstracts should be a maximum of 500 words in length and cover the following headings:

•         Brief outline
•         Methodology
•         Key findings
•         References

Extended Deadline for submission of abstracts: Monday, 27^th January 2020

All abstracts are refereed anonymously by BUIRA Executive Committee members.

Conference fee £200 full and £100 PhD 

References

Dundon T and Rafferty A (2018) The (potential) demise of HRM? Human Resource Management Journal 28(3): 377– 391.

Kelly J (1998) Rethinking Industrial Relations: Mobilisation, Collectivism and Long Waves. London: Routledge

20th January 2020

Fully-Funded ESRC PhD 'Collaborative Studentship - Living Wage Wales: Exploring the drivers to and barriers against the growth of the Living Wage Standard in the Wales (in collaboration with Citizens Cymru Wales)

Project Description

20th January 2020

Plenary speakers announced for BUIRA 70th Anniversary Conference 2020

We are pleased to announce the plenary speakers for the 'BUIRA 70th Anniversary Conference 2020: the past, present and future of industrial relations and the politics of work' will be:

Judy Wacjman http://www.lse.ac.uk/sociology/people/judy-wajcman

Anne McBride https://www.research.manchester.ac.uk/portal/a.mcbride.html

Gail Hebson https://www.research.manchester.ac.uk/portal/gail.hebson.html

Jane Holegate https://business.leeds.ac.uk/research-ceric/staff/521/jane-holgate

Sian Moore https://www.gre.ac.uk/people/rep/faculty-of-business/sian-moore

Kirsty Newsome https://www.sheffield.ac.uk/management/staff/kirsty_newsome/index

Jean Jenkins https://www.cardiff.ac.uk/people/view/610450-jenkins-jean

See the call for papers here: https://www.buira.net/conference/13

Abstract deadline: Monday, 27^th January 2020.

17th January 2020

Lecturer in Sociology Brunel University London - Department of Social & Political Sciences

13th January 2020

New publication: ‘Exploring Trade Union Identities, Union Identity, Niche Identity and the Problem of Organizing the Unorganized’ by Bob Smale was published last week by Bristol University Press.

The labour market has changed over recent decades and so have trade unions with mergers, rebrandings, dissolutions and new unions being formed. The question is, how well positioned are unions to organize the unorganized? With more than three quarters of UK workers unrepresented, the growth of precarious employment and the gig economy this topical new book reports up-to-date research on union identities and what is termed ‘niche unionism’, while raising critical questions for the future.

For further information go to: https://bristoluniversitypress.co.uk/exploring-trade-union-identities

13th January 2020

Ideas in Employment Relations Research Call for Papers for Special Issue Industrial Relations: A Journal of Economy and Society New Extended Deadline: February 12, 2020!

Ideas in Employment Relations Research Call for Papers for Special Issue Industrial Relations: A Journal of Economy and Society

New Extended Deadline: February 12, 2020!

 Guest editors

Martin B. Carstensen (Copenhagen Business School): mbc.ioa@cbs.dk

Christian Lyhne Ibsen (Michigan State University): ibsenchr@msu.edu

Vivien Schmidt (Boston University): vschmidt@bu.edu

Industrial Relations: A Journal of Economy and Society has issued a call for papers for a special issue on ‘Ideas in Employment Relations Research’.

Please be advised that the deadline for long abstracts for this special issue has been extended to February 12, 2020 – full details are available at the following link:

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/pb-assets/assets/1468232x/EXTENSION%20IR_Call%20for%20Papers_Ideas%20in%20Employment%20Relations%20Research-1578684488783.pdf

Best wishes

Martin B. Carstensen, Vivien Schmidt and Christian Lyhne Ibsen

13th January 2020

In case you missed it DEADLINE EXTENDED to 27th Jan for BUIRA Conference Abstracts

Abstract Deadline Extended for BUIRA Conference to Monday, 27^th January 2020.

Call for papers

BUIRA 70th Anniversary Conference 2020: The past, present and future of industrial relations and the politics of work

Alliance Manchester Business School, University of Manchester

30th June to 2nd July 2020

Call for papers 

BUIRA turning 70 presents a good opportunity to reflect on the past, present and future of industrial relations. Despite facing recent challenges, the field of industrial relations continues to be a vital topic of academic and practitioner enquiry. Issues that have long been central within the study of industrial relations, such as pay, collective bargaining, rights at work, employee representation, national and transnational forms of regulation, health and safety, job (in)security, precarity, and workplace conflict are highly prominent within many current political and academic debates. Understanding the politics of work, grounded in a critical social science tradition, is crucial for academics and policy makers alike.  

IR continues to face a tough institutional environment. In the university, ‘HRM’ and ‘people and work’ has overtaken ‘industrial relations’ in the nomenclature of courses and modules. Within organisations and workplaces, trade unions continue to struggle to maintain a presence and voice for workers. While many university departments may nevertheless offer critical perspectives on work and employment, there is concern that the way ‘HRM’ is taught in some business schools may lack a sufficient diversity of perspectives and critical engagement with hegemonic neoliberalism. This in turn could lead to a potential ‘immiseration’ of the subject matter, and an inability to prevent or address trends such as the spread of precarious work, and the growing problem of in-work poverty (Dundon and Rafferty, 2018). At the same time, IR scholarship is often accused of being theoretically weak, suffering from a descriptive, and institutional bias, i.e. focusing on the dwindling institutions of trade unions and collective bargaining (Kelly, 1998). 

Where are we now? How have we got here, and what should the future of the field look like? Reflecting on historical developments in industrial relations is crucial in order to ground and contextualise current developments in the world of work. History matters in helping us to understand the changing nature of industrial relations, and yet is often overlooked in modern accounts of work relations. It is also important to reflect on pressing current issues such as the impact of austerity and the crisis in an increasingly financialised world. What have been their consequences for public sector industrial relations? What is the impact of patterns of precarious work and non-standard employment relationships on the changing nature of work and employment, skills and the quality of work? Across all of these questions, issues of social class, equality and diversity remain more relevant than ever before. Looking to the future, one key question concerns the extent to which unions can play an active role with social movements to tackle climate breakdown. 

We welcome empirical (both quantitative and qualitative), analytical, conceptual and methodological papers that concern any area of industrial relations, or fields cognate to industrial relations. We would particularly appreciate submissions from early career researchers and doctoral students. Papers concerning topics under the following headings will be particularly welcome:

• Reflections and challenges for Equality and Diversity, and challenging the gender pay gap
• The consequences of new technology, digitalisation and the growth of platforms for work and industrial relations
• Climate breakdown and industrial relations
• Comparative industrial relations
• Political economy of work (e.g. austerity, financialisation, fragmentation, flexibilisation and inequality)
• New forms of collective action in the workplace, and new agents of resistance
• The rise of populism/nationalism and industrial relations

Submission details

Abstracts of papers should be submitted here:

 https://bham.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_0iYSk4W03DvrkDr 

Abstracts should be a maximum of 500 words in length and cover the following headings:

•         Brief outline
•         Methodology
•         Key findings
•         References

Extended Deadline for submission of abstracts: Monday, 27^th January 2020

All abstracts are refereed anonymously by BUIRA Executive Committee members.

Conference fee £200 full and £100 PhD 

References

Dundon T and Rafferty A (2018) The (potential) demise of HRM? Human Resource Management Journal 28(3): 377– 391.

Kelly J (1998) Rethinking Industrial Relations: Mobilisation, Collectivism and Long Waves. London: Routledge

13th January 2020

BUIRA Conference Deadline Extended 27 January

BUIRA 70th Anniversary Conference 2020: The past, present and future of industrial relations and the politics of work

30th June to 2nd July 2020

https://www.buira.net/conference/13

Call for papers

BUIRA turning 70 presents a good opportunity to reflect on the past, present and future of industrial relations. Despite facing recent challenges, the field of industrial relations continues to be a vital topic of academic and practitioner enquiry. Issues that have long been central within the study of industrial relations, such as pay, collective bargaining, rights at work, employee representation, national and transnational forms of regulation, health and safety, job (in)security, precarity, and workplace conflict are highly prominent within many current political and academic debates. Understanding the politics of work, grounded in a critical social science tradition, is crucial for academics and policy makers alike.  

IR continues to face a tough institutional environment. In the university, ‘HRM’ and ‘people and work’ has overtaken ‘industrial relations’ in the nomenclature of courses and modules. Within organisations and workplaces, trade unions continue to struggle to maintain a presence and voice for workers. While many university departments may nevertheless offer critical perspectives on work and employment, there is concern that the way ‘HRM’ is taught in some business schools may lack a sufficient diversity of perspectives and critical engagement with hegemonic neoliberalism. This in turn could lead to a potential ‘immiseration’ of the subject matter, and an inability to prevent or address trends such as the spread of precarious work, and the growing problem of in-work poverty (Dundon and Rafferty, 2018). At the same time, IR scholarship is often accused of being theoretically weak, suffering from a descriptive, and institutional bias, i.e. focusing on the dwindling institutions of trade unions and collective bargaining (Kelly, 1998). 

Where are we now? How have we got here, and what should the future of the field look like? Reflecting on historical developments in industrial relations is crucial in order to ground and contextualise current developments in the world of work. History matters in helping us to understand the changing nature of industrial relations, and yet is often overlooked in modern accounts of work relations. It is also important to reflect on pressing current issues such as the impact of austerity and the crisis in an increasingly financialised world. What have been their consequences for public sector industrial relations? What is the impact of patterns of precarious work and non-standard employment relationships on the changing nature of work and employment, skills and the quality of work? Across all of these questions, issues of social class, equality and diversity remain more relevant than ever before. Looking to the future, one key question concerns the extent to which unions can play an active role with social movements to tackle climate breakdown. 

We welcome empirical (both quantitative and qualitative), analytical, conceptual and methodological papers that concern any area of industrial relations, or fields cognate to industrial relations. We would particularly appreciate submissions from early career researchers and doctoral students. Papers concerning topics under the following headings will be particularly welcome:

• Reflections and challenges for Equality and Diversity, and challenging the gender pay gap
• The consequences of new technology, digitalisation and the growth of platforms for work and industrial relations
• Climate breakdown and industrial relations
• Comparative industrial relations
• Political economy of work (e.g. austerity, financialisation, fragmentation, flexibilisation and inequality)
• New forms of collective action in the workplace, and new agents of resistance
• The rise of populism/nationalism and industrial relations

Submission details

Abstracts of papers should be submitted here:

 https://bham.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_0iYSk4W03DvrkDr 

Abstracts should be a maximum of 500 words in length and cover the following headings:

•         Brief outline
•         Methodology
•         Key findings
•         References

Extended Deadline for submission of abstracts: Monday, 27^th January 2020

All abstracts are refereed anonymously by BUIRA Executive Committee members.

Conference fee £200 full and £100 PhD 

References

Dundon T and Rafferty A (2018) The (potential) demise of HRM? Human Resource Management Journal 28(3): 377– 391.

Kelly J (1998) Rethinking Industrial Relations: Mobilisation, Collectivism and Long Waves. London: Routledge

Further Information

Full details are available here.

10th January 2020

CENTRAL LONDON BUIRA SEMINAR: Digitalisation, employment and industrial relations

Prof Birgit Mahnkopf (Berlin School of Economics and Law) The future of work in the era of ´digital capitalism´. Digitalization and its impact on employment, workers and industrial relations

Dr Kim Moody (University of Westminster) The ‘logistics revolution’ of the 21^st century as a material aspect of digital capitalism

 Friday 31 January 2020, 10.30am – 12.30pm, followed by buffet lunch

University of Westminster, 35 Marylebone Road, London NW1 5LS

(opposite Madame Tussauds and nearly opposite Baker Street tube)
Room L195

For further details and to reserve a place, contact Linda Clarke (clarkel@wmin.ac.uk)

This regular monthly seminar is focused on the urgent question of the impact of digitalisation on employment and industrial relations, often regarded as the 4^th wave of the industrial revolution, and we are fortunate to have two expert speakers.

Birgit Mahnkopf is a German industrial sociologist and a retired professor of European Politics at Berlin School of Economics and Law Berlin. She has published broadly on issues such as: economic, social and political dimensions of globalization; political economy of European integration; social-ecological transition; sociology of work and industrial relations. Drawing on her discussion paper (No 01/2019 for the Euro Memorandum Group (‘The ‘4^th wave of industrial revolution’ – a promise blind to social consequences, power and ecological impact in the era of ‘digital capitalism’’), she will talk about the newest wave of automation when it will be possible to produce (even) more (useless) commodities with less people, which will increase structural unemployment at least in some, and likely in many, countries and lead to further pressure of wages. The presentation attempts to subject the ongoing digitalization hype, especially how far digitalization can be linked to societal goals in favour of workers, to a critical assessment.

Kim Moody (University of Westminster) was a founder of Labor Notes in the US and is the author of several books on labour and politics, the most recent being On New Terrain: How Capital is Reshaping the Battleground of Class War (Haymarket Books, 2017). His discussion will draw primarily on two recent publicatons: “Labour and the Contradictory Logic of Logistics” Work Organisation, Labour & Globalisation 13(1) (2019): 79-95; “High Tech, Low Growth: Robots and the Future of Work” Historical Materialism, 26(4) (2018): 3-34. He will discuss the rapid rise of the new dynamics of logistics driven by the increased centrality of time in global competition and enabled by new technology. This ‘logistics revolution’ has changed the way millions of people work, who does the work and where, the nature of the workplace, and the impact on workers, communities and the environment. Driven by capital’s inherent need for expansion and ‘time-based competition’ and guided by ICT, contemporary logistics is altering the built environment through the creation of giant ‘logistics clusters’, changing the composition of the working class and the nature of work, and intensifying climate change. Can the labour and social movement meet these challenges?

This seminar is an opportunity to air and discuss these issues in an open forum and consider their implications for industrial relations. Anyone interested is welcome to attend this event. These meetings can be full though so, if you would like to attend and to help forecast catering provision, please Contact: Professor Linda Clarke,  clarkel@wmin.ac.uk or 020350 66528

10th January 2020

1 year post-doc fellowship (€1,600 net/month) at Scuola Normale Superiore, Florence

10th January 2020

Manchester Industrial Relations Society - Dr Phoebe Moore: ‘Work, Technology and What Counts: Surveillance and Monitoring and Worker Responses.’

10th January 2020

BUIRA Conference Fee Announced

We've been working hard with the Manchester organising team to keep BUIRA Conference fee as low as possible. We are pleased to announce that the fee for the 

BUIRA 70th Anniversary Conference 2020: The past, present and future of industrial relations and the politics of work

at Alliance Manchester Business School, University of Manchester will be £200 full / £100 PhD

See the call for papers here: https://www.buira.org/conference/13

https://www.buira.org/conference/13

10th January 2020

ESRC PhD Studentship: Job Quality and Fairness in UK and Welsh Workplaces (Cardiff University)

ESRC PhD Studentship:

Job Quality and Fairness in UK and Welsh Workplaces (Cardiff University)

Despite growing affluence, research evidence suggests that the quality of work is declining.  Survey evidence suggests that work is becoming more intense, task discretion declining, insecurity rising and employee involvement falling.  One of the great challenges facing researchers is how to reconcile growing prosperity and falling hours at work with the growth of poor quality jobs.  This PhD studentship will do this through an examination of the Skills and Employment Survey series (led by Professor Alan Felstead of the School of Social Sciences, Cardiff University) together with qualitative work carried out in Welsh workplaces (following the work of Professor Jonathan Morris of Cardiff Business School, Cardiff University). This ESRC PhD studentship is also offered in collaboration with ACAS Wales and South West of England with whom Morris and Felstead have developed strong links.

We welcome applications for both full and part-time study, and studentships are available as either ‘1+3’ (i.e. one full time year of research training Masters followed by three years of full-time Doctoral study, or the part-time equivalent), or ‘+3’ (i.e. three years of full-time doctoral study or its part-time equivalent), depending on the needs of the applicant. 

For more information, go to: https://www.findaphd.com/phds/project/wales-esrc-dtp-phd-collaborative-studentship-fair-work-job-quality-and-fairness-in-uk-and-welsh-workplaces-in-collaboration-with-acas-wales-and-south-west-of-england/?p116529

2nd January 2020

Critique of Institute of Employment Rights: Sectoral Collective Bargaining, POLITICAL QUARTERLY

This public policy piece in Political Quarterly (Early View) on the future of British employee voice might be of wider IR interest. It's the published version of arguments I presented to a History & Policy Trade Union and Employment Forum, at Warwick University Modern Records Centre on 27 April 2018 and to the 2019 BUIRA conference, Newcastle, 2 July.

Industrial Relations and the Limits of the State: Can a left Labour Government resurrect comprehensive Sectoral Collective Bargaining and restore trade union power?

Abstract

Since 2017 the British Labour Party has proposed mandatory Sectoral Collective Bargaining (SCB) as a comprehensive strategy to rebuild trade union voice across the entire economy. The intellectual roots lie in the Institute of Employment Rights (IER), Manifesto for Labour Law (2016). First, this article explains the core IER approach, questioning: its feasibility given current low levels of union membership and bargaining coverage; and whether it would produce the stable and productive economy promised. Second, the central  body develops four social science objections to this state-driven approach centred on: Industrial Relations History; Political Sociology; Economics; and Political Philosophy. The Conclusion argues that while stronger voluntary trade unions could help, it's neither practicable nor desirable for the state to impose a trade union, single-channel approach to employee voice. Instead, a ‘mixed economy of voice’ is proposed, perhaps including statutory wages councils, which speaks directly to all employees - union or non-union - and wins broader political, employer and public support.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1467-923X.12788

19th December 2019

Post-Doctoral Research Fellowship: Work, Labour and Climate Change, Centre for Employment Relations, Innovation and Change (CERIC)

Are you an ambitious researcher looking for your next challenge?  Do you have a research background in employment or industrial relations, industrial sociology or other fields related to work and employment? Do you have an interest in action to protect the enviroment and mitigate climate change? Do you want to further your career in one of the UK’s leading research intensive Universities?

The Centre for Employment Relations Innovation and Change (CERIC) is a leading research centre investigating the changing nature of work and employment and employment relations. It houses a critical mass of internationally regarded researchers that produce intellectually challenging work with genuine policy and practitioner impact. CERIC is looking for a research fellow to support Dr. Vera Trappmann and Dr. Jo Cutter in their research on work, the labour movement and climate change mitigation. 

This research is focused on the political economy and comparative industrial relations systems that shape the labour movement’s responses to climate change. You will support this work through undetaking reviews of relevant academic and policy literature; contribute significantly to the set up and delivery of a programme of qualitative research interviews and the design and testing of a new survey survey tool for trade union members.

To explore the post further or for any queries you may have, please contact:

Dr Jo Cutter 

Tel: +44 (0)113 343 0202; email: j.cutter@leeds.ac.uk

Or

Dr Vera Trappmann

Tel: +44 (0)113 343 1119; email: v.trappmann@leeds.ac.uk

19th December 2019

Missed the UCU ballot threshold? Download this guide to achieving a high participation union!

Missed the ballot threshold? Download this guide to achieving a high participation union!

This is a little out of date but might still be of interest 

https://actionnetwork.org/forms/sign-up-to-download-the-guide/?fbclid=IwAR3vUbcQho_W1BRCNOeZecBsjtlX1D08VlLtRnJGrFdVLAidoO8_mP9YrkQ

6th December 2019

Three PhDs at Sheffield Business School with scholarships

Study With Scholarships at the Sheffield Business School (SBS)

A PhD in SBS offers you a brilliant opportunity to develop your research skills and knowledge to create a real impact either in academia, public sector, private sector or as an entrepreneur.

At Sheffield Business School we have a vibrant international community of research students, academics and support staff, and a 30-year history of delivering high-quality postgraduate research that places a strong emphasis on close supervision and support.

Join us in our search for new thinking because:

We have extensive expertise in creating new knowledge and applying business research to solve real world problems

You will be supervised by a vibrant community of academics who are driven by the discovery of new knowledge

Your research will be conducted alongside a diverse community of doctoral researchers from the globe who bring a wealth of international experience

Our reputation for excellence is recognised through our high-quality research training and the support we offer our doctoral students

Sheffield Business School is committed to providing you with an outstanding student experience in a collegiate environment

About SBS

Sheffield Business School is one of the largest such institutions in the UK, with over 200 academic staff. As a result, the school’s research covers a wide spectrum of disciplines, ranging from finance and accounting, management, strategy, marketing, economics, international business and human resource management, hospitality, tourism, events management, food and nutrition.

Research undertaken at Sheffield Business School is largely shaped by the University's Creating Knowledge strategy, which sets out the following ambitions:

We will be recognised internationally for research which has real social, economic and cultural impact

We will identify and seize opportunities to lead in new and emerging areas

We will apply research to enrich students' learning and work with others to ensure translation into practice

In Sheffield Business School our research supports two overarching themes which are The Experience Economy and Social and Cooperative Economy. We welcome applications from prospective PhD students to undertake research that contributes to this agenda.

The Experience Economy covers a broad range of research interests linked to both the experience economy and the related area of customer experience management, focusing on the design, delivery and development of consumer experiences in a range of leisure, recreation, events, hospitality and tourism contexts. Research within this theme spans the breadth of the consumer experience process in various product markets. It includes a variety of service management issues and is also concerned with the employee workplace experience and the associated functional management issues.

Social and Cooperative Economy - Sheffield Business School is a leading centre of research into alternative forms of business organisation, notably social enterprise, through which businesses combine commercial objectives with the achievement of social aims such as environmental improvement or support for vulnerable groups in society. In particular SBS and our partners have pioneered the development of the Fair Shares model, which focuses on the democratic involvement of all stakeholders and the distribution of rewards on a fair and equitable basis.

How to apply

Anyone can apply for a PhD scholarship. However you would need to meet the standard Programme application entry requirements (see below). All applicants wishing to be considered for a PhD scholarship need to submit by the closing date (12 noon on Monday 2nd March 2020) the following documents (see below) by email to sbsdoctorates@shu.ac.uk.
Please indicate clearly in the body of your email that you would like to be considered for a SBS PhD scholarship.

We require the following documents for your application:

-a fully completed Sheffield Hallam University application form.

-a detailed research proposal (4-6 sides of A4 in length). All submitted research proposals will be uploaded to Turnitin to assess their originality.

-a transcript of marks from your highest qualification (we require a dissertation mark of 60 or higher).

-a copy of your award certificate from your highest qualification.

-two references, both of which must be recent letters on headed notepaper or the reference form found within the University application form (one of which should ideally be from an academic source). Referees can submit their references electronically by scanning and emailing the original documents direct to us from their own email address, but these must be on headed notepaper or the official form.

English Language proficiency evidence - Where English is not your first language, you must show evidence of English language ability to the following minimum level of proficiency. You must provide evidence of either a current IELTS score of 7.0 overall (with all component marks of 6.5 or higher and preferably Academic IELTS); or a current TOEFL test with an overall score of 100 internet based (with a minimum component score of 23 in listening and reading, 26 in writing and 22 in speaking) or SHU TESOL English Language qualification – final overall grade of A (with all components graded at B or higher) or a recognised equivalent testing system.  Please note that your test score must be current, i.e. within the last two years.

Funding amount

A generous and comprehensive package is offered. This funding is for 3 year full-time PhD study. Our SBS PhD Scholarship covers tuition which is equal to the Home/EU fee. This includes a stipend at Research Council UK levels (this is currently £15,009 for 2019/20) per annum plus Home/EU tuition fees (£4,330 in 2019/20). For international students, a top up tuition fee of approximately £8,200 per year is required.

Selection process

Successful applicants will be required to attend an interview where you will be asked to discuss your research proposal. Interview panel members will include the PhD Programme Leader, a prospective Director of Studies and a representative from the SBS Creating Knowledge Board. All applicants wishing to be considered for a PhD scholarship need to submit all their documents by e-mail on 12 noon on Monday 2nd March 2020 to sbsdoctorates@shu.ac.uk. Interview dates are provisionally scheduled for week commencing 20th April 2020.

Areas of study

We are seeking PhD scholarship applications for 3 year funded full-time study with proposed theoretical and managerial implications in one of our department

Service Sector Management (SSM)

Management

Further information

If you have any queries about full-time PhD Scholarships in SBS please contact:

Dr. Alisha Ali 
PhD Programme Leader 
Sheffield Business School 
Sheffield Hallam University 
Alisha.Ali@shu.ac.uk 
Tel: 0114 225 4593

Deadline is 2 noon on Monday 2nd March 2020) the following documents (see below) by email to sbsdoctorates@shu.ac.uk.

Find a PhD: https://www.findaphd.com/phds/programme/sheffield-business-school-phd-scholarships/?p4325 

SHU’s Website: https://www.shu.ac.uk/research/degrees/phd-scholarships/sheffield-business-school-phd-scholarships

6th December 2019

Scottish Labour History - vol 54, 2019

The contents of the newly publish, 2019 journal, include:

John Foster, Kenny MacAskill and Rory Scothorne: symposium on the Jimmy Reid biography by McKinlay and Knox

Ewan Gibbs & Jim Phillips: Remembering the Auchengaich mining disaster

Alan McKinlay, John Boyle & William Knox: Unionising BSR in East Kilbride, 1969

Rory Stride: Women, Work & Deindustrialisation: the case of James Templeton & Son, Glasgow, 1960-81

Adam McInnes: Deindustrialisation and Gordon Brown's approach to devolution in Scotland

Ian Gasse: The 1905 Dumfries Bakers' Strike

Please see https://www.scottishlabourhistorysociety.scot/ for details on access and subscriptions to Scottish Labour History.

6th December 2019

Open letter in support of the Labour Party's labour law reforms

If you are interested in signing the below letter  please let me know by return email by 12 pm on Thursday manoj.dias-abey@bristol.ac.uk Dr. Manoj Dias-Abey, Lecturer in Law, University of Bristol

Britain’s labour laws are in desperate need of reform. Working people are increasingly engaged in work that pays poorly, is insecure, and contains few avenues of redress if they are treated unfairly by their employers. In-work poverty is at a record high. In the large majority of families in poverty (60%) there is at least one person in work. The current government boasts about record low unemployment figures whilst at the same time it fails to protect workers from poverty pay and insecurity.

Evidence shows that collective bargaining helps to improve productivity and secure stable and well-paying jobs. In 1979, over 80% of UK workers were covered by collective agreements, but today that figure is less than 20%. The decline in collective bargaining was hastened by waves of anti-union legislation that began in the 1980s.  Today, British trade union laws are some of the most restrictive in the Western world.

The Labour Party’s 2019 manifesto proposes significant labour law reform, explaining: “[w]ork should provide a decent life for all, guaranteeing not just dignity and respect in the workplace, but also the income and leisure time to allow for a fulfilling life outside it.” We believe that this vision is backed up by a credible plan of action.

Labour will support the introduction of sectoral collective bargaining to set minimum terms and conditions covering all workers in UK sectors. Enterprise-based collective bargaining will be boosted so that employers and workers can negotiate agreements suited to the needs of their workplace. Labour will introduce a real “living wage” and require employers to replace zero-hour contracts with minimum hours contracts based on a new right to regular hours. It will ensure the full range of employment protections are available to all workers from day one of employment and it will create a properly resourced government agency to proactively enforce these rights. Race and gender pay equality will be achieved by making the state responsible for enforcing equal pay legislation and by requiring employers to publicly report on pay disparities for BAME workers.

Labour will also introduce several important corporate governance reforms for large businesses, such as worker representatives on boards and the creation of “inclusive ownership funds”, which have the potential to radically democratise the economy.

Collectively, we have spent many decades studying labour law and industrial relations in the United Kingdom. We believe that the Labour Party is the only party with a transformative plan to create jobs that offer security, fair pay and dignity at work as well as an economy that works for the many. 

Yours sincerely,

3rd December 2019

Ideas in Employment Relations Research Call for Papers for Special Issue Industrial Relations: A Journal of Economy and Society

Ideas in Employment Relations Research Call for Papers for Special Issue Industrial Relations: A Journal of Economy and Society

We are currently accepting long abstracts for this Special Issue – full details are available at the following link:

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/pb-assets/assets/1468232x/IR_Call%20for%20Papers_Ideas%20in%20Employment%20Relations%20Research-1572620793003.pdf

Ideas in Employment Relations Research

Call for Papers for Special Issue

Industrial Relations: A Journal of Economy and Society

Guest editors

Martin B. Carstensen (Copenhagen Business School): mbc.ioa@cbs.dk

Christian Lyhne Ibsen (Michigan State University): ibsenchr@msu.edu

Vivien Schmidt (Boston University): vschmidt@bu.edu 

We look forward to receive your long abstracts by January 15, 2020. 

Best wishes

Martin B. Carstensen, Vivien Schmidt and Christian Lyhne Ibsen

13th November 2019

CIPD Applied Research Conference

CIPD Applied Research Conference 

We are delighted to announce that tickets are now on sale for the CIPD Applied Research Conference (ARC)! The conference, taking place in Dublin City University (DCU) St Patrick’s Campus, Ireland, on 22-23 January 2020, explores cutting-edge research into work, employment and people management. 

ARC is CIPD’s annual meeting place to discuss cutting edge research into work, employment and people management. It holds a unique place in strengthening links between academic research and HR practice, focusing on the applications of research insights to organisational life and labour markets.

This year’s conference, in partnership with DCU Business School, will see the CIPD Applied Research Conference held in Ireland for the first time, further expanding our research and impact, while giving practitioners, researchers, and keen learners, the opportunity to gain insights, apply learnings, and network in one of Ireland’s most dynamic universities.

Registration for the CIPD Applied Research Conference 2020 is now open, and the fees for attending are as follows:

• Standard tickets £80/€93 + VAT
• Student tickets £55/€64 + VAT

For full details on the programme, themes, location and everything else, make sure to click https://www.cipd.co.uk/learn/events-networks/applied-research-conference

We look forward to seeing you there!

13th November 2019

CREW seminar Nov 27th November on Four day working week

Dear Colleagues,

A reminder about our exciting CREW seminar on The four day working week on 27^th Nov at Hamilton House. All welcome!

A future Labour government is committed to implement a four day working week with no loss of pay. This is also the Trades Union Congress (TUC) policy. As Stephen Hawking predicted we need to think carefully about how the potential benefits of automation and artificial intelligence are shared in society. Reductions in working time has been seen to have a positive impact on the environment and integral to challenging climate change, as well as the possibility of shared child and eldercare and benefits for mental and physical health.

Yet, how do we move towards a 4 day week? This seminar hears from Professor Andre Spicer on the wider benefits and the introduction of ‘an infrastructure of conviviality’. It reflects on the experience of trade union campaigns to cut the working week, but also hears from employers who have already introduced a 4 day week, their experiences and the outcomes for their business.

Come along and find out more, as it may be that exciting times lie ahead of us!

The Four-day working week – possibilities and implications

Wednesday 27th November 2019

TIME: 15.00 – 17.30

VENUE:  Room HH103, Hamilton House, Park Vista, Greenwich    SE10 9LZ

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/crew-seminar-four-day-working-week-tickets-78414613219

13th November 2019

BUIRA 2020 Conference - Call for papers

BUIRA 70th Anniversary Conference 2020

The past, present and future of industrial relations and the politics of work

Alliance Manchester Business School, University of Manchester,

30th June to 2nd July 2020

Call for papers

BUIRA turning 70 presents a good opportunity to reflect on the past, present and future of industrial relations. Despite facing recent challenges, the field of industrial relations continues to be a vital topic of academic and practitioner enquiry. Issues that have long been central within the study of industrial relations, such as pay, collective bargaining, rights at work, employee representation, national and transnational forms of regulation, health and safety, job (in)security, precarity, and workplace conflict are highly prominent within many current political and academic debates. Understanding the politics of work, grounded in a critical social science tradition, is crucial for academics and policy makers alike. 

IR continues to face a tough institutional environment. In the university, ‘HRM’ and ‘people and work’ has overtaken ‘industrial relations’ in the nomenclature of courses and modules. Within organisations and workplaces, trade unions continue to struggle to maintain a presence and voice for workers. While many university departments may nevertheless offer critical perspectives on work and employment, there is concern that the way ‘HRM’ is taught in some business schools may lack a sufficient diversity of perspectives and critical engagement with hegemonic neoliberalism. This in turn could lead to a potential ‘immiseration’ of the subject matter, and an inability to prevent or address trends such as the spread of precarious work, and the growing problem of in-work poverty (Dundon and Rafferty, 2018). At the same time, IR scholarship is often accused of being theoretically weak, suffering from a descriptive, and institutional bias, i.e. focusing on the dwindling institutions of trade unions and collective bargaining (Kelly, 1998). 

Where are we now? How have we got here, and what should the future of the field look like? Reflecting on historical developments in industrial relations is crucial in order to ground and contextualise current developments in the world of work. History matters in helping us to understand the changing nature of industrial relations, and yet is often overlooked in modern accounts of work relations. It is also important to reflect on pressing current issues such as the impact of austerity and the crisis in an increasingly financialised world. What have been their consequences for public sector industrial relations? What is the impact of patterns of precarious work and non-standard employment relationships on the changing nature of work and employment, skills and the quality of work? Across all of these questions, issues of social class, equality and diversity remain more relevant than ever before. Looking to the future, one key question concerns the extent to which unions can play an active role with social movements to tackle climate breakdown.

We welcome empirical (both quantitative and qualitative), analytical, conceptual and methodological papers that concern any area of industrial relations, or fields cognate to industrial relations. We would particularly appreciate submissions from early career researchers and doctoral students. Papers concerning topics under the following headings will be particularly welcome:

• Reflections and challenges for Equality and Diversity, and challenging the gender pay gap
• The consequences of new technology, digitalisation and the growth of platforms for work and industrial relations
• Climate breakdown and industrial relations
• Comparative industrial relations
• Political economy of work (e.g. austerity, financialisation, fragmentation, flexibilisation and inequality)
• New forms of collective action in the workplace, and new agents of resistance
• The rise of populism/nationalism and industrial relations

Submission details

Abstracts of papers should be submitted here:

 https://bham.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_0iYSk4W03DvrkDr 

Abstracts should be a maximum of 500 words in length and cover the following headings:

•         Brief outline
•         Methodology
•         Key findings
•         References

Deadline for submission of abstracts: Monday, 13^th January 2020

All abstracts are refereed anonymously by BUIRA Executive Committee members.

References

Dundon T and Rafferty A (2018) The (potential) demise of HRM? Human Resource Management Journal 28(3): 377– 391.

Kelly J (1998) Rethinking Industrial Relations: Mobilisation, Collectivism and Long Waves. London: Routledge. 

4th November 2019

Sheffield Business School, Sheffield Hallam University Lecturer/ Senior Lecturer in Organisational Behaviour and Human Resource Management

31st October 2019

IER Free Book: Brexit and Workers' Rights

On 23 June 2016, the United Kingdom held a referendum on whether to remain in or leave the European Union. The result was 51.9% of voters voting to leave. Two things were immediately clear. First, the negotiations would be a very complex, technical, and politically charged affair. Second, the UK would face tough choices and would not be allowed to ‘cherry-pick’ the terms of the Brexit arrangements.

About this book https://www.ier.org.uk/publications/brexit-and-workers-rights

Now, on the brink of the third deadline for a Brexit deal, two leading UK academics consider the possible implications of a ‘no-deal Brexit’ for UK workers’ rights. They conclude that the process and the post-Brexit architecture will be owned and determined by the political party in power at the time of Brexit and they pose two alternative scenarios.

Either the future could deliver a relentless process of ossification, stagnation and erosion of UK labour rights led by politicians traditionally hostile to workers’ rights. Or, the UK could not only protect those UK rights already on the statute book but could resist the tendencies of the European Commission to decentralise collective bargaining arrangements and deregulate employment protection legislation.

31st October 2019

Research position for a part-time fieldworker in Scotland for a project about regulation in the care sector.

The post is  part time and for a year. It might suit someone just finishing up their thesis, or it would suit a post-grad person who has an understanding of how social care works or an interest in improving job quality  https://jobs.kent.ac.uk/Vacancy.aspx?ref=SS-137-19

31st October 2019

BUIRA Nominations Appointed Fellows of the Academy of Social Sciences

 Professor Peter Ackers, Professor John Kelly and Professor Jill Rubery have been appointed Fellows of the Academy of Social Sciences. All three were nominated by BUIRA as academics who have made a significant contribution to the social sciences.  

The Academy of Social Sciences is the national academy of academics, learned societies and practitioners in the social sciences. Its mission is to promote social science in the United Kingdom for the public benefit. https://www.acss.org.uk/introduction/

The Academy is composed of 1335 individual Fellows, 43 Learned Societies and a number of affiliates, together representing nearly 90,000 social scientists. Fellows are distinguished scholars and practitioners from academia and the public and private sectors. Most Learned Societies in the social sciences in the UK are represented within the Academy. The Academy also sponsors the Campaign for Social Science.

31st October 2019

Consultation: BUIRA Code of Practice

Please send us feedback on the below suggested BUIRA Code of Practice. 

BUIRA Code of Practice

Introduction 

The British Universities Industrial Relations Association (BUIRA) is devoted to increasing scholarly and professional knowledge about the present and future of Industrial Relations. BUIRA promotes the use of this knowledge to improve the work lives of individuals through critical debate that influences public dialogue about Industrial Relations, Employment Relations, Sociology of Work and Employment and cognate fields such as HRM. At the core of its activities, BUIRA places the rights and well-being of its members and those it comes into contact with, embracing a collegiate, welcoming and inclusive environment where members’ civil and human rights and their freedom of inquiry and expression in research, teaching, and publication are respected and protected. 

This Code of Practice puts forward (1) principles that underlie the professional responsibilities and conduct of BUIRA members, and (2) enforced ethical standards that apply to BUIRA members in official roles in the association and to those participating in BUIRA-sponsored activities. BUIRA members perform many roles, acting as researchers, educators, administrators, supervisors, commentators, activists and social interventionists who maintain a personal and professional lifelong commitment to ethical standards of behaviour, and encouraging those they come in contact with, such as colleagues, students, supervisees, collaborators, professional contacts, employees and employers, to behave ethically.

 The Code of Practice is structured in three main sections: General Principles, Professional Principles, and Ethical Standards. A separate document, a “Policy and procedure for handling claims and violations related to the BUIRA Code of Practice” accompanies the present document.

 General Principles

 These general principles serve as aspirational guidelines for the members of BUIRA in matters pertaining ethical conduct. The general principles upon which BUIRA is built are:

• Responsibility: Members of BUIRA uphold professional standards of conduct, clarify their professional roles and obligations, accept appropriate responsibility for their behaviour, and seek to manage conflicts of interest that could lead to exploitation or harm. They are aware of their professional and scientific responsibilities to society and to the specific communities they belong to and engage with as part of their work.

Integrity: Members of BUIRA promote accuracy, honesty, and truthfulness in the research, teaching, and practice of their profession. They strive to conduct themselves with dignity, fairness, and care in all their contacts and relationships with peers, students, professional contacts and the community at large.

Respect: Members of BUIRA establish relationships of trust with those with whom they work. They respect the dignity and worth of all people and the rights of individuals to privacy, confidentiality, and self-determination. They are aware of and respect cultural, individual, and role differences, including those based on gender identity, race, ethnicity, disability, age or youth, culture, nationality, religion, political persuasion, sexual orientation, real or suspected status with regards to AIDS/HIV, language, socioeconomic status, and subordinate status; and they are mindful of these factors when working with all people. They are committed to providing academic and professional work environments that are free of harassment (sexual or otherwise) and all forms of intimidation and exploitation (sexual or otherwise).

Professional Principles

BUIRA’s professional principles aim to support the professional interactions of colleagues within BUIRA and the Industrial and Employment Relations field more broadly. The professional principles of BUIRA will impact on members’ research, scholarship, teaching, mentoring and professional development activities.

We have two major responsibilities:

1. To the advancement of Industrial and Employment Relations knowledge

1. To commit to rigorous research that is planned, recorded, stored, analysed, reported and published with rigour
2. To ensure research results are not misleading and research is carried out in line with RCUK’s ethics policy and local institutions’ ethical procedures
3. To ensure participants’ freedom and dignity are respected
4. To ensure anonymity and confidentiality of research participants are maintained at all times.
5. To secure informed consent from participants at all times
6. To encourage timely dissemination of research findings with supportive and constructive feedback from peers
7. To manage projects and collaborations efficiently and effectively
8. To seek impact activities to encourage industrial and employment relations research to impact government policy and management practice
9. To encourage the dissemination of results and improve the exchange of information between academics and those in practice
10. To never engage in plagiarism and should plagiarism be suspected, to report it to the relevant body(ies) concerned.
11. To ensure that authorship credit reflects the professional or scientific contribution to a piece of work

3. To the BUIRA community and broader professional environment

1. To encourage meaningful exchange of ideas that invites counter/opposing views in a supportive and collegiate manner
2. To commit to the development of BUIRA through engaging in and contributing to BUIRA activities
3. To show commitment to the professional standards of BUIRA as included in this document as well as other policy documents
4. To treat all members of BUIRA and the wider Industrial and Employment Relations community with dignity and respect, demonstrating a collegiate attitude at all times.

Ethical Standards

Members of BUIRA must conduct themselves in line with the highest ethical standards. These standards are to be adhered to in all professional activities, including when interacting with other members of BUIRA and in their conduct of official roles in BUIRA.

BUIRA members must commit to the exclusion of the following:

1. Discrimination on the grounds of any individual characteristic (e.g. gender identity, race, ethnicity, disability, age or youth, culture, nationality, religion, political persuasion, sexual orientation, marital status, real or suspected status with regards to AIDS/HIV, disability, language, socioeconomic status, and subordinate status)
2. Any behaviours or acts that violate a person’s dignity. BUIRA regards the following as specific but not exhaustive examples of acts and behaviours that it deems to violate a person’s dignity:

• Physical contact ranging from unnecessary and unwelcome touching to serious assault.
• Intimidating behaviour, either physical or non-physical
• Verbal and written harassment through jokes, offensive language, gossip and slander, letters and electronic communication
• Visual display of offensive material
• Isolating, ostracising or marginalising a person
• Pressure/coercion into participation or relinquishing membership of political/religious groups
• Intrusion by pestering, spying or following.

1. Words or actions which seek to demean another person or persons (this includes language that frames a conversation or exchange in credentialist terms, within power structures or perceived hierarchical distances)
2. Any behaviours or acts that cause intimidation, humiliation, ridicule, offence or loss of privacy.
3. Exploitative relationships between those of the same grade or between individuals of different grades.
4. Destructive behaviour that seeks to undermine or otherwise harm any other person.
5. Activities that involve conflicts of interest. Should any conflict of interest arise, individuals must declare such conflict of interest.

Subscribing to the Code of Practice

On joining BUIRA, members agree to comply, promote and enforce the contents of this Code of Practice, which exemplifies the highest ethical ideals of professional conduct of the profession. BUIRA members are responsible for:

1. Familiarising themselves with the Code of Practice: Lack of awareness or misunderstanding of an ethical standard is not, in itself, a defence against inappropriate or unethical conduct.

2. Confronting ethical issues: Any violation of the Code of Practice should be reported to BUIRA’s Ethics Officer. If any member is unsure where a violation of the Code of Practice has been committed, they should consult with BUIRA’s Ethics Officer.

3. Treating all parties fairly in any dispute over violations to the Code of Practice: BUIRA members do not discriminate against a person on the basis of their having made an ethical claim or having been the subject of a claim. This consideration does not preclude taking action based upon the outcome of a claim.

4. Reporting ethical violations of others: If a BUIRA member has substantial reason to believe that there has been a violation of the Code of Practice by another BUIRA member, they should attempt to resolve the issue by bringing it to the attention of that individual. If an informal resolution appears appropriate or possible, or members seek advice about how to proceed, they may contact the BUIRA Ethics Officer for guidance.

5. Avoiding making improper claims: BUIRA members do not file or encourage the filing of claims that are frivolous and are intended to harm an alleged violator.

Policy and procedure for handling claims related to the BUIRA Code of Practice

Introduction

This document outlines the policy and procedures to deal with matters associated with the violation of the BUIRA Code of Practice. The policy and procedures are intended to reinforce the highest standards of professional ethical practice and behaviour through a process that is fair, procedurally just, and effective. This policy and procedures should be formally reviewed every four years and, if necessary, in accordance with any changes deemed necessary by the Ethics Committee. All recommended changes are approved by BUIRA’s Executive Board.

Principles

The policy and procedures are guided by the following eight principles:

1. Predictability - Each individual claim is handled in a consistent, orderly, fair, and just manner.

2. Transparency - The BUIRA Code of Practice and the Policy and Procedures for Handling Claims of Ethical Standards Violations are made available to all members. Charges and responses are made known to the parties, and decisions are explained and documented.

3. Professionalism - Each case is handled on the basis of good will and with a belief that there is no malicious intent on the part of anyone involved.

4. Impartiality - All parties are treated equally and impartially.

5. Democracy - Both parties have voice and must be given the opportunity to be heard. The process includes checks and balances.

6. Confidentiality - The process is confidential; but, within the process all individuals involved, their claims, and responses are known to each other.

7. Efficiency - A commitment is made to resolve issues swiftly, allowing proper time for quality deliberation.

8. Education - The process is intended to be educational with regard to ethics and appropriate professional practice for all parties involved.

Role, Scope and Responsibilities

The implementation of this policy and procedures is the responsibility of BUIRA members who are appointed and elected to the various roles as detailed in this document. Members involved in enforcing BUIRA’s policy and procedures have an obligation to act in an unbiased manner, to work expeditiously, to safeguard the confidentiality of any adjudication process, and to follow the procedures established to protect the rights of all individuals involved. In addition, each member is expected to act only to uphold the Ethical Standards of the Code of Practice while keeping in mind the principles that guide this policy and procedures.

There are two different dimensions to handling claims related to the BUIRA Code of Practice: (a) education, information and guidance, and (b) application and maintenance of policy and procedure for handling claims related to the BUIRA Code of Practice

.

Education, information and guidance to members

Education, information and guidance to membership about Ethical Standards related to the BUIRA Code of Practice is the responsibility of the Ethics Officer.

Ethics Officer Role

The Ethics Officer role is a single position of expert member elected by the BUIRA membership. The role has a term of 3 years and is elected outside of the stewardship cycle. The role is open to re-election only for an additional term. Having served one term, if not seeking re-election individuals shall not be eligible to serve again in the role for a period of 2 years. Having served 2 terms (e.g. including re-election), individuals shall not be eligible to serve again for a period of 5 years.

The responsibilities of the Ethics Officer are, as follows:

1. Point of contact for BUIRA members on ethics inquiries
2. Provides expert advice on ethics matters to BUIRA members
3. Provides policy and strategy advice to the Ethics Committee
4. Provides informal counselling and referrals to individuals on ethics matter
5. Educates individuals about the Code of Practice and the Policy and Procedures for handling claims related to the BUIRA Code of Practice
6. Receives and processes requests for interpretations of the Code of Practice.
7. Screens inquiries to assess whether the matter meets criteria for filing a claim. The Ethics Officer makes no judgments on the merit of a claim, but rather explains the process for filing a claim and provides forms and materials.
8. Notifies the Chair of the Ethics Committee if a claim may be forthcoming
9. Discusses claims of alleged violations to the Code of Practice with members
10. Maintains timely communication with individuals involved in a claim about the status of the claim.
11. Maintains records of ethics inquiries and claims
12. Maintains historical records of all ethics-claim procedures
13. Serves as liaison to legal counsel where appropriate
14. Coordinates appointments of roles to the Ethics Committee
15. In a case where the Ethics Officer is a party related to the claim, has a relationship with any party in the dispute or is conflicted, he/she shall recuse himself/herself and the Chair of the Ethics Committee Chair shall make an appointment of a different expert member to fill the role. In the event that a violation is proven, the Ethics Officer will be removed from the role with immediate effect and the member appointed by the Chair of the Ethics Committee will serve for the remaining of the tenure of the outgoing Ethics Officer.

Application and maintenance of policy and procedure for handling claims related to the BUIRA Code of Practice

Application and maintenance of the policy and procedure for handling claims related to the BUIRA Code of Practice are the responsibility of the Ethics Committee and the Ethics Appeals Committee.

Ethics Committee

The Ethics Committee is an enforcement committee, comprised of two members of the BUIRA Executive Board appointed by the BUIRA President (one of whom will act as Chair of the Ethics Committee), and three elected BUIRA members. All members except the Ethics Office serve for a period of 1 year. The roles are not open for consecutive re-election. Having served, individuals shall not be eligible to serve again in the same role for a period of 2 years.

The responsibilities of the Ethics Committee are, as follows:

1. Proposes new ethics-related initiatives
2. Reviews and recommends changes to the Code and the Policy and Procedures
3. Reports to BUIRA Executive Board on ethics committee meetings
4. Prepares summaries of decisions regarding ethical questions for the purpose of educating BUIRA members (Note: Summaries may be anonymised, published and distributed to the membership when the BUIRA Executive believes doing so constitutes an opportunity to educate members).
5. Explains adjudication procedures; receives and processes claims of alleged violations of the Code of Practice that have passed screening by the Ethics Officer
6. Compiles an objective, impartial, and factual account of the claim in question, and makes the best possible recommendation for the case. In taking action, the committee shall do so only for just cause and shall only take the degree of disciplinary action that is reasonable. The Ethics Committee engages in this procedures adhering to the guiding principles of predictability, transparency, professionalism, impartiality, democracy, confidentiality, efficiency and education.
7. In a case where any member of the Ethics Committee is a party related to the claim, has a relationship with any party in the claim or is conflicted, the individual shall recuse themselves from all deliberations and votes and the Ethics Committee Chair shall appoint a replacement so that the Ethics Committee shall fulfil its responsibilities. If this is the case of the Chair of the Ethics Committee, the Chair shall recuse themselves from all deliberations and votes and the President of BUIRA shall appoint a replacement so that the Ethics Committee shall fulfil its responsibilities.

Chair of the Ethics Committee

The Chair of the Ethics Committee is a single position undertaken of one of the two members of the BUIRA Executive Board appointed by the BUIRA President to be part of the Ethics Committee. The role has a term of 1 year. The role is not open to re-appointment. Having served one term, if not seeking re-election individuals shall not be eligible to serve again in the role for a period of 1 year. Having served twice, individuals shall not be eligible to serve again for a period of 5 years.

The responsibilities of the Chair of the Ethics Committee are, as follows:

1. Convenes the Ethics Committee when a claim is received
2. Presides over all adjudication processes
3. Issues the final written decision to all parties, including to the Ethics Officer and the BUIRA Executive Board
4. Confers with the BUIRA Executive Board on behalf of the Ethics Committee where appropriate
5. Reports to the BUIRA Executive Board on behalf of the Ethics Committee

Ethics Appeals Panel

In cases where individuals involved in a claim want to appeal the outcome of their claim, this will be dealt with by an Independent panel assembled to hear appeals. The Ethics Appeals Panel will be comprised by a Chair and two members appointed by the President of BUIRA. The panel is assembled to settle appeals on a case-by-case basis. This means that the term begins and ends with each case.

The responsibilities of the Ethics Appeals Panel are, as follows:

1. Reviews the claim and recommendation in an objective, impartial, and factual manner
2. Assesses the fairness of the outcome in view of the facts of the claim.

The Ethics Appeal Panel engages in these procedures adhering to the guiding principles of predictability, transparency, professionalism, impartiality, democracy, confidentiality, efficiency and education.

Operating Procedures

1. Quorum and voting - The quorum is constituted by all members of the Ethics Committee. Decisions shall be by two-thirds vote of members of the Ethics Committee. Members of the Ethics Committee are not allowed to send representatives to deliberate on their behalf. Votes on claims can be undertaken by post, by e-mail, or by voice (e.g. conference call, skype, etc). In the event that a member of the Ethics Committee has to recuse themselves from a claim, the BUIRA President shall temporarily appoint a replacement.

2. Conflicts of interest - If an individual involved in a claim challenges the composition of the Ethics Committee or the Ethics Appeal Committee, it is the responsibility of the individual to inform the President of BUIRA, in writing, before the decision is made or any appeals process begins. Challenges can be made for the following reasons: alleged bias, prejudice or conflict of interest. Notwithstanding the previous, members of the Ethics Committee or the Ethics Appeal Committee shall be vigilant in assessing their own impartiality, as well as any questionable appearances due to relationships, and shall take appropriate action to eliminate any impression of impropriety.

3. Means for handling claims - Three principal means for handling claims are telephone consultations, e-mail, and written communication. Final decisions must be completed in hardcopy.

4. Confidentiality - At the point of original suspicion or informal query, members are urged to avoid public disclosure of the situation. Once a formal claim is filed with the Ethics Officer, parties involved shall avoid public disclosure and discussion of the claim in order to respect the dignity and right to privacy of all involved. Breach of this requirement may be construed as malicious and may result in dismissal of the claim by the Chair of the Ethics Committee as it, in itself, represents a violation of the Code of Practice. Throughout the process, the Ethics Officer, the Ethics Committee or the Ethics Appeal Committee, and any parties involved are all expected to respect the confidentiality of the process as well as its outcome. Communication to parties outside the process is inappropriate and will be deemed a violation of due process.

5. Use of counsel/legal advisor - Proceedings undertaken by the Ethics Committee or and Ethics Appeals Panel are not legal proceeds and are closed to legal counsel of all parties.

6. Informal protocols and queries - In all cases, BUIRA members are first encouraged to resolve claims directly and informally with the other individual(s) involved. If informal resolution is not possible, the individual making the claim has the option to file a formal claim. The Chair of the Ethics Committee shall also assess whether informal resolution is possible at the point in the process where the response is received and both parties have provided complete information.

7. Amendment - The Policy and Procedures for handling claims of ethical-standards violations may be amended by a vote of the BUIRA Executive Board, following a recommendation by the Ethics Committee, the Ethics Officer and or an Ethics Appeals Panel. All changes (regardless of the nature) must be communicated to NUIRA members through BUIRA outlets (e.g. BUIRA newsletter, website, AGM, etc.).

8. Time limits for the filing of formal claims - Claims regarding research must be filed within 3 years of the alleged incident. Claims regarding personal conduct must be filed within 6 months of the alleged incident. Claims regarding financial or other matters must be filed within 18 months of the alleged incident. The Ethics Officer may accept formal claims outside of the above time frames under exceptional circumstances.

9. Timelines - The Ethics Officer, the chair of the Ethics Committee or the Chair of an Ethics Appeals Panel may, at their discretion, accept documentation submitted late, and may also delay or postpone review of a case for good cause. Additionally, individuals involved in a claim may request that the Ethics Committee delay or postpone its review of a case for good cause if done so in writing. Otherwise all timelines for submission and response must be adhered to for matters to be resolved efficiently and in good faith.

10. Notice of legal action - If individuals involved in a claim know of any legal action (civil or criminal) related to the claim, they are required to notify the Ethics Committee. In the event of any legal action, all activity will be suspended until the conclusion of the legal action. At the conclusion of legal action it is the responsibility of the individual raising a claim to re-initiate the process with BUIRA, if desired, by notifying the Chair of the Ethics Committee.

11. Filing of formal records - Final written reports must be filed formally by the Chair of the Ethics Committee and the outcome must be shared with the Ethics Officer. A copy of the report, with all names or identifying marks removed from the report, may be made available to the Ethics Committee for the purpose of learning and improvement of processes.

Processes

Screening of Inquiries

1. All inquiries are screened by the Ethics Officer. The Ethics Officer discusses the incident with the individual to assess preliminarily if:
2. The incident occurred within the domain of a BUIRA activity
3. The incident is covered under the Ethical Standards of the Code of Practice
4. The claim is being filed within the specified time limits.

2. If YES to all of the above, the Ethics Officer sends a claim pack to the individual to initiate a formal claim. The pack includes an Ethics Claim Form, a copy of the Code of Practice, and a copy of this policy and procedures document.

3. If NO to any of the above, the Ethics Officer informs the individual that the matter is not subject to BUIRA processes and counsels the individual for educational purposes, if the individual so wishes.

4. The Ethics Officer notifies the Chair of the Ethics Committee that a claim may be forthcoming.

5. Alleged violations of the General and Professional Principles of the Code of Practice, that are non-enforceable aspirations, will not be considered.

Eligibility to File Claims

1. After initial screening by the Ethics Officer, the Ethics Committee will receive claims that BUIRA members have violated one or more sections of the Ethical

Standards of the Code of Practice from the following individuals:

1. Any member who has reason to believe that a BUIRA member has violated the Ethical Standards of the BUIRA Code of Practice
2. The Chair of the Ethics Committee on behalf of the BUIRA membership, when the Chair has reason to believe, through information received by the Committee, that BUIRA members have violated the BUIRA Code of Practice
3. Non-members (e.g. collaborators, professional contacts, service providers, etc.) under specific circumstances having to do with their involvement in BUIRA activities.

2. If possible, individuals should attempt to resolve claims directly with other members before filing ethical claims.

Filing of Formal Claims

1. All formal claims are received by the Chair of the Ethics Committee.

2. Only written claims will be considered. Oral and anonymous claims are not permitted.

3. Claims must be filed within the specified time limits. Individuals eligible to file claims must:
4. Complete and sign an Ethics Claim Form that includes the name of the individual making the claim, name of the member involved in an alleged violation, details of the alleged violation and names and contact information for any other individuals who have knowledge of the facts involving or related to the claim. The form must be signed by the individual making the claim in order for the claim to be examined.
5. Include a brief supporting statement with evidence of how the member violated the referenced ethical standards. The burden of proof is on the person making the claim.
6. Supply any pertinent supporting documents.

4. If a claim has been filed by a BUIRA member against a non-member, the non-member will be asked if they wish to participate in the process. If no, the Ethics Committee, based on the claim received from a member, will investigate the matter and take action commensurate with the degree of involvement of the non-member with BUIRA. If yes, the process will go forward as it would for a member.

Preliminary screening of formal claim by Ethics Officer

1. The Ethics Officer receives and screens the claim to assess preliminarily if:
2. The Claim Form is signed and filled out completely, accurately, and is accompanied by supporting materials.
3. The claim is covered under the Ethical Standards of the Code of Practice and may be a violation of a specific Standard that is referenced on the Claim Form
4. The claim has been filed within the specified time limits.

2. If YES to all of the above, the Ethics Officer notifies the Chair of the Ethics Committee and sends a copy of the Claim Form and supporting documentation.

3. If NO to any of the above, the Ethics Officer contacts the individual to:
4. Inform them that the forms and materials are not in conformance with the requirements and must be resubmitted for consideration
5. Inform them that the claim is not subject to adjudication by the Ethics Committee, or
6. Provide counselling for educational purposes, if the individual so wishes.

Preliminary screening of formal claim by the Chair of the Ethics Committee

1. The Chair of the Ethics Committee receives the screened claim and any supporting documentation from the Ethics Officer.

2. The Chair of the Ethics Committee screens the claim to determine preliminarily if:
3. The claim is a matter of education or a matter of potential violation
4. The claim, if proven, has sufficient grounds to warrant a violation of the Ethical Standards in the Code of Practice
5. The claim is not trivial
6. There is sufficient evidence to proceed

3. The Chair of the Ethics Committee verifies the specific standard that has been violated and any additional subsets of the Ethical Standards if not included on the Ethics Claim Form.

4. After initial screening by the Chair of the Ethics Committee, if the claim exhibits sufficient grounds to warrant a violation, the Chair sends a formal notice of claim to the individual involved in the alleged violation and notifies the Ethics Committee that a claim will be processed

5. If the claim does not show sufficient ground s to warrant a violation, the Chair of the Ethics Committee notifies the individual making the claim that the matter is dismissed. The Chair of the Ethics Committee places the claim and dismissal action on file and asks the Ethics Officer to record this.

Notice of claim, informal resolution, and investigation

1. Every formal claim not dismissed or deferred by the Chair of the Ethics Committee is promptly communicated to the individual involved in the alleged violation. This individual must be referred to as “Respondent” in all documentation.

2. The Chair of the Ethics Committee sends the Respondent a copy of the formal claim via tracked post (signed-for) alongside a copy of this policy and procedures document, the Code of Practice and any evidence/documents submitted in support of the claim.

3. The Respondent has 30 days from the date of receipt of the claim to respond to the Chair of the Ethics Committee. The Respondent is asked to provide a written response addressing the section(s) of the Ethical Standard(s) of the BUIRA Code of Practice they have allegedly violated and may also submit any evidence and documents they wish to be considered by the Ethics Committee in reviewing the claim.

4. If a Respondent fails to respond to the claim within the time allowed or does not respond to the inquiry in a suitable manner, the Chair of the Ethics Committee can forward the matter directly to the Ethics Committee to decide the matter without participation by the Respondent.

5. Once the Chair of the Ethics Committee receives the response, a copy is shared with the individual making the complaint (“The Complainant”). For transparency of the process, the parties involved and the Ethics Committee members will become known to each other. The parties may be asked by the Ethics Committee to provide additional information in writing that also will be shared.

6. The Chair of the Ethics Committee will ask the Complainant and Respondent if they would like to resolve the matter informally before the process of reviewing and decision begins. If not, the case moves forward. If the Complainant and Respondent both agree to discontinue the claim process, the Ethics Committee Chair will accept the withdrawal and consider the case dismissed.

7. If the case moves forward, the Chair of the Ethics Committee convenes the Ethics Committee to start the formal process. If a member of the committee is unavailable, the BUIRA President shall appoint a replacement to participate in the process to its completion.

8. The Ethics Committee receives from the Chair the signed Claim Form and supporting documentation, and the signed response from the Respondent and supporting documentation.

9. Within a timescale of 60 days, the Ethics Committee will dismiss, defer, or deliberate the case; request or allow additional information from either or both parties to be presented; and render a final written decision.

10. If the case is dismissed or deferred, the Complainant and Respondent are notified in writing of the reasons for dismissal or deferral. A claim can be dismissed by the Ethics Committee if the Respondent agrees to the fact that ethical negligence occurred and is willing to immediately take corrective action deemed sufficient by the Ethics Committee

.

Final decision

1. The Ethics Committee renders a final, written decision within 60 days from the start of the review process that is initiated when the Chair of the Ethics Committee forwards the claim, response, and all documents to the full committee.

2. The written decision includes findings of fact and conclusions as to whether a violation occurred as alleged in the claim, along with the ruling and/or sanctions. If no violation was proven, the Ethics Committee report recommends dismissal of the claim. The Chair of the Ethics Committee notifies both the Respondent and Complainant regarding the outcome of the claim and notice of final decision. The Chair then forwards a copy of the report both to the Complainant and Respondent. All final-decision reports are filed with the Chair of the Ethics Committee.

3. If the Ethics Committee dismisses the claim, the dismissal is noted in the final decision.

4. If the Ethics Committee renders a decision of violation of an Ethical Standard, the Ethics Committee may impose corrective action with or without sanctions. Corrective action can include educational requirements or other actions as may be necessary to remedy a violation or protect the interests of BUIRA.

5. Possible sanctions may include, but are not limited to:
6. Private reprimand: For ethics violations not likely to cause harm to another person or to the profession.
7. Public reprimand: For ethics violations that have been distributed or made visible to the public. The ethics violation is not likely to cause harm to another person but may harm the profession. Any public reprimand should take care not to undermine an individual’s dignity and focus on reiterating BUIRA’s position to promoting and upholding the highest standards of ethical conduct.
8. Denial of BUIRA privileges: For violations likely to cause harm to individuals and/or the profession it may be deemed appropriate to, for example, ban an individual from attending a BUIRA event.
9. Termination of membership: For violations likely to cause substantial harm to another person or to the profession or those that are of sufficient gravity to warrant such action.

6. Reinstatement: Persons whose membership has been terminated may apply for reinstatement after three years of notice of the final decision. Reinstatement requires a 2/3 vote of the Ethics Committee.

7. The penalties for failing to fulfil either corrective actions or sanctions in a satisfactory manner may result in automatic suspension of membership until the requirement(s) is met

8. A copy of the Ethics Committee report, with all names or identifying marks removed from the report, may be made available to the members of the BUIRA Executive for the purpose of learning and improvement of processes.

Notices of decisions

The decisions and decisions both of the Chair of the Ethics Committee (in the case of deferrals and dismissals) and of the Ethics Committee (in the case of dismissals and decisions of ethical violations), are subject to notice in the Ethics Committee report.

Notice of Appeal

1. If a Respondent or Complainant wants to contest the decision of the Ethics Committee, an appeal may be initiated within 30 days of the dated decision letter. The individual, known as the “Appellant,” must contact the Ethics Officer to request an appeal. The Ethics Officer screens the request for Appeal and sends an Appeals Form to the Appellant. The Appellant submits a complete and signed Appeals Form, along with a supporting statement to the Ethics Officer. Only written appeals will be considered.

2. Appeals to the Ethics Officer are only permitted on the basis of decisions and/or sanctions. Appeals are not allowed for dismissals or on matters of due process by the Ethics Committee.

3. The filing of an appeal automatically stays the implementation of the final decision by the Ethics Committee until the appeal is resolved.

4. Once the Ethics Officer receives the completed Ethics Appeal Form with supporting documentation, the Ethics Officer has to confer with the BUIRA President to determine if the Ethics Appeal Panel should be formed.

5. If NO, the appeal is dismissed.

6. If YES, the BUIRA President will assemble an independent Ethics Appeal Panel comprised of three BUIRA members with no ties to the prior process or to the Complainant or Respondent. This panel will follow the same process as the Ethics Committee, as outlined above. The Ethics Appeal Panel will use the prior documentation, including the notice of decision, to inform its process. The appealing party can submit additional documentation if necessary. The appeals process must conclude within 60 days, with a written decision and report.

7. The decision by the Ethics Appeal Panel is final, and limited to upholding the decision; upholding the decision but altering sanctions; or reversing the decision.

Filing of decided cases

A completed file containing all forms and supporting documents is forwarded to the Ethics Officer by the Chair of the Ethics Committee or the Chair of the Ethics Appeal Committee for confidential and encrypted storage at the close of a case. Any records will be kept and maintained in accordance with GDPR legislation.

31st October 2019

University of Birmingham Lecturer/Senior Lecturer - Work and Organisations

We have a vacancy for a Lecturer/Senior Lecturer in the Organisation, Work and Employment group in Birmingham Business School, University of Birmingham. Applications in the area of HRM/Employment Relations welcomed. Deadline is 1/12/19

https://www.jobs.ac.uk/job/BWC153/lecturer-senior-lecturer-in-work-and-organisation-teaching-and-research-38029

31st October 2019

CENTRAL LONDON BUIRA SEMINAR

A Just Transition? trade unions and climate change

Dr Béla Galgóczi (European Trade Union Institute) Two faces of a Just Transition: challenges for trade unions in addressing climate change’

Alana Dave (International Transport Federation) Towards a social model of public transport – ITF global strategy and policy

Friday 29 November 2019, 10.30am – 12.30pm, followed by buffet lunch

University of Westminster, 35 Marylebone Road, London NW1 5LS

(opposite Madame Tussauds and nearly opposite Baker Street tube)
Room tbc

For further details and to reserve a place, contact Linda Clarke (clarkel@wmin.ac.uk)

This regular monthly seminar is focused on the urgent question of climate change and how this is and can be addressed by trade unions.

Béla Galgóczi has been working as senior research officer at the European Trade Union Institute (ETUI), Brussels since April 2003. His main research fields over the years have been capital and labour mobility in the EU, third country migration and income convergence. His current research focus is a just transition towards a carbon neutral economy, focussing on fair labour market transitions in carbon intensive sectors and regions. Béla will speak about the two faces of a just transition towards a net-zero carbon economy, drawing lessons from two carbon-intensive sectors, coal-based energy generation and the automobile industry, and regarding just transition not as an abstract concept but a real practice in real workplaces. While decarbonisation itself is a common objective, concrete transitions take place in work environments that are, farther on, determined by the capital-labour relationship with conflicts of interest during the transition. This is where the role of trade unions and social dialogue is key. The cases presented will demonstrate major differences between the two sectors in both the nature and the magnitude of the challenge, as well as in the applied practices and the role of actors.

Béla has a degree in electronical engineering (Budapest Technical University), in sociology (University of Sciences Budapest) with post-graduate studies in political science (University of Amsterdam) and a Ph.D. in economics (Hungarian Academy of Sciences).

Alana Dave is Urban Transport Director at the International Transport Workers Federation (ITF), based in London. Alana leads the International Transport Workers’ Federation (ITF) global programme on public transport, which includes a number of strategic projects on labour impacts and workers issues. She is responsible for the development of a trade union public transport policy to further decent work, social and climate justice and gender equality and represents the ITF in external relationships with political decision makers and public transport employers. Alana will present the ITF’s Our Public Transport programme and how it links current issues in the sector with a long-term vision of a pro-public democratic model of public transport. Alan was the education officer of the ITF from 2002 and has a long history in trade union education. She was previously the director of International Labour Research and Information Group in South Africa and projects officer of the International Federation of Workers’ Education Associations, for which she has been an executive board member since 2012.

This seminar is an opportunity to air and discuss these issues in an open forum and consider their implications for industrial relations. Anyone interested is welcome to attend this event. These meetings can be full though so, if you would like to attend and to help forecast catering provision, please Contact: Professor Linda Clarke,  clarkel@wmin.ac.uk or 020350 66528 and if you would like to attend subsequent London BUIRA seminars including:

31^st January 2020, Digitalisation, employment and industrial relations, with Prof Birgit Mahnkopf (Berlin School of Economics and Law) on The future of work in the era of ´digital capitalism´: Promises of digitalization and its impact on employment, workers and industrial relations, and Dr Kim Moody on The ‘logistics revolution’ of the 21^st century as a material aspect of digital capitalism

Room C281

27^th March 2020, Higher education, marketisation, RF/TEF and employment relations, with Prof Dorothy Bishop (University of Oxford) on REF and TEF: are they useful?" and Dr Olga Kuznetsova (Manchester Metropolitan University’ on Employee relations in marketizing universities

Room: C385

16th October 2019

MLERS: ‘Beyond ideology: comparing confrontational union responses to restructuring in France‘

We’re very excited that the November meeting of the ‘Midlands Labour Employment Relations Society’ (MLERS) will be taking place on Tuesday 12^th November 2019 18:00 – 20:00 (talk starts at 18:30) at the Birmingham & Midlands Institute (5 min walk form New Street Station).

Please register for free here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/november-midlands-labour-employment-relations-society-meeting-tickets-77030102109

‘Beyond ideology: comparing confrontational union responses to restructuring in France‘ 

Ruth Reaney, London School of Economics, Genevieve Coderre-LaPalme, University of Birmingham 

For several decades, workplace restructuring has been a central feature of a shift towards market-driven employment relations in both the public and private sectors in France (Beaujolin-Bellet and Schmidt 2012). Within this challenging environment, local unions have responded to workplace restructuring in various ways. Whilst ‘cooperative’ strategies such as concession bargaining and the negotiation of social plans are common responses to this type of restructuring, some unions have employed more ‘confrontational’ strategies such as political mobilisation to prompt negotiations about alternative plans (Pulignano and Stewart 2013; Marginson and Meardi 2009; Foster and Scott 1998; Jalette and Hebdon 2012; Greer et al 2013). Under what conditions do unions adopt a confrontational approach? While external circumstances (Frege and Kelly 2003; Jalette and Hebdon 2012; Martinez-Lucio and Stuart 2005) and power resources (Levesque and Murray 2005; Murray et al 2010) help shape the opportunities and threats which unions see in their environment, internal ideology and identity are also considered to be key factors in shaping and sustaining union strategy (Bacon and Blyton 2004; Levesque and Murray 2010; Hodder and Edwards 2015; Hyman 2001). 

In examining local unions’ choices to engage confrontational responses to restructuring, this paper compares case studies of ‘critical restructuring incidents’ in two of the country’s most unionised sectors, public healthcare and automobile manufacturing. In doing so, it extends understanding of unions’ tactical choices in responding to restructuring, thereby offering insight into the extent to which internal and external factors shape trade union strategic choice.

Findings from the study indicate that inter- and intra-union variation in strategy across and within cases is explained by the interplay which occurs between ideology and resources. Whereas some unions in the cases had confrontational responses because this forms part of their usual repertoire of action and general union identity, others opted for a confrontational response to ensure their access to resource in the future. Unions which are generally considered in the literature to be “non-militant” engaged in confrontational action in instances where it was deemed the best way to protect their legitimacy and power within the organisation and in the eyes of employees. Patterns within the case findings therefore suggest that unions’ responses to restructuring, although ostensibly similar, are motivated by various external and internal factors, demonstrating that union strategic choice is neither determined by external factors nor professed union ideology. Thus, restructuring poses strategic dilemmas for unions, forcing them to navigate the process by balancing union identity with membership and workforce preferences.

Ruth Reaney is an LSE Fellow in the Department of Management with research interests in work and employment. Her current research concerns trade union response to decreasing institutional security, with specific focus on the French labour movement.

Genevieve Coderre-LaPalme is a Lecturer in Employment Relations at Birmingham Business School. Her research so far has focused on comparative industrial relations, in particular trade union strategies towards restructuring. She is also developing research around employment, stratification and disability. 

Details on how to join MLERS and future meetings can be found on our website

16th October 2019

Time's Willy Brown obituary

Professor William Brown obituary

Academic whose work on industrial relations led to the minimum wage and who took Arthur Scargill, the miners’ leader, to task

The drive for a national minimum wage in Britain owed much to Willy Brown’s childhood ability to talk his way out of trouble. Brown, who according to his brother Henry was “a social chameleon”, came from an academic family and in time turned his negotiating skills into an economics professorship that focused on how wages should be set.

The minimum wage first hit the statute book in 1604 when James I passed an Act Fixing a Minimum Wage for textile workers. It was scrapped in the 19th century, but Tony Blair seized on the idea when he became prime minister in 1997. He created the Low Pay Commission (LPC), of which Brown was a founder member.

In the 1960s Brown had worked for the Wilson government’s Prices and Incomes Board, an early attempt to regulate the economy. After being appointed to the University of Warwick he put a strong emphasis on case-study research, but found that policymakers were not much impressed with case studies because they thought there was only limited scope to generalise from them into political solutions. So he started the Workplace Employment Relations Study, a regular exercise that he eventually persuaded the government to fund and which continued until only a few years ago.

Brown used his survey techniques to research the effects of raising the minimum wage on employment, prices, inflation, exports and imports. “It was Willy who laid down the modus operandi of the LPC,” Sir George Bain, its first chairman, said, “treating the national minimum wage as an empirical rather than theoretical question.”

The balding and bespectacled Brown rejected theoretical economics in favour of a more practical approach. It may also have better suited his sociable temperament, which inclined him to linger over a pint or three in the pub after work. New acquaintances were often taken off guard when his soft tone of voice gave way to a sudden, loud laugh that lit up his crinkly eyes.

Yet he did not suffer fools. It was at one of the university’s regular management-union seminars in 1984, when Arthur Scargill, the leader of the National Union of Mineworkers, was in the throes of the miners’ strike, that Brown bared his intellectual teeth.

Bain, then the chairman of Warwick Business School, said: “I remember Willy cross-examining Scargill in a forensic way, exposing how shallow his tactics were. He thought he was just a fraud and a sham, leading the miners to disaster.” Brown, a Labour Party member since the 1950s, would have been naturally sympathetic to a well-argued union case. “He got along well with most people, including union leaders,” Bain said. “But he didn’t bother to get along with shits.”

William Arthur Brown was born in Oxford in 1945 to Joan (née Taylor) and Arthur Brown (obituary, April 9, 2003), an economist and fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, who soon after his son’s birth was appointed pro-vice chancellor at the University of Leeds.

The family had a large house in an acre of garden, much of it woodland, on the edge of the Meanwood valley north of Leeds. William (known as Willy) wrote: “The garden gave us considerable freedom from parental supervision. We were free to climb trees and dig dens — and later learn more constructive skills such as use of axes, bow saws and scythes. As they grew older, our parents beat a careful strategic retreat with the garden, allowing it to become ever more jungle-like.”

There was no television in the house, but the sound of The Goon Show and the American humourist Tom Lehrer floating out of the radio was acceptable. The family had an extensive family library, with Chambers’s Encyclopaedia to answer impossible questions from small boys. Holidays started on the Settle-to-Carlisle railway line, followed by two weeks in a hotel near Loweswater in the northwest Lake District near Crummock Water. However, Willy was pitchforked into adult reality aged 14 when his eldest brother, John, died in a climbing accident in the Swiss Alps.

“Willy was the brightest of us boys,” Henry said. “He could certainly think on his feet, and he had a real sense of mischief.” A scholarship boy, he breezed through Leeds Grammar School on his way to Wadham College, Oxford. There he read PPE and fell under the influence of Hugh Clegg, who taught Brown about real ale and took him to the National Board for Prices and Incomes. In 1968 Brown moved to the University of Warwick and then, in 1985, to Wolfson College, Cambridge, where he was the Montague Burton professor of industrial relations for 27 years. He was appointed to the Advisory, Conciliation and Arbitration Service (Acas) in 1998.

Yet even the knottiest problems Brown had to disentangle at Acas paled into insignificance compared with the potential pitfalls he faced at home: Brown had two pairs of stepdaughters with the same names.

He first married Kim, who had daughters Rachel and Sarah from her marriage to his friend Nick Hewitt at the University of Warwick. After his ten-year marriage to Kim ended in 2003 (it was not formally dissolved until ten years later) he partnered with Jackie Scott and they were married in 2017. She was a colleague at Cambridge, where she was head of the Faculty of Social and Political Sciences and is now retired. She had two daughters, also called Rachel and Sarah. “It was a bit tricky, but he always said he wanted four daughters,” Jackie said.

Rachel Hewitt is a writer who lectures in creative writing at the University of Newcastle. Her sister Sarah was until recently a housing officer in Lewes, East Sussex. Jackie’s daughter Sarah Goodwin was a financial officer for the National Trust. Rachel Scott has worked in non- government organisations helping refugees and asylum seekers in Canada and the UK.

From 2000 Brown was master of Darwin College, Cambridge, for 12 years, but he maintained his links with Yorkshire. Henry said: “Willy and I, and many family and friends, shared a strong attachment to a remote family cottage in Middlesmoor on a steep green hillside, anchored by a stocky church and a tall stand of sycamores, in the Yorkshire Dales.” The brothers laboured to renovate the cottage in the 1970s, turning it into a spiritual home and base for energetic moorland walks, in Willy’s case punctuated by reciting huge chunks of Wordsworth and Shakespeare from memory, with a varied stock of ribald verses and limericks that often ignited that explosive laugh.

In retirement Brown and Jackie moved to Hinxton in Cambridgeshire, where he would be entranced by the Red Arrows circling the Hinxton church spire before flying over the Duxford air show, with Lancasters, Spitfires and other aircraft that had been part of his childhood. He entered local politics, using his arbitration skills to take the rough edges off commercial property development plans.

While busy with a large garden, Brown still had time for writing. As well as dozens of academic papers, he wrote several significant books on the modern workplace and the changing face of industrial relations. To those he added, two years ago, The Emerging Industrial Relations of China.

“I can see a parallel in the intellectual stance of our father,” Henry said. “Sceptical of theories and models, and happy to struggle with awkward data to make sense of the world. They were both determined that policy based on that understanding can make the world a better place.”

William Brown, CBE, professor of industrial relations, was born on April 22, 1945. He died of acute aortic dissection on August 1, 2019, aged 74

16th October 2019

Abstract Deadline Extended: Disrupting technology: contextualising continuity and change in technology, work and employment

• The state, regulation and new technology
• Historical research on the introduction of new technologies of work
• Management, resistance, organization, and technology
• Occupations, skills, professions, and technology
• Inequalities (race, gender, (dis)ability) and technology
• Methods for studying work and technology – towards a research agenda

16th October 2019

'Handbook of the Politics of Labour, Work and Employment' (ed. Gregor Gall) now published by Edward Elgar

16th October 2019

Book Series “Trade Unionism: Changing Contexts And Shifting Paradigms”

Book Series “Trade Unionism: Changing Contexts And Shifting Paradigms”  Series Editors:  Andy Hodder and Miguel Martinez Lucio

Proposals are invited for books and research monographs in the area of trade unionism. The series focuses on trade unions in terms of a range of relevant changes and developments internally and in relation to the social, economic and political environment. The series is an attempt to provide a space, not just for established academics, but for emerging commentators and researchers.

The aim of the series is to present a series of interventions that are thorough and well-grounded in terms of their analysis but that are also innovative and provocative in terms of their impact on debates and reflections on worker organisation and representation. We aim is to provide a more innovative space and variety of voices engaging with regards to the debate on and within trade unionism. To this extent, we also welcome books that involve discussants, roundtables and conference presentations and not just standard monographs and edited collections, although these latter forms will constitute the core of the series. All texts in the series will publish in paperback after 18 months of hardback sale.

 Further information: https://books.emeraldinsight.com/page/series-detail/trade-unionism-changing-contexts-and-shifting-paradigms/

16th October 2019

Moving forward in 2020, Unions 21 and bridging the gap with academics

‘Moving forward in 2020, Unions 21 wants to be more effective at bridging the gap between the academic and union community, enabling the sharing of best practices, learning and projects.

16th October 2019

New and emerging forms of worker collectivism: Resisting the rise of employers’ precarious work in the ‘gig economy’ Saturday, 26 October 11:00 – 2:00pm Djam Lecture Theatre, SOAS, London

8th October 2019

Essex Business School Lecturer in HRM (specialising in employee relations and employment law).

This is an exciting opportunity to join the Organisation Studies and Human Resource Management Group at Essex Business School. If successful, you will be part of a team of over 15 research active colleagues with a global reputation for their work in critical organisation studies, HRM, and equality and diversity.

We are keen to appoint a talented scholar with experience in the field of Human Resource Management and, ideally, with the ability to contribute to the teaching of Employment Law. We would, therefore, especially welcome applications from those with expertise in:

* UK and international employment law
* Employee relations

The offer is competitive, and includes a generous relocation allowance, the possibility of paid research leave, and research funds.

https://vacancies.essex.ac.uk/tlive_webrecruitment/wrd/run/ETREC107GF.open?VACANCY_ID=909752L0jj&WVID=9918109NEm&LANG=USA

8th October 2019

Durham looking to hire a Full Professor and an Assistant Professor in HRM (including industrial relations).

Durham University Business School is looking to hire a Full Professor and an Assistant Professor in HRM (including industrial relations).

For further information regarding the job as Professor in HRM please see the attachment or the following link:

https://www.dur.ac.uk/jobs/recruitment/vacancies/mgmt19-02/

For further information regarding the job as Assistant Professor in HRM please see the attachment or the following link:

https://www.dur.ac.uk/jobs/recruitment/vacancies/dubs18-2/

I would be very grateful if you could draw this to the attention of potential applicants. If you would like further information, please let me know.

Best wishes

Jo McBride

3rd October 2019

BUIRA History of Industrial Relations Study Group

BUIRA History of Industrial Relations Study Group

 Labour Unrest pre-First World War: Germany and the UK Compared

Tuesday 12 November 2019

3.30pm for 4.00-6.00m (Tea/ coffee from 3.30)

Room L195, University of Westminster Business School, 35 Marylebone Road, London NW1 5LS (opposite Madame Tussauds and nearly opposite Baker Street tube)

For further details or to reserve a place, please email Michael Gold (m.gold@rhul.ac.uk) or Linda Clarke (clarkel@wmin.ac.uk).

Programme:

3.30-3.50pm: Tea/ coffee/ refreshments

3.50-4.00: Welcome: Michael Gold and Linda Clarke (Chairs)

4.00-4.30: Ralph Darlington

Pre-First World War Labour Unrest and Women’s Suffrage Revolt: Never the Twain Shall Meet?

During the years immediately preceding the First World War, Britain experienced social unrest on a scale beyond anything since the first half of the 19^th century. Both the women’s suffrage revolt for the vote (embracing suffragettes and suffragists) and the unprecedented labour unrest of 1910-14 (involving strikes in pursuit of higher wages, better working conditions and trade union recognition) utilised dramatic extra-parliamentary ‘direct action’ forms of militant struggle from below that represented a formidable challenge to the social and political order of Edwardian Britain. This presentation re-examines the historical record to deploy both new and previously unutilised evidence to provide a detailed assessment of the interconnections between the women’s and labour movements in this defining period of British history.

4.30-5.00: Joern Janssen

1910 Eight-week Lockout in the German Construction Industry: a Victory of Labour against Private Property

This presentation analyses the greatest industrial confrontation in German history, which ran from 15 April to 20 June 1910 and ended with the virtually complete defeat of the construction employers’ federation on 16 June 1910 through the verdict of a tripartite court of arbitration. It consolidated a new stage in labour-property relations and the role of labour in the development of anonymous capital. This industrial dispute was about a national framework agreement on collective employment relations and bargaining. It transformed employee organisation and divided the employers’ organisation, benefiting, on the one hand, the central sectoral industrial labour unions to the detriment of trade organisations and, on the other, the anonymous corporations to the detriment of personal ownership of industrial enterprise.

5.00-5.30: General discussion

5.30pm: Close (followed by drinks until 6.00pm)

The speakers:

Ralph Darlington is Emeritus Professor of Employment Relations at the University of Salford. He is the author of The Dynamics of Workplace Unionism (Mansell 1994) and Radical Unionism: The Rise and Fall of Revolutionary Syndicalism (Haymarket 2013), co-author of Glorious Summer: Class Struggle in Britain 1972 (Bookmarks 2001), and is currently researching for a book to be published by Pluto Press on The Labour Unrest 1910-1914.

Joern Janssen, born in Düsseldorf in Germany, studied architecture in the 1950s and worked as an architect from 1960 to 1970. He was awarded his PhD in political sciences (rer. pol.) in 1973 and became a Professor in construction economics at the Fachhochschule Dortmund from 1972 to 1997. He was a Visiting Professor at the University of Westminster 1997-2001, and since 1997 has been researching the history of labour-property relations.

3rd October 2019

MANCHESTER INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS SOCIETY PROGRAMME OF MEETINGS 2019-20

Thursday October 17 2019 6pm

Arthur Priest Memorial Lecture/ Joint Meeting with the CIPD

Reducing the Disability Employment Gap in Britain

Professor Kim Hoque

Professor of HRM, University of Warwick

Thursday 14 November 2019, 6pm

Independent Trade Unions: Organising Precarious Workers and Winning

Henry Chango Lopez

President, Independent Workers Union of Great Britain

Discussant: Dr Gabriella Alberti, University of Leeds

Thursday 5 December 2019, 6pm

Work, Technology and What Counts: Surveillance and Monitoring and Worker Responses

Dr Phoebe Moore

Associate Professor, Political Economy & Technology, University of Leicester School of Business and Guest Research Fellow, WZB Weizenbaum Institute for the Networked Society

Thursday 13 February 2020, 6pm

Joint meeting with the Industrial Law Society

Individual Labour and Equality Rights at Work Through the Lens of Bullying and Harassment

Professor Lizzie Barmes

Professor of Labour Law, Queen Mary University

Thursday 19 March 2020, 6pm

Employment Relations in the Informal Economy?

The Spatial Dynamics That Shape the Presence of Hand Car Washes

Ian Clark (Professor of HRM), James Hunter (Principal Lecturer in Public Policy), Richard Pickford (Knowledge Exchange and

Impact Officer), and Huw Fearnall-Williams (Lecturer in HRM and OB) Nottingham Trent University

Thursday 14 May 2020, 6pm

Shirley Lerner Memorial Lecture

Union Organising and Power:

Is This The Missing Link in Union Revitalisation?

Professor Jane Holgate

Professor of Work and Employment Relations, University of Leeds

All meetings take place at the Ground Floor, Manchester Metropolitan University Business School, All Saints Campus, Oxford Road, Manchester M15 6BH (near Oxford Road railway station)

26th September 2019

Theories ion HRM and Employment Relations

The following book on Theories ion HRM and Employment Relations may be of interest.

1) https://www.e-elgar.com/shop/elgar-introduction-to-theories-of-human-resources-and-employment-relations

26th September 2019

Equal Pay @50: Making equal and fair pay a reality

 May 2020 will mark 50 years of the UK’s Equal Pay Act. Forty-five years ago the European Community enacted the Equal Pay Directive which enshrined the principle of equal value and 100 years ago the International Labour Organization (ILO) first stated the principle of equal remuneration for women and men. Yet the gender pay gap has been resilient in the UK and the gap between those who run organisations and the average pay of their workers has got increasingly wider.

While we now understand a range of explanations for unfair pay, including gender and ethnic segregation; human capital; workplace practices and processes; the limitations of the law and of course discrimination, many of these explanations remain as relevant today as they were 50 years ago. It is still the case that these reasons are as relevant today as 50 years ago and that they continue to fundamentally challenge genuine and sustained reform.

This event will engage with these and other issues relevant to making equal and fair pay a reality (see programme below). Speakers and contributors from academia, law, business, unions and equality organisations will provide insight into the context of unequal pay, strategies that have been successful and strategies that have failed, and the barriers navigated to progress equal pay. It will also provide the opportunity to share ideas on how change might take place in multiple arenas in order to affect fair and equal pay and built a strategic way forward. It will also be an opportunity to share and transfer ideas across sectors and contexts.

Equal Pay @50: Making equal and fair pay a reality

DLA Piper UK LLP | Princes Exchange | Princes Square | Leeds LS1 4BY | United Kingdom

Monday, 9 December 2019 from 10:00 to 16:00 (GMT)

Register here if you want to attend- https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/equal-pay-50-making-equal-and-fair-pay-a-reality-registration-72058558087

Who should attend?

Academics, diversity specialists, lawyers, policy makers, employers, trade unions, consultants, shareholders, third sector groups working on gender and intersectional pay gaps, living wage and students interested in reward in their careers.

The diversity of participant roles will ensure that this is a lively, interactive event committed to moving forward with respect to pay equality and provide an ideal opportunity for delegates to network and work together for change.

Organised by the Centre for Employment Relations Innovation and Change at the University of Leeds Business School and in partnership with The Equality Trust and sponsored by DLA Piper, Global Law firm.

Programme

10:00 Registration

10:30 Session 1: Welcome and opening session: Equal Pay @50: Making equal and fair pay a reality

Chair: Jane Holgate, Leeds University Business School

• Jane Hannon: Partner, DLA Piper
• Jenny Tomlinson: Professor and Director of the Centre for Employment Relations Innovation and Change, Leeds University Business School
• Bill Adams: Regional Secretary Yorkshire and Humber Trades Union Congress
• Jane Aitchison: Prospective parliamentary candidate Pudsey and Leeds TUC president

11:30 Session 2: Unequal pay in the private sector

Chair: Jana Javornik: Leeds University Business School

• Bob Padron: CEO Penrose Care Ltd
• John Page: Fair Pay Campaigner, Equality Trust
• Karen Reay: Regional Secretary Unite the Union

12:30 Session 3: Gender inequality and the law

Chair: Iyiola Solanke: University of Leeds, School of Law

• Karon Monagahan: QC Matrix Chambers

13:00 Lunch

13:45 Session 4: Unequal pay in the public sector
Chair: TBC

• James Lewis: Deputy Leader of Leeds City Council
• Victoria Jones: National Officer & Women’s Lead, First Division Association
• Gabriella Alberti: Leeds University and Colleges Union

14:45 All panel speakers

Chair: Jane Holgate: Leeds University Business School

15:30 Taking forward the challenge of equal pay

Chair: John Page: Equality Trust

 16:00 Close

26th September 2019

Unions and Social Movements: Institutional Rivalry or Alliance and Cooperation? - Inaugural MLERS Meeting

Heather Connolly, University of Leicester

Unions and Social Movements: Institutional Rivalry or Alliance and Cooperation?

This paper explores the relationship between labour and non-labour movements and whether the relationship is likely to be characterised by institutional rivalry or alliance and cooperation. To what extent are non-labour movements, including community-based, campaigning/single-issue groups and advocacy organisations replacing organised labour as the main dynamic force advancing workers’ interests? There are overlapping interests and methods between labour and non-labour movements but there is also the potential for and evidence of tension and rivalry. Existing research shows that much of the tension and rivalry is a result of institutional barriers rather than fundamental differences in interests and methods.

The paper draws on my research and the work of others to explore the argument that the primary (and potentially most sustainable) way in which labour and non-labour movements have come together is through ‘absorption’, where the labour movement has provided an institutional field upon which other movements can organise and campaign. The paper considers the significance of the ‘gilets jaunes’ in France – a non-labour based movement which emerged in November 2018 initially as a protest against rising fuel prices and which has enjoyed strong support from the wider population. There has been a shift in the movement’s approach from an explicit rejection of any connection with the trade union movement to the adoption of a more conciliatory approach on both sides. This rapprochement has the potential to develop synergies between the organisational capacity of the ‘old’ (the trade unions) and the imaginative spontaneity of the ‘new’ (the ‘gilets jaunes’). Drawing on the strengths of each is an important means to build effective resistance. The emergence of non-labour movements like the ‘gilet jaunes’ has important implications for trade unions reflecting on their role and their strategies for renewal.

Heather Connolly is Associate Professor of Employment Relations at the University of Leicester. Her research in France, the Netherlands, Spain and the UK, explores how trade union activists respond to contemporary challenges, particularly the innovative role that unions might play in the social inclusion of migrant workers. Her publications include The Politics of Social Inclusion and Labor Representation: Immigrants and Trade Unions in the European Context, published in May 2019 by Cornell University Press.

Date And Time

Location

26th September 2019

Willy Brown's Obituary by George Bain

Read Willy Brown's Obituary in the Guardian by George Bain 

18th September 2019

BUIRA History of Industrial Relations Study Group

BUIRA History of Industrial Relations Study Group

Labour Unrest pre-First World War: Germany and the UK Compared

Tuesday 12 November 2019

3.30pm for 4.00-6.00m (Tea/ coffee from 3.30)

Room tbc, University of Westminster Business School, 35 Marylebone Road, London NW1 5LS (opposite Madame Tussauds and nearly opposite Baker Street tube)

For further details or to reserve a place, please email Michael Gold (m.gold@rhul.ac.uk) or Linda Clarke (clarkel@wmin.ac.uk). 

Programme:

3.30-3.50pm: Tea/ coffee/ refreshments

3.50-4.00: Welcome: Michael Gold and Linda Clarke (Chairs)

4.00-4.30: Ralph Darlington

Pre-First World War Labour Unrest and Women’s Suffrage Revolt: Never the Twain Shall Meet?

During the years immediately preceding the First World War, Britain experienced social unrest on a scale beyond anything since the first half of the 19^th century. Both the women’s suffrage revolt for the vote (embracing suffragettes and suffragists) and the unprecedented labour unrest of 1910-14 (involving strikes in pursuit of higher wages, better working conditions and trade union recognition) utilised dramatic extra-parliamentary ‘direct action’ forms of militant struggle from below that represented a formidable challenge to the social and political order of Edwardian Britain. This presentation re-examines the historical record to deploy both new and previously unutilised evidence to provide a detailed assessment of the interconnections between the women’s and labour movements in this defining period of British history.

4.30-5.00: Joern Janssen

1910 Eight-week Lockout in the German Construction Industry: a Victory of Labour against Private Property

This presentation analyses the greatest industrial confrontation in German history, which ran from 15 April to 20 June 1910 and ended with the virtually complete defeat of the construction employers’ federation on 16 June 1910 through the verdict of a tripartite court of arbitration. It consolidated a new stage in labour-property relations and the role of labour in the development of anonymous capital. This industrial dispute was about a national framework agreement on collective employment relations and bargaining. It transformed employee organisation and divided the employers’ organisation, benefiting, on the one hand, the central sectoral industrial labour unions to the detriment of trade organisations and, on the other, the anonymous corporations to the detriment of personal ownership of industrial enterprise.

5.00-5.30: General discussion

5.30pm: Close (followed by drinks until 6.00pm)
 

The speakers:

Ralph Darlington is Emeritus Professor of Employment Relations at the University of Salford. He is the author of The Dynamics of Workplace Unionism (Mansell 1994) and Radical Unionism: The Rise and Fall of Revolutionary Syndicalism (Haymarket 2013), co-author of Glorious Summer: Class Struggle in Britain 1972 (Bookmarks 2001), and is currently researching for a book to be published by Pluto Press on The Labour Unrest 1910-1914.

Joern Janssen, born in Düsseldorf in Germany, studied architecture in the 1950s and worked as an architect from 1960 to 1970. He was awarded his PhD in political sciences (rer. pol.) in 1973 and became a Professor in construction economics at the Fachhochschule Dortmund from 1972 to 1997. He was a Visiting Professor at the University of Westminster 1997-2001, and since 1997 has been researching the history of labour-property relations.

16th September 2019

CfP JIR: ‘Old Frames and New Lenses: Frames of Reference and the Field of Industrial Relations’

Journal of Industrial Relations (JIR)

CALL FOR PAPERS

‘Old Frames and New Lenses:

Frames of Reference and the Field of Industrial Relations’

Special Issue: Journal of Industrial Relations, Vol.63(2), April 2021

Special Issue Guest-Editors:

Professor Michael Barry, Griffith University, Australia

Professor Adrian Wilkinson, Griffith University, Australia

• The objective and aim of the special issue

The ‘frames of reference’ has been a guiding and enduring concept since the celebrated work of Fox (1966) (see Heery, 2016). Countless courses that introduce students to industrial/employment relations feature a discussion of the distinctions between the traditional unitarist and pluralist frames as outlined by Fox, and the Marxist/critical frame as articulated for an industrial relations audience by authors such as Hyman (1975). Through dissemination, the frames of reference has been impactful on generations of students who have gone on to become academics and practitioners. Though much used as an instructional tool, and given its wide acceptance appearing as it does in most textbooks on the subject of industrial relations (IR), it is perhaps surprising that there has been limited scholarly research seeking to apply the frames (For an exception see Ramsay, 1974).

Despite the apparent influence of the concept of frames there are issues around the application. Industrial relations academics have been prone to assert that managers’ views of the employment relationship are guided by the unitarist frame, but it is not entirely clear what this means. As Fox noted, unitarism can vary from a soft form of paternalism at one end to an absolute assertion of a right to unilaterally manage the employment relationship at the other end. Unitarism in its soft form may be manifest through welfare provisions, such as high pay and fringe benefits, or though human resource management policies that provide satisfying work and career development (Purcell and Ahlstrand, 1994; Provis, 1996). The soft variant of unitarism simply asserts that conflict can be avoided and that where effective HR policies and procedures apply, unions have no role to play. In this sense unions are not so much excluded as they are rendered unnecessary. Critical here is the role of management to avoid the conditions that would give rise to conflict, such as by providing clear and effective communication.

As similar critique of the traditional frames has been made by Purcell (1987). Purcell argued that the unitarist and pluralist frames, on their own, did not adequately explain variation in the way employers treated workers, which he labelled management styles. Purcell preferred the terms individualism and collectivism, where individualism denoted the extent to which management sought to develop individual workers (and this could range from low to high, with labour control at the low end and extensive employee development at the high end). Similarly, collectivism, scaled, related to the extent to which management supported workers having a collective voice and influence in decision making.

Cullinane and Dundon (2014) argue that while unitarism has been often cited as the guiding ideology of management, there is little evidence on which to base this assertion. They note that ‘Few studies have had empirical access to union-resistant employers, with analysis of unitarism, as a consequence, based on conjecture and inference of a presumed intent.’ Therefore, IR has suffered from an ‘excess of deduction’ and a ‘paucity’ of investigation into the actual views and intentions of management.

As might be expected there has been more research into the pluralist frame of reference given its long standing, mainstream position. Contemporary research on the pluralist frame has focused principally on examining how it has adapted (or indeed failed to do so) to the significant changes affecting work; namely the breakdown of the traditional breadwinner model of male, full time employment occurring in large manufacturing workplaces governed as they were by a prevailing structure of unionised collective bargaining. Ackers (2014) argues that pluralism has failed to move beyond its core assumption of the primacy of unions and collective bargaining, that reflected the system of the 1970s much more than contemporary employment relations, whereas at least through the efforts of authors such as Kelly (1988), Marxist analysis has engaged in some critical self-reflection and revision to reflect modern workplace realities.

The Ackers’ (2002) critique of pluralism centres on how it has failed to account for relations that occur outside the auspices of unionised collective bargaining. His account argues for a need for a new (neo) pluralism that captures the important interactions between work, family and community which have produced a growing disparity in opportunity and outcome. Ackers’ call is for pluralism to re-find its moral and ethical compass, which for him became lost in the preoccupation with rule-making processes and outcomes.

Heery (2002; 2016) has also examined how those in the pluralist academic tradition have responded to changes that cut deep into pluralisms’ core assumptions. Unlike Ackers, Heery’s (2016) overall focus remains more squarely on evolving market and workplace relations, and how pluralism has come under attack from an ascendant unitarism and neo-liberalism. More specifically, Heery (2002), examine the frames of reference through academic research on worker participation and employee voice. Heery notes that worker participation is a heavily contested area of academic analysis, and that the frames of reference offers a way to understand the divergent scholarly views, which offer both analysis and prescription of different forms of participation. In HR (and OB research) there is a strong unitarist prescription for direct participation, with employee participation seen as a means to assist business performance. Other writers have noted this trend as well, with Godard (2014) arguing that this research agenda reflects the influence of psychology on current employment relations scholarship.

John Budd has added to the work of Fox by introducing the ‘egoist’ frame of reference. The egoist frame is itself aligned to neo-liberalism and is used as a term to summarise a world view in which markets are perfectly competitive and are governed purely by supply and demand transactions. Actors are assumed to be self-interested and rational. In such markets, exit is costless and voice unnecessary because labour is a treated as a commodity. Budd and Bhava (2008) argue the need for the egoist frame as an addition to the other frames, and in particular because the unitarist frame does not properly capture the deregulatory and commodifying features of neo-liberal employment relations.

• • The scope, themes and topics to be addressed by the special issue

A key aim of this proposed special issue is to explore the relevance of frames in the contemporary world of work. Articles for inclusion in the special issue will include research that makes a significant contribution to the literature. Such research includes re-conceptualisation of frames, testing frames, and integrating theories with frames to open new avenues for research. While we invite prospective authors to focus on the questions they consider most relevant to our theme, the following are offered as illustrative questions that are consistent with the spirit of this special issue.

• o Do Frames need revisiting, revising or discarding, and why?
• o Do employees and managers see the contemporary world of work through the same lens or in vastly different ways?
• o How do we test frames in practice, and what role might differences in context (industry, sector, country) play?
• o How do changes in work practices affect the application of frames?
• o In what ways can the frames of reference inform debates around gender, race and ethnicity in employment relations?

Papers should add value both to theory-building and to practice. We welcome empirical and conceptual papers that increase our understanding of frames while developing theory.

The topics listed above are examples of possible research questions and should not be considered an exhaustive list. However, contributions to the special issue must be consistent with the theme outlined in this call for papers.

• • Special issue process:

Abstracts of between 500-1,000 words should be submitted to the Guest Editors (see contact details below) by 1 October 2019. The abstracts should clearly indicate which theme the paper fits within and outline the aims, method and significance of the proposed paper to be submitted for consideration. The organisers aim to advise the authors if their abstract has been accepted by 10 October 2019. Those who are successful will be expected to submit their full paper online to the JIR for peer review by 3 February 2020.

All submitted abstracts will be examined by the Guest Editors for suitability for the special issue. All submitted papers must be based on original material and not under consideration by any other journal or outlet. All manuscripts are reviewed initially by the Guest Editors and only those papers that fit within the aims and scope of the special issue and meet the academic and editorial standards of the journal, are sent out for external review. All papers will undergo a full double-blind review process and will be evaluated by the Guest Editors of the special issue and at least two independent reviewers.

• • Special issue timeline:

• o 1 October 2019 – Submission of abstracts to the guest editors
• o 10 October 2019 – Confirmation/acceptance of abstract and invitation to submit full paper
• o 3 Feb 2020 – Full original papers to be submitted online to the JIR for peer review
• o 28 October 2020 – Accepted papers to be finalised/submitted online to the JIR
• ➢ Publication of the special issue, JIR Vol. 63(2), April 2021

• • Contact details:

• o Organisers and Special Issue Guest-Editors:
• − Professor Michael Barry

Griffith University, Australia

Email: m.barry@griffith.edu.au

− Professor Adrian Wilkinson

Griffith University, Australia

Email: adrian.wilkinson@griffith.edu.au

• o Journal of Industrial Relations
• − JIR Editorial Office

Email: business.jir@sydney.edu.au 5

16th September 2019

New and emerging forms of worker collectivism: Resisting the rise of employers’ precarious work in the ‘gig economy’ Saturday, 26 October 11:00 – 2:00pm Djam Lecture Theatre, SOAS, London

16th September 2019

Unions and Social Movements: Institutional Rivalry or Alliance and Cooperation?

Midlands Labour and Employment Relations Society (MLERS) Meeting 

6:30-8pm, 8th October 2019 the Birmingham & Midlands Institute

Heather Connolly, University of Leicester

Unions and Social Movements: Institutional Rivalry or Alliance and Cooperation?

This paper explores the relationship between labour and non-labour movements and whether the relationship is likely to be characterised by institutional rivalry or alliance and cooperation. To what extent are non-labour movements, including community-based, campaigning/single-issue groups and advocacy organisations replacing organised labour as the main dynamic force advancing workers’ interests? There are overlapping interests and methods between labour and non-labour movements but there is also the potential for and evidence of tension and rivalry. Existing research shows that much of the tension and rivalry is a result of institutional barriers rather than fundamental differences in interests and methods.

The paper draws on my research and the work of others to explore the argument that the primary (and potentially most sustainable) way in which labour and non-labour movements have come together is through ‘absorption’, where the labour movement has provided an institutional field upon which other movements can organise and campaign. The paper considers the significance of the ‘gilets jaunes’ in France – a non-labour based movement which emerged in November 2018 initially as a protest against rising fuel prices and which has enjoyed strong support from the wider population. There has been a shift in the movement’s approach from an explicit rejection of any connection with the trade union movement to the adoption of a more conciliatory approach on both sides. This rapprochement has the potential to develop synergies between the organisational capacity of the ‘old’ (the trade unions) and the imaginative spontaneity of the ‘new’ (the ‘gilets jaunes’). Drawing on the strengths of each is an important means to build effective resistance. The emergence of non-labour movements like the ‘gilet jaunes’ has important implications for trade unions reflecting on their role and their strategies for renewal.

Heather Connolly is Associate Professor of Employment Relations at the University of Leicester. Her research in France, the Netherlands, Spain and the UK, explores how trade union activists respond to contemporary challenges, particularly the innovative role that unions might play in the social inclusion of migrant workers. Her publications include The Politics of Social Inclusion and Labor Representation: Immigrants and Trade Unions in the European Context, published in May 2019 by Cornell University Press.

Join MLERS here: https://mlers.org.uk/join-us/

16th September 2019

ILERA Americas Regional Congress submission deadline is Sept 15

The ILERA Americas Regional Congress submission deadline is Sept 15. In addition to the usual call for research presentations (https://www.ryerson.ca/tedrogersschool/ilera2020/call/), there is also a special call for teaching-related contributions (see https://www.ryerson.ca/content/dam/tedrogersschool/ilera2020/documents/ILERA2020_mini-conference-teaching-labour-employment-relations.pdf) 

6th September 2019

The impact of work on (un)healthy aging: How to reduce social inequalities?

SEMINAR

Organisational Psychology Group &

Work and Equalities Institute

Tuesday October 22^nd 2019, 6.00pm-7.30pm,

Main Lecture Theatre (Room G.003)

Professor Johannes Siegrist

University of Düsseldorf, Germany

The impact of work on (un)healthy aging:

How to reduce social inequalities?

Epidemiologic evidence indicates that the quality of work and employment has a direct effect on workers‘ health and their aging process. This holds true for material (physical) and psychosocial (mental, emotional) aspects of work. Moreover, this quality is socially graded, with lower levels among workers in lower socioeconomic positions (SEP). In this presentation, new findings on this social gradient and its effects on health are presented and discussed, with special emphasis on an adverse psychosocial work environment, as defined by the effort-reward imbalance (ERI) model. High ERI is prospectively associated with elevated risks of a variety of stress-related disorders, and these effects are often particularly strong among working people with low SEP. These theory-based findings can instruct measures towards reducing work-related health inequalities. To improve the quality of work and employment these measures need to be implemented at two levels, the organizational level of worksite health promotion in companies and the national/international level of appropriate social and labor policies.

Johannes Siegrist is Senior Professor of Work Stress Research at the Faculty of Medicine, University of Duesseldorf, Germany. Trained as sociologist at the University of Freiburg i.Br. he held Professorships at Marburg University (1973-1992) and Duesseldorf University (1992-2012) and Visiting Professorships at the Johns Hopkins University School of Public Health, USA (1981) and Utrecht University, The Netherlands (1993). His main research area is social determinants of health, with a focus on stressful psychosocial work environments, being the author of the internationally established effort-reward imbalance model. In addition to extensive, long-standing scientific research he has been –and continues to be – involved in policy-oriented collaboration, in particular with WHO and ILO. Among other distinctions he is a member of Academia Europaea (London) and a corresponding member of the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences.

6th September 2019

Inclusive Growth in Cities: Theory, Evidence and Practice Conference

Inclusive Growth in Cities: Theory, Evidence and Practice

The first academic conference on inclusive growth in the UK

University of Manchester 19th / 20th November 2019

Call for Abstracts

We welcome papers on a wide range of topics related to inclusive growth, both conceptual and empirical. The central focus is on the level of the city or city-region, but relevant findings may be drawn from other larger and smaller spatial scales. Themes could include, but are not limited to: 

 Inclusive growth: theories and concepts

 Measurement of inclusive growth, at city, neighbourhood and project level

 Labour market trends and inclusive growth

 Building Inclusive Economies (e.g. community wealth building, municipal companies, building the social economy, procurement, anchors)

 Inclusive innovation

 Politics and governance of inclusive growth, including citizen engagement

 Planning, housing and transport

 Finance, investment and appraisal models for inclusive growth

 Employment support programmes and employer/business engagement

 Education and skills

 Innovative actions at neighbourhood level

 The role of welfare states in inclusive growth

 Inclusive growth, sustainability, health and well-being

 Migration and inclusive growth

If you would like to present at the conference, please submit your abstract of 250-300 words toigau@manchester.ac.uk . Please include your name, title and institutional affiliation and indicate whether you are an early career researcher, and if so whether you would like to apply for bursary support.

Abstracts should be submitted by Monday 9th September 2019 and participants will be notified of acceptance by Friday 20th September at the latest.

Conference registration will be open from mid August. Details will be circulated via mailing lists. If you do not wish to submit an abstract but are interesting in attending, please email

igau@manchester.ac.uk to receive a direct email when registration opens. A modest conference fee (£40-50 for two days, or 1-day equivalent, to cover administration and site visits) will be payable on booking.

6th September 2019

Historical Studies in Industrial Relations 40 (2019) will be published later this month

Historical Studies in Industrial Relations 40 (2019) will be published later this month. Length is over 100,000 words; subscriptions remain low.

All subscriptions are now handled by Liverpool University Press –  

Email: suscriptions@liverpool.ac.uk

Tel: 0151 795 1080 (Monday to Friday, 9 am to 5 pm; UK time).

Contents

Noel Whiteside

Casual Employment and its Consequences: An Historical Appraisal of Recent Labour Market Trends

Ester Stern

Australian Unions during the Formative Years of Federal Arbitration: ‘Cogs in a bureaucratic machine’?

Stephen Mustchin

Right-Wing Pressure Groups and the Anti-Union ‘Movement’ in Britain: Aims of Industry, Neoliberalism and Industrial Relations Reform, 1942–1997

R. H. (Bob) Fryer

Reforming Trades Union Governance: The Reorganization of the National Union of Public Employees

R. H. (Bob) Fryer and Steve Williams

Latecomers to Trade-Union Democracy: The Emergence, Growth and Role of Union Stewards in the National Union of Public Employees

Steven Daniels

The Thatcher and Major Governments and the Union of Democratic Mineworkers, c. 1985–1992

 Huw Beynon

After the Long Boom: Living with Capitalism in the Twenty-First Century

Jim Phillips

Review Essay: The Moral Economy and Industrial Politics in the UK from the 1960s to the 1980s

Steve Jefferys

Review Essay: The Neoliberal Convergence of European Industrial Relations since the 1970s: An Economic Inevitability or the Result of European Political Choices?

Book Reviews

6th September 2019

Midlands Labour & Employment Relations Society (MLERS)

MLERS exists to develop an in-depth understanding of the politics of work among academics, trade unionists, managers, and the general public in the Midlands.

We organise monthly meetings which are addressed by internationally renowned researchers of the world of work.

Our meetings currently take place on the second Tuesday of the month during term time at the Birmingham & Midlands Institute (walking distance from New Street) at 6:30-8pm. 

At the first meeting on the 8th Oct Heather Connolly (University of Leicester) will discuss 'Unions and social movements – can they ever be brothers and sisters in arms?' see https://mlers.org.uk/events/ for more details. 

6th September 2019

Disrupting technology: contextualising continuity and change in technology, work and employment

1. The state, regulation and new technology
2. Historical research on the introduction of new technologies of work
3. Management, resistance, organization, and technology
4. Occupations, skills, professions, and technology
5. Inequalities (race, gender, (dis)ability) and technology
6. Methods for studying work and technology – towards a research agenda

3rd September 2019

Conference schedule (link fixed)

Dear members

The latest schedule is available here.  Please check as there have been some minor adjustments.

We look forward to welcoming you all to Newcastle on Monday.

The Organising Team

27th June 2019

2019 Conference schedule

The 2019 Conference schedule is now available online

https://bit.ly/2WMP5Qu

11th June 2019

Still time to register for 69th BUIRA conference Newcastle

It is now only a month until the conference!  A reminder to register for the BUIRA Conference in Newcastle if you are still intending to attend.

More information about the conference and accommodation options is available on the website. 

It also now possible to register your meal choices for the evening meals:

https://forms.ncl.ac.uk/view.php?id=4963080

We look forward to welcoming you to Newcastle.

7th June 2019

Vacancies on the BUIRA Exec

NOTICE TO ALL MEMBERS

The BUIRA Executive Committee will have 2 vacancies as from July 2019.

As discussed and agreed at the AGM in Leeds 2016, the voting system for vacancies on the Executive Committee will be conducted differently.

We now invite all members to forward their interest in becoming a member of the BUIRA Exec Committee to BUIRA admin to Kay Pryer and Susanne Laidler at admin@buira.org.

All members are welcome to apply regardless of career stage i.e. early, senior etc

However, we would strongly encourage women to apply for these positions as they remain to be under-represented on the Committee.

Of course this does not remove open competition and the selection process is still via the membership at the AGM, not the Stewardship or the Executive Committee.

Please include a short biography of no more than 300 words and your reasons for applying for the vacant position.

7th June 2019

Call for papers: Flexible Work Patterns Study Group Meeting Ilera European Congress 2019

From Study group 10

Call for papers: Flexible Work Patterns Study Group Meeting Ilera European Congress 2019

ILERA European Congress 2019 Heinrich Heine University, Düsseldorf, Germany 5–7 September 2019

The Flexible Work Patterns Study Group will meet Thursday, 5 September 2019, 9:30-11:00am before the official opening of the congress. The group covers all aspects of flexible work issues including part-time work, telework, home working, shift work, flexible hours, compressed working week, zero hours contracts and other temporary and flexible arrangements.The meeting brings together scholars working in this area to network and discuss work in progress, or recently completed, in an informal setting. Papers from doctoral students are very welcome.

Abstracts of papers to be presented at the study group are invited on any aspects of flexible working and may be at the macro, organisational or individual level; theoretically based; or on empirical research that is country, region, sector or organisation specific. 

Abstracts should be about 500 words and include:

Paper title

Name(s) of authors, institutional affiliation and contact details

  Aim

Theoretical/Research framework

Method

Findings

Discussion/Conclusion

Please send the abstract as a word file to c.edwards@kingston.ac.uk; clare.kelliher@cranfield.ac.uk; R.Croucher@mdx.ac.uk; by Monday July 1 2019 at the latest. Authors selected to present at the Study Group will be notified as soon as possible.

Note early bird tickets are available until 31 May 2019.

https://ilera2019.giraweb.de/content/registration

Please get in touch if you need further information.

We look forward to receiving your papers,

Best wishes,

Coordinators

Professor Christine Edwards Kingston University Business School Kingston Hill, Kingston Surrey KT2 7LB United Kingdom E-mail: c.edwards@kingston.ac.uk

5th June 2019

University of Manchester, Work and Equalities Institute (WEI) Research Seminar

University of Manchester

Work and Equalities Institute (WEI)

Research Seminar

Financialization, work and inequalities: the case of Italy

Dr Angelo Salento (Università del Salento, Lecce, Italy)

Date: Wednesday 12^th June 2019

Time: 15:30 - 17:00 Hrs (coffee and tea at 15:15)

Venue: Alliance Manchester Business School, Room G.013 (view campus map here: https://www.manchester.ac.uk/discover/maps/interactive-map/?id=26)

Abstract

The contemporary dynamics of inequality are not only a consequence of the ineffectiveness of the redistribution devices: they are primarily connected to the imbalances in the distribution of income “at its source”. The processes of financialization – i.e. the tendency of business to pursue financial accumulation strategies, or anyway to pursue the maximization of return on capital for investors in the short term – enrich financial and managerial elites, promoting a “wealthification” of income, whilst they trigger a reduction of labour costs, and a decline of wages. The analysis presented, specifically referred to the Italian case, considers both the accumulation strategies of large non-financial firms, and the effects of the “short-termist turn” of economic players in the foundational economy, which additionally operates as a regressive taxation, entailing a growing difficulty for working classes to access basic goods and services.

About the Speaker

Angelo Salento is associate professor (senior lecturer) of Economic and Labour Sociology in the Università del Salento (Lecce, Italy), where he teaches Economic and Labour Sociology, Sociology of Organizations, and Sociological Analysis of Development. His background is in labour law and economic sociology. He has done research on the regulation of economy, financialization, local and rural development, the foundational economy. In 2014 he was a visiting researcher in CRESC, University of Manchester. He is currently visiting the Alliance Manchester Business School.

5th June 2019

Special Offer: Historical Studies in Industrial Relations

Special Offer: Historical Studies in Industrial Relations

HSIR is losing its storage facilities at Keele so we are offering back-issues for sale at the bargain price of £1 per single issue, numbers 1–22 (1996–2006), and £2 per double issue/annual, numbers 23/24–31/32 (1997–2011) and 33–37 (2012–2016), plus postage and packing. This is a one-off sale as afterwards we will have to dispose of most copies. Single issues are approximately 60,000 words in length; double-issues and annuals, 110,000.

HSIR was established to provide an outlet for research on the history of industrial relations. This includes research on contemporary issues, which often lack a historical foundation. A few examples of articles:

William Brown, ‘The High Tide of Consensus: The System of Industrial Relations in Great Britain (1954) Revisited’. 4: 135–49.

Peter Dorey, ‘Weakening the Trade Unions, One Step at a Time: The Thatcher Governments’ Strategy for the Reform of Trade-Union Law, 1979–1984’. 37: 169–200.

John Edmonds, ‘Positioning Labour Closer to the Employers: The Importance of the Labour Party's 1997 Business Manifesto’. 22: 85–107.

Paul Edwards, ‘The Analytical Heritage of Alan Fox’s History and Heritage (1985). 14: 139–58.

Keith Ewing, ‘The State and Industrial Relations: ‘Collective Laissez-Faire’ Revisited’. 5: 1–31.

Nina Fishman, ‘“A Vital Element in British Industrial Relations”: A Reassessment of Order 1305, 1940–1951’. 8: 43–86.

Colin Hay, ‘The Trade Unions and the “Winter of Discontent”’. 36: 181–203.

Bob Hepple, ‘Wedderburn’s The Worker and the Law: An Appreciation’.

34: 215–28.

Sian Moore, ‘Gender and Class Formation: Women’s Mobilization in the Industrialization of the Bradford Worsted Industry, 1780–1845’. 35: 1–31

Jim Phillips, ‘UK Business Power and Opposition to the Bullock Committee’s 1977 Proposals on Worker Directors’. 31/32: 1–30.

John Saville, ‘The Trade Disputes Act of 1906’. 1: 11–45.

Rebecca Zahn, ‘German Codetermination without Nationalization and British Nationalization without Codetermination: Retelling the Story’. 36: 1–27.

Bill Wedderburn, ‘History of British Labour Law’. 17: 127–38.

See the HSIR website for more authors and articles.

To buy back-issues, contact Paul Smith: paulsmithblist@hotmail.co.uk

5th June 2019

BUIRA 2019: Call for Doctoral Papers and Conference Participation

BUIRA 2019: Call for Doctoral Papers and Conference Participation

The British Universities Industrial Relations Association holds 2019 conference at Newcastle University, Monday 1- Wednesday 3 July 27th July, 2019.

The PhD session is planned to hold on last day of the conference, Wednesday 1^st July 2019. The session will have two main features (PhD paper presentations and panel discussions).

Panel Discussion ‘Life after PhD: Hopes and Impediments’

Panels will offer discussions on opportunities and challenges for new PhDs, exploring the highways and cul-de-sacs in academia.

Panels will include senior academics, Mid-Career, and Early Careers. A representative from the University and College Union UCU is expected to be in the panel. Details of panel will be confirmed in weeks to come.

Paper Presentation

Invitation is hereby extended to PhD colleagues who are researching in the field of Industrial/Employment Relations, to submit abstracts for doctoral papers.

Abstracts could be on any work in progress paper (WIP), or from sections of ongoing PhD work- the idea of this is to offer a platform away from main BUIRA conference paper sessions, where critical, but friendly feedback could be offered by doctoral peers and from established academics.

This call for abstracts opens from Tuesday 8th May to Friday 14th June. Please send abstract of 250 words to: buiraphd@outlook.com

Venue: Newcastle University Business School, 5 Barrack Road, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK

Registration: Click Here to Register.

Accommodation:  the official accommodation page. 

22nd May 2019

The BUIRA International & Comparative Employment Relations Study Group will be holding the following seminar in May:

--

22nd May 2019

EFES NEWSLETTER - MAY 2019

22nd May 2019

Central London BUIRA Seminar: Labour law and sustainability

Labour law and sustainability

with Professor Tonia Novitz (University of Cardiff) Labour standards and social sustainability, and Dr Ania Zbyszewska (University of Warwick) Work regulation and environmental sustainability: Moving beyond the discourse of conflicting rights

Friday 31 May 2019, 10.30am – 12.30pm, followed by buffet lunch

University of Westminster, 35 Marylebone Road, London NW1 5LS

(opposite Madame Tussauds and nearly opposite Baker Street tube)
Room C279

For further details and to reserve a place, contact Linda Clarke (clarkel@wmin.ac.uk)

This regular monthly seminar is focused on the ever more urgent question of how labour law can address climate change and sustainability issues and we are fortunate to have two expert speakers.

Tonia Novitz is a Professor of Labour Law at the University of Bristol and will discuss the emergence of recognition of social sustainability under the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). She will outline the partial acknowledgement of certain facets of an International Labour Organisation (ILO) decent work agenda in this context in substantive terms within, for example, SDGs 5 and 8. She will also discuss the potential significance for labour standard setting and enforcement of procedural entitlements related to sustainable decision-making under SDG 16, alongside the challenges of global policy coherence envisaged in SDG 17. Her analysis draws on experience as a participant in the European Union (EU) funded Horizon 2020 project Sustainable Market Actors for Responsible Trade (SMART): see https://www.smart.uio.no/. A list of her publications is available at: http://www.bristol.ac.uk/law/people/tonia-a-novitz/index.html.

Ania Zbyszewska is an Assistant Professor at the University of Warwick School of Law. She will talk about her research on the interface of work and environmental regulation, which focuses on legal contestations and conflicts produced by jurisdictional boundaries and legal dis/articulation, but also probes the possibilities inherent in more ecologically-attuned forms of work regulation and governance. She is currently involved in a European Commission-funded project entitled aGREENment, which investigates the role of European, including UK-based, labour unions in negotiating such forms of governance through the means of collective bargaining. 

This seminar is an opportunity to air and discuss these issues in an open forum and consider their implications for industrial relations. Anyone interested is welcome to attend this event. These meetings can be full though so, if you would like to attend and to help forecast catering provision, please Contact: Professor Linda Clarke,  clarkel@wmin.ac.uk or 020350 66528

22nd May 2019

Work and Equalities Institute Second Annual Lecture

Lindsay Endell, Work and Equalities Institute Manager

Work and Equalities Institute

You can subscribe to our mailing list by emailing us.

Alliance Manchester Business School | The University of Manchester | AMBS 6.037 |

Booth Street West | Manchester M15 6PB | +44 (0) 161 275 0556 | lindsay.endell@manchester.ac.uk

www.alliancembs.manchester.ac.uk

Facebook  Google+   LinkedIn   Twitter   YouTube

22nd May 2019

Work & Equalities Institute Policy Discussion Panel

Lindsay Endell, Work and Equalities Institute Manager

Work and Equalities Institute

You can subscribe to our mailing list by emailing us.

Alliance Manchester Business School | The University of Manchester | AMBS 6.037 |

Booth Street West | Manchester M15 6PB | +44 (0) 161 275 0556 | lindsay.endell@manchester.ac.uk

www.alliancembs.manchester.ac.uk

Facebook  Google+   LinkedIn   Twitter   YouTube

22nd May 2019

Modern Working Practices and the Future of Work

22nd May 2019

Andrew Brady book UK Unions & Labour Party

Dear all, In 2017, I examined the Strathclyde PhD of Andrew Brady, a Unite official. Now he has a book out based on this, which I think will be of great interest to IR academics.

It looks at Union influence on Labour Party policy for the Social Contract (1974-79), NMW (1998), ERA (1999) & Warwick (2004). He interviewed many of the key figures of the TUs & LP.

Unions and Employment in a Market Economy Strategy, Influence and Power in Contemporary Britain 

https://www.routledge.com/Unions-and-Employment-in-a-Market-Economy-Strategy-Influence-and-Power/Brady/p/book/9781138489875

Best Wishes, Peter

Visiting Professor in the History of Industrial Relations, Loughborough University 

http://www.lboro.ac.uk/departments/phir/staff/peter-ackers/

Paperback,Alternatives to State-Socialism in Britain,https://www.palgrave.com/de/book/9783319341613

On Professor Hugh Clegg: https://youtu.be/zwt_D0IX94o

22nd May 2019

You're invited to the Unions 21 Annual Conference at ITF House on Monday May 21st.

You're invited to the Unions 21 Annual Conference at ITF House on Monday May 21st.

This year, we'll be exploring how to reinvigorate unions, particularly how collective voice can overcome issues workers face now and in the future economy. Bringing together trade unions, politicians, academia and partner organisations to discuss the future of work, we'll be looking at how unions, employers and policy-makers can extend worker voice.

We'll also be discussing the initial findings from our forthcoming new report 'WorksForUs', the first report from the Commission on Collective Voice in 21st Century.

REGISTER here - https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/unions-21-annual-conference-the-future-of-collective-voice-tickets-57002282361

Working Programme:

9:30 - 11:00: The Future of Collective Voice

11:15 -12:30: Future of Digital in Trade Unions

12:30 - 1:30: Lunch

13:30 - 14:45: Innovation in Unions - with sessions on health, public and private sectors

15:00 - 16:00: Future of Work: How do unions and policy-makers respond?

2nd May 2019

BUIRA Conference Hosts 2020

BUIRA Conference Hosts 2020

We are advertising for hosts to organise the BUIRA Annual Conference 2020.  This particular year is extremely important for BUIRA’s history as it will be the 70^th Anniversary of BUIRA. 

Any willing parties, please contact us at BUIRA admin  -  Kay Pryer and Susanne Laidler at admin@buira.org

We look forward to your response.

BUIRA Stewardship

2nd May 2019

NOTICE TO ALL MEMBERS

NOTICE TO ALL MEMBERS

The BUIRA Executive Committee will have 2 vacancies as from July 2019.

As discussed and agreed at the AGM in Leeds 2016, the voting system for vacancies on the Executive Committee will be conducted differently.

We now invite all members to forward their interest in becoming a member of the BUIRA Exec Committee to BUIRA admin to Kay Pryer and Susanne Laidler at admin@buira.org.

All members are welcome to apply regardless of career stage i.e. early, senior etc

However, we would strongly encourage women to apply for these positions as they remain to be under-represented on the Committee.

Of course this does not remove open competition and the selection process is still via the membership at the AGM, not the Stewardship or the Executive Committee.

Please include a short biography of no more than 300 words and your reasons for applying for the vacant position.

BUIRA

2nd May 2019

Call for Nominations for Fellows of the Academy of Social Sciences (AcSS)

Call for Nominations for Fellows of the Academy of Social Sciences (AcSS)

BUIRA is a member organization of the Academy of Social Sciences (AcSS), the body that exists in the UK to promote the social sciences.

As part of its membership, BUIRA is able to make nominations for the conferment of Fellowships of the Academy.

The BUIRA Executive would therefore like to invite BUIRA members to nominate individuals who might be put forward for this honour.  Not only would this recognise the contribution of the individuals concerned, it would raise the profile of employment relations in the broader social science arena.

More on AcSS can be found at: https://www.acss.org.uk/

And details of the nomination process are at:

https://www.acss.org.uk/membership/making-nomination-fellow/

You will see from this that the 'paramount requirement' of a successful nomination is 'evidence of eminence and impact of the nominee’s contribution to social science'.  Formally, this requires a statement of justification and a brief CV.

Could any nominations be sent to BUIRA (admin@buira.org) by Friday 24 May.  This will allow the Executive to meet AcSS's next deadline of 7 June.

If you have any queries about the process, please contact the BUIRA Treasurer, Stephen Procter (stephen.procter@newcastle.ac.uk)

2nd May 2019

BUIRA Conference 2019 - Accommodation and Registration Open

Please remember to register for the conference https://www.buira.net/conference/12/register

Information on accommodation can be found here https://ngcb.hotelplanner.com/Event/14df/

Further information on the city is availabled here https://www.newcastlegateshead.com/

2nd May 2019

The BUIRA International & Comparative Employment Relations Study Group

The BUIRA International & Comparative Employment Relations Study Group will be holding the following seminar in May:

Professor Guglielmo Meardi, Warwick Business School

'Brexit, migration and labour market policy: comparative lessons from Canada, Switzerland and Norway'

Time and location: 29th May 2019, 2-4pm in Darwin Building DW0.29/0.30, Keele University

For further information, please contact Carola Weissmeyer at Keele University (c.weissmeyer@keele.ac.uk, 01782 733603)

1st May 2019

University of Manchester's Work & Equalities Institute - Research Seminar: " Psychic Income: Working for Nothing in the Creative Industries "

University of Manchester

Work and Equalities Institute (WEI)

Research Seminar

Psychic Income: Working for Nothing in the Creative Industries

Professor Irena Grugulis (Leeds University Business School)

Date: Wednesday 8^th May 2019

Time: 15:30 - 17:00 Hrs (coffee and tea at 15:15)

Venue: Alliance Manchester Business School, Room 3.009

Abstract

Psychic income, the intrinsic satisfaction that people get from work, is traditionally used as an explanation for low pay and seen only in its negative form, as compensation. There is little understanding of what constitutes psychic reward, nor of how and or whom it benefits. This article challenges that. Psychic rewards are positive attributes in their own right. They are also variable, just as financial rewards are, so people can be exploited psychically as well as financially. Drawing on detailed qualitative research into film and TV production it argues that psychic rewards in the form of creative and interesting work was important and often featured in contractual discussions, but that it was the established professionals who were most capable of negotiating for creativity. Here the idea of individual bargaining power is combined with that of psychic reward to distinguish between bargains at different stages in professionals’ working lives. Novices experienced exploitation, those developing skills found work intensified, and established professionals negotiated for earnings and creativity. All professionals were prepared to accept low (or no) pay in exchange for a ‘good credit’, but most of the positive aspects of psychic reward were reserved for the established professionals.

About the Speaker

Irena Grugulis is Professor of Work and Skills at Leeds University Business School.  Her research focuses on skills, particularly the way people learn in and at work and the ways in which work may either limit or encourage that learning.  Her work has been funded by the ESRC, EPSRC and EU and has been published in Organization Studies, Journal of Management Studies, British Journal of Industrial Relations, Work, Employment and Society and Human Resource Management Journal. She has also published two sole-authored textbooks, A Very Short, Fairly Interesting and Reasonably Cheap Book About Human Resource Management (Sage, 2017) and Skills, Training and Human Resource Development (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).  Irena is an ESRC/AIM Services Fellow, an Associate Fellow of SKOPE and an Academic Fellow of the CIPD. She served on the Academic Advisory Panel of the UKCES and contributed to a number of governmental skills enquiries including the Leitch Review and the National Skills Task Force as well as advising the Singaporean Government.  She has been both Editor and Joint Editor in Chief of Work, Employment and Society and currently chairs the journal’s Editorial Board.

17th April 2019

Debating the Future of Work: Challenges and Future Prospects

Hilton Hotel Sheffield, 28-29 May 2019

This two-day conference is being organised by the Centre for Decent Work (CDW) at the University of Sheffield in collaboration with the International Labour Organisation (ILO). The recent report by the ILO’s Global Commission on the Future of Work Commission, which represents the culmination of the ILO’s centenary initiative on the future of work, describes ways in which the world of work might be improved. The conference will bring together leading academics and ILO officials to discuss issues raised by the report and other matters that are of central importance to the future of work and the future research agenda. The themes to be addressed will include:

• Labour market transitions, skills and lifelong learning;

• New forms of employment and the future of social protection;

• Diversity and inclusion;

• Ageing, caring and wellbeing;

• Work organisation, technology and job quality;

• Governance, labour administration and social dialogue

• Work and the environment;

• The future research agenda.

 The conference will feature invited contributions from researchers based at universities in various countries, including Australia, Canada, Denmark, Ireland, Japan, the USA and UK, providing opportunities for international sharing of knowledge and experience and also network building. Confirmed speakers include Marian Baird (Sydney), Burt Barnow (George Washington), Nelarine Cornelius (Queen Mary), Pauline Dibben (Sheffield), Janet Fast (Alberta), Anne-Marie Greene (Leicester), Damian Grimshaw (ILO), Christopher King (Texas at Austin), Janine Leschke (Copenhagen), Seamus McGuinness (ESRI), Kirsty Newsome (Sheffield), Peter Nolan (Leicester),  Jonathan Payne (De Montfort), Dean Stroud (Cardiff), Jill Rubery (Manchester), David Uzzell (Surrey), Maria-Luz Vega (ILO), Colin Williams (Sheffield), Alex Wood (Oxford), Ryuichi Yamakawa (Tokyo), Susan Yeandle (Sheffield).

Information about how to register can be found at:

http://management.sheffield.ac.uk/events/59751972759/

17th April 2019

EFES NEWSLETTER - APRIL 2019

Having trouble viewing this e-mail? This newsletter is also available in 7 languages (EN, FR, ES, DE, IT, CS, HU) on page
http://www.efesonline.org/EFES NEWS/2019/EFES NEWSLETTER - 4-2019 EN.htm

Subscribe  /  Unsubscribe  /  Membership                                                        EFES NEWSLETTER - APRIL 2019 New Record Year for Employee Share Ownership in Europe JUST RELEASED The new "Annual Economic Survey of Employee Share Ownership in European Countries" is just released More information   in partnership with New Record Year for Employee Share Ownership in Europe New record year for employee share ownership in Europe, with nearly 400 billion Euro held by employees in their company or 3.11%. More and more European companies are organizing employee share plans. In 2018, 87.3% of all large European companies had employee share plans of all kinds, while 52.3% had "broad-based" plans for all employees. Their number increased by 3 to 4% on average each year since 2006, a solid growth. The rise is back for the number of employee shareholders, with 7.5 million people in large European companies; if we add one million employee shareholders in SMEs, the total figure reaches 8.5 million. However, the decline in the democratization rate of employee share ownership has still to be stopped. Following the crisis, some European countries (including the UK) had chosen for stronger incentive policies, promoting employee share ownership and long term savings as an investment for the future. Instead of that, some other countries (including France) had chosen to reduce public spending and to support household consumption, while incentives for long term savings and for employee share ownership were sacrificed. This had a strong impact on the democratization rate of employee share ownership in Europe (the proportion of employee shareholders amongst all employees), leading to a divorce between continental Europe and the UK. A sharp drop below 20% was observed on the continent. On the contrary, the democratization rate had risen to more than 25% in the UK. After the negative phase from 2009 to 2013, policy decisions are positive again in most European countries. This led to a rebound of the democratization rate to 38% in France  following the "Macron Law", illustrating the high elasticity of employee share ownership to fiscal incentives. However negative factors are still prevailing in some countries. Germany gives the picture of the dramatic impact of such policies on the democratization rate of employee share ownership, with less than 13%. On the other hand, the UK and France are the only European countries showing a recent but significant positive dynamics of the majority-employee-owned sector. The number of such companies increased from 36 in the UK in 2014 to 80 in 2018, mainly due to the impact of the new Employee Ownership Trust scheme implemented in 2014. In France, it is mainly due to the multiplication of combined Management and Employee Buy-Outs. Press Review We have a selection of 22 remarkable articles in 8 countries in March 2019: Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Poland, United Kingdom, USA. Belgium: EASI is employee-owned and for the fifth time in a row "Best Place to Work". Canada: Canadian government will cap the use of the preferential tax treatment on stock options. France: How the new "Pacte Law" will impact employee share ownership and savings schemes. Employee share ownership for start-ups. First employee share plan for Iliad. New workers co-operative linked to rescue plans. Germany: 300.000 employee shareholders for Siemens through free share awards. Italy: First employee share plan for Generali. Poland: New employee share plan for XTPL. UK: British Airways unions call for the re-introduction of an employee share ownership scheme. New firms sold to Employee Ownership Trusts. John Lewis cuts staff bonuses to lowest level in 65 years. USA: New companies sold to ESOPs. Colorado launches initiative to boost employee ownership of businesses, "looking to make Colorado the Delaware of employee ownership". The full press review is available on:               http://www.efesonline.org/PRESS REVIEW/2019/March.htm    Your support Why? Amount in Euro: 5.00 2.00 10.00 20.00 50.00 100.00 200.00 500.00 1000.00 A political roadmap for employee ownership in Europe The EFES needs more members. Download the EFES membership form What's new on the EFES website? EFES NEWS distribution: 200.000    With best regards         Marc Mathieu Secretary General EFES - EUROPEAN FEDERATION OF EMPLOYEE SHARE OWNERSHIP FEAS - FEDERATION EUROPEENNE DE L'ACTIONNARIAT SALARIE Avenue Voltaire 135, B-1030 Brussels Tel: +32 (0)2 242 64 30 - Fax: +32 (0)2 791 96 00 E-mail: efes@efesonline.org Web site: www.efesonline.org EFES' objective is to act as the umbrella organization of employee owners, companies and all persons, trade unions, experts, researchers, institutions looking to promote employee share ownership and participation in Europe.

17th April 2019

Next Manchester Industrial Relations Society meeting

Dear all

The next meeting of the Society, which is the Shirley Lerner Memorial Lecture will be Professor Damian Grimshaw, Director of the Research Department at the ILO who will be giving a presentation on The ILO and social justice at work: Reinvigorating its century-old mandate at 6pm on 16^th May 2019.

Please find attached the flyer and a map of the venue.

We look forward to seeing you there.

Best wishes,

Stephen Mustchin

Secretary

Manchester Industrial Relations Society

17th April 2019

Visions of the workplace:

Visions of the workplace:

missing from the record

Britain at Work (B@W) 1945-95 in association with British Universities’ Industrial Relations (BUIRA) IR History Group and Oral History Society (OHS)

Saturday 11 May 2019, 11am – 16.450pm

University of Westminster, 35 Marylebone Road, London NW1 5LS

(opposite Madame Tussauds and nearly opposite Baker Street tube)

Room C279 (lunch C287)

For further details and to reserve a place, please email Michael Gold (m.gold@rhul.ac.uk) or Linda Clarke (clarkel@wmin.ac.uk)

This year’s, Britain at Work Oral Labour History Day, will focus on the visual and remembering, asking and answering questions about images of work and activism in film, photography and the theatre. Changing technology means that opportunities to record working lives are now available immediately and with the potential of greater democracy. In recent decades, some photographers and workers in film and theatre have pushed at the boundaries recording and disseminating, engaging directly with working people. In this year’s Oral Labour History Day, we are inviting people known for visualising the workplace and struggle to reflect on how their experience links to oral history. There will also be an accompanying exhibition, Cuban Notebook, by Larry Herman, photographer, on display.

B@W is an initiative to capture the memories of people at work between 1945 and 1995, many of which can be found at the TUC Library Collections held at London Metropolitan University, accessible at: (www.unionhistory.info/britainatwork)..

Programme

About the speakers:

Sarah Boston, award winning documentary film maker, author of the book Women Workers and Trade Unions and trade union member (ACTT/BECTU) since 1967, writes: “Over the decades I have interviewed people on film about their lives. The interviews have included women who had been chain makers in the 1910 strike (BBC 1976): the daughters in Dorothea Lange’s iconic photograph the migrant mother (C4 1989) and four women- Hortensia Allende; Joan Jara; Joyce Horman and Angela Jeira Bachelet - whose husbands were murdered by the Pinochet regime (2005 Fuse Films). Actually seeing and hearing people adds to our multi layered understanding of history. To illustrate. I will use short clips from the above documentaries.”

Dr Susan Croft is Director of Unfinished Histories, a major initiative to record the history of Alternative Theatre in Britain through oral histories and to preserve archives of the alternative theatre movement from the 1960s to the 1980s (see www.unfinishedhistories.com). In 2013-14 she led the HLF-funded project Unfinished Histories Company Links, which culminated in the exhibition and publication Re-Staging Revolutions: Alternative Theatre in Lambeth and Camden 1968-88, as well as curating 15 accompanying events. From 1997-2005 Susan was Senior Curator (Contemporary Performance) at the V&A Theatre Museum, working on the National Video Archive of Performance and curating four major exhibitions. She also established a range of initiatives recording the history of Black and Asian theatre in Britain.

Nick Jones: After a career reporting industrial conflict, former BBC correspondent Nicholas Jones reflects on the changing nature of photo-ops and Vox Pops. More than ever workers in conflict understand that a picture tells the story. But are their voices being heard? Jones fears lazy journalism and editorial cuts are limiting the chances of working people to argue their case through the news media.

Pam Schweitzer has spent the last thirty years developing reminiscence arts work, especially original reminiscence theatre productions, professional and amateur. She founded the Age Exchange Theatre Trust and the Reminiscence Centre and was its Artistic Director from 1983 to 2005. She directs the European Reminiscence Network (1993 to the present), specialising in international reminiscence festivals and conferences, and co-ordinates Europe-wide projects on reminiscence in dementia care, receiving a Lifetime Achievement Award by the National Dementia Care Awards 2014. At the University of Greenwich, which awarded her an Honorary Doctorate in 2017, she is developing the Reminiscence Theatre Archive and Website as well as working with students on Reminiscence Theatre and Theatre-in-Education projects. Pam will talk about moving from recorded story into theatre, especially verbatim theatre based closely on interviewees' words. With the example of 'What did you do in the war, Mum?', a show, a book, an exhibition and a website, she will show how the writer, director and cast gather together the interview material and look for a structure to reflect and contain it, transforming it into a professional production seen by thousands on national and international tours. She will describe how students of drama today make original plays of their own from the same interview material recorded 40 years previous.

17th April 2019

The Winter of Discontent: Myth, memory and history’

Dear all

On 19 June Manchester Industrial Relations Society in conjunction with the Work and Equalities Institute at the University of Manchester will be holding a seminar focused on the 1978/9 ‘Winter of Discontent’ strike wave. Stephen Mustchin will introduce the seminar and then Tara Martin Lopez will give a talk based on her book ‘The Winter of Discontent: Myth, memory and history’ (see https://www.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/books/isbn/9781781380291/ )

Synopsis:

Britain’s “Winter of Discontent, 1978-1979” is shrouded in a potent and politically charged myth, one aspect of which revolves supposed “trade union bully boys” bringing down a sympathetic Labour Government and ushering in the era of Thatcherism with their excesses. This discussion, based on research published in Tara Martin Lopez’s The Winter of Discontent: Myth, Memory, and History, will approach this myth in a threefold way. First, the talk will define the term “myth” and provide background to the essential elements of the myth of the Winter of Discontent. Second, the discussion will then look at how oral histories from the workers themselves, especially women and Black workers, provide a potent source of “counter-memory” that challenges this myth. Three, it will then conclude by exploring the power of marginalized groups’ remembering and participation in key historical events and the implications of this for the historiography of Britain in the late 20th century.

The seminar will be at 4pm-6pm on 19 June in room 3.006a in Alliance Manchester Business School – if you are coming please arrive 10 minutes early and ask for directions at reception.

I hope to see some of you there

Best wishes

Stephen Mustchin

13th April 2019

Register now for BUIRA 2019 confererence in Newcastle

Members are advised that registration is now open for the 2019 conference here and that accommodation can also now be booked through the following link here.

4th April 2019

Debating the Future of Work Hilton Hotel Sheffield, 28-29 May 2019

Debating the Future of Work

This two-day conference is being organised by the Centre for Decent Work (CDW) at the University of Sheffield in collaboration with the International Labour Organisation (ILO). The recent report by the ILO’s Global Commission on the Future of Work, which represents the culmination of the ILO’s centenary initiative on the future of work, describes ways in which the world of work might be improved. The conference will bring together leading academics and ILO officials to discuss issues raised by the report and other matters that are of central importance to the future of work and the future research agenda. The themes to be addressed will include:

• Education, skills and lifelong learning;

• New forms of employment and the future of social protection;

• Diversity and inclusion;

• Ageing, caring and wellbeing;

• Work organisation, technology and job quality;

• Governance, labour administration and social dialogue

• Work and the environment;

• The future research agenda.

The conference will feature invited contributions from researchers based at universities in various countries, including Australia, Canada, Denmark, Germany, Japan, the USA and UK, providing opportunities for international sharing of knowledge and experience and also network building.

Further information, including how to register, will be available soon.

2nd April 2019

BUIRA Member Conferred as Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences

BUIRA Member Conferred as Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences

The BUIRA Executive would like to offer their congratulations to Professor Mark Stuart, who this week was amongst the 73 leading social scientists conferred as Fellows of the Academy of Social Sciences (AcSS).  Professor Stuart is a member and former President of BUIRA, and, as the Fellowship recognises, he has made major contributions to research in employment relations and in social science more widely.

The full announcement made by the AcSS can be found here.

As a constituent learned society of the AcSS, BUIRA is able to make nominations for Fellowships.  The deadline for the next round of nominations is June 2019.  A call to all BUIRA members to propose nominees will be made in April, but anyone wishing to discuss a nomination informally before then should contact the BUIRA Treasurer, Stephen Procter (stephen.procter@newcastle.ac.uk).

1st April 2019

Call For Papers: Inequality and Organizations: Paper Development Masterclass for Early Career Academics and Doctoral Students

Call For Papers: Inequality and Organizations: Paper Development Masterclass for Early Career Academics and Doctoral Students

September 20^th, 2019, The York Management School, University of York, UK

Inequality and social justice are long standing concerns in academic research and public policy, affecting individual and collective wellbeing, diminishing growth and productivity and undermining trust in key societal institutions. Organizations, their structures, practices and strategies act both as potential barriers and solutions to this.

This master class, supported by the Society for the Advancement of Management Studies in association with The York Management School’s Justice, Ethics and Inequality theme, invites papers of 7,000-10,000 words by 21^st June 2019 looking at the relationship between inequality and organizations, their structures, practices and strategies.  Themes include but are not limited to: poverty, social mobility, diversity management, precarity, international inequality, corporate social responsibility, employee participation, and industrial democracy.

Participants will present their research to leading scholars in the field and receive detailed critique of their work as well as attending a faculty-led plenary session to provide guidance on researching and publishing work on inequality in world class management journals.  Panelists have editorial experience at leading journals including Academy of Management Review, Journal of Management Studies, Sociological Quarterly and Work, Employment and Society, as well as extensive publication, editorial board and peer reviewing experience.

Travel bursaries of up to £175 will be given to successful applicants, intended to include second class travel and hotel costs if necessary. There will also be an optional dinner in York on the 19^th September.  York is a pleasant cathedral city in the north of England and well worth visiting, while the university campus is in a pleasant out of town location conducive to academic thought and discussion.

Please send any enquires as to suitability to Dr Kevin Tennent (kevin.tennent@york.ac.uk), Dr Joyce Jiang (joyce.jiang@york.ac.uk) or Professor Daniel Muzio (Daniel.muzio@york.ac.uk).

Decisions as to acceptance will be communicated by 31^st July 2019.

Masters/Panelists:

Dr Louise Ashley (Royal Holloway)

Professor Penny Dick (University of Sheffield)

Professor Kevin Leicht (University of Illinois)

Professor Jacqueline O’ Reilly (University of Sussex)

Professor Ro Suddaby (University of Victoria and University of Liverpool)

Please send submissions and inquiries to: SAMSMasterClass2019@gmail.com

1st April 2019

Vacancy at UCD

For more information see:

http://www.ucd.ie/adastrafellows/

29th March 2019

BSA Early Career Regional Forum:

BSA Early Career Regional Forum: 

Theorising worker-employer relations in the new world of work  

4th April 2019, 9:00am-5:00pm

Provisional Programme

This event, sponsored by the British Sociological Association and the Centre for Employment Relations Innovation and Change (CERIC), University of Leeds: theorising worker-employer relations in the new world of work brings Early Career Researchers(ECRs) with leading academics to consider contemporary theoretical and empirical understandings of the worker-employer relationship. To see the provisional programme and register for this event, please click  here BSA Leeds ECR Forum 4th April 2019 Event Page  A small number of bursaries are available to support attendance. For further information, please contact the event organisers, Dr. Jo Cutter (j.cutter@leeds.ac.uk)  or Dr. Simon Joyce (s.joyce1@leeds.ac.uk).

29th March 2019

The Palgrave Handbook of Workers’ Participation at Plant Level Editors: Berger, Stefan, Pries, Ludger, Wannöffel, Manfred (Eds.)

• An historical and comparative examination of plant-level workers' representations and models of social partnership 
• Considers both European and non-European case studies, adding important insight on global trends
• Suggests future directions for sustainable and long-term innovation and growth in the knowledge era.

Comprising the study, documentation, and comparison of plant-level workers’ participation around the world, this volume meets the challenge of offering a global perspective on workers’ participation, representation, and models of social partnership. Value chains, economic life, inter-cultural exchange and knowledge, as well as the mobility of persons and ideas increasingly cross the borders of nation-states. In the knowledge age, the active participation of workers in organizations is crucially important for sustainable and long-term growth and innovation. This handbook offers lessons from historical, global accounts of workers’ participation at plant level, even as it looks forward to predict forthcoming trends in participation.

https://www.palgrave.com/gb/book/9781137481917

29th March 2019

In Place of Strife (1969): Trade Union legal rights & responsibilities revisited

14th March 2019

Norwich Business School University of East Anglia Lecturer in Human Resource Management (ATS856)

14th March 2019

EFES NEWSLETTER - MARCH 2019

Having trouble viewing this e-mail? This newsletter is also available in 7 languages (EN, FR, ES, DE, IT, CS, HU) on page
http://www.efesonline.org/EFES NEWS/2019/EFES NEWSLETTER - 3-2019 EN.htm

Subscribe  /  Unsubscribe  /  Membership                                                        EFES NEWSLETTER - MARCH 2019 Congratulations from the Irish Parliament The Irish Parliament likes this newsletter, he let us know by letter. Every month, this newsletter highlights the significant facts of employee share ownership worldwide, as well as European policies. The monthly press review is a fabulous source of information. It sheds light on proven facts and helps sort out fake news, delivering a story full of novelties and twists. The progress and benefits of employee share ownership are becoming more and more evident. Letter from the Irish Parliament Press review We have a selection of 21 remarkable articles in 5 countries in February 2019: France, Ireland, South Africa, United Kingdom, USA. France: Employee share ownership is spreading in Intermediate Size Businesses. The coming "Pacte Law" will fail to provide employee shareholders with financial advisory solutions. New employee share plan for Total, for Schneider Electric. Employee buy-outs for Securimut, for Handi-Wagala. Ireland: Fears grow over Brexit threat to Irish staff share schemes. South Africa: The ANC's election manifesto endorses employee share ownership. UK: British Airways unions call for the re-introduction of an employee share ownership scheme. New Employee Ownership Trusts for Wales' leading TV production company. USA: ESOPs increase optionality for business owners. Publix supermarket is the largest employee-owned company in the world. Allowing employees to own company shares is a powerful retention tool.  The full press review is available on:               http://www.efesonline.org/PRESS REVIEW/2019/February.htm    Your support Why? Amount in Euro: 5.00 2.00 10.00 20.00 50.00 100.00 200.00 500.00 1000.00 A political roadmap for employee ownership in Europe The EFES needs more members. Download the EFES membership form What's new on the EFES website? EFES NEWS distribution: 200.000    With best regards         Marc Mathieu Secretary General EFES - EUROPEAN FEDERATION OF EMPLOYEE SHARE OWNERSHIP FEAS - FEDERATION EUROPEENNE DE L'ACTIONNARIAT SALARIE Avenue Voltaire 135, B-1030 Brussels Tel: +32 (0)2 242 64 30 - Fax: +32 (0)2 791 96 00 E-mail: efes@efesonline.org Web site: www.efesonline.org EFES' objective is to act as the umbrella organization of employee owners, companies and all persons, trade unions, experts, researchers, institutions looking to promote employee share ownership and participation in Europe.

14th March 2019

Call for Papers: "Politicizing and Depoliticizing Work in the Contemporary Firm and Beyond" Deadline for submission: April 20, 2019.

14th March 2019

Call for Papers : Theorising worker-employer relations in the new world of work: BSA Early Career Researcher (ECR) Forum

14th March 2019

Labour and Industry: A journal of the social and economic relations of work Special Issue: Call for Papers

Labour and Industry: A journal of the social and economic relations of work

Special Issue: Call for Papers

Geographical labour mobility in the construction sector: Contexts, Patterns, Processes, and Consequences

 
Guest Editors

Lachlan Barber, Department of Geography, Hong Kong Baptist University

Michael Haan, Department of Sociology, Western University, Ontario

Barbara Neis, Department of Sociology, Memorial University of Newfoundland

Nicole Power, Department of Sociology, Memorial University of Newfoundland

Overview of Special Issue

The construction industry is one of the largest industries globally. It is extremely diverse, encompassing craft, professional and industrial services related to the building, demolition, renovation and maintenance of civil, industrial, residential and commercial built environments. Various forms of employment-related geographical mobility (E-RGM) or labour (im)mobilities are intrinsic to construction work. Despite the opportunities the construction industry presents for understanding the relationship between E-RGM and work, the patterns and dynamics of E-RGM, and their intersections with labour markets, work scheduling, family, community and the larger political economy are underexplored. This is the case despite the size of the construction sector and its association with large public investments in state-commissioned projects and thus, related policy interest. The proposed special issue seeks to address this gap.

We seek papers that shed light on the complex interrelationships between construction (in its different forms), diverse patterns of E-RGM and their intersections with work, family labour markets and community. Topics could include, but are not limited to understanding:

• how the construction industry and collective bargaining enable and regulate mobile work and mobile workers in different contexts;
• the relationship between mobility and health and safety, including wellbeing and work-life balance;
• the relationship between mobility and the application and enforcement of labour standards in construction;
• changes over time in industry mobility regimes and their consequences for labour force composition and labour relations;
• the implications of work mobility for families and communities in the construction industry.

We also welcome enquiries relating to other topics that look at the intersectionality of mobility, labour, industry and built environments.

Key Dates:

Expression of interest, including titles and abstracts, to the co-editors by: 15th April, 2019

Submit your paper via the journal website by 1^st September, 2019

Papers finalised and sent to the publisher 1^st March, 2019

Publication of the special issue expected in May, 2020

Notes for Prospective Authors

Please contact Michael Haan, Guest Editor, if you any questions about the special issue at mhaan2@uwo.ca. For any queries regarding the submission process please contact the journal’s Systems Manager, Jane Halteh at jane.halteh@gmail.com.

Papers submitted to Labour and Industry are managed using an online submission and review system with Editorial Manager http://www.edmgr.com/rlab/default.aspx. Please check the website for formatting requirements for submissions.

Authors should first register with Editorial Manager and when submitting their papers they should ensure all the author and co-author details are entered correctly. Any authors or co-authors who have previously submitted a paper to Labour and Industry, or reviewed a paper, should already be registered in the system, but they should check their details.

Labour and Industry: A journal of the social and economic relations of work

Special Issue: Call for Papers

Geographical labour mobility in the construction sector: Contexts, Patterns, Processes, and Consequences

 
Guest Editors

Lachlan Barber, Department of Geography, Hong Kong Baptist University

Michael Haan, Department of Sociology, Western University, Ontario

Barbara Neis, Department of Sociology, Memorial University of Newfoundland

Nicole Power, Department of Sociology, Memorial University of Newfoundland

Overview of Special Issue

The construction industry is one of the largest industries globally. It is extremely diverse, encompassing craft, professional and industrial services related to the building, demolition, renovation and maintenance of civil, industrial, residential and commercial built environments. Various forms of employment-related geographical mobility (E-RGM) or labour (im)mobilities are intrinsic to construction work. Despite the opportunities the construction industry presents for understanding the relationship between E-RGM and work, the patterns and dynamics of E-RGM, and their intersections with labour markets, work scheduling, family, community and the larger political economy are underexplored. This is the case despite the size of the construction sector and its association with large public investments in state-commissioned projects and thus, related policy interest. The proposed special issue seeks to address this gap.

We seek papers that shed light on the complex interrelationships between construction (in its different forms), diverse patterns of E-RGM and their intersections with work, family labour markets and community. Topics could include, but are not limited to understanding:

• how the construction industry and collective bargaining enable and regulate mobile work and mobile workers in different contexts;
• the relationship between mobility and health and safety, including wellbeing and work-life balance;
• the relationship between mobility and the application and enforcement of labour standards in construction;
• changes over time in industry mobility regimes and their consequences for labour force composition and labour relations;
• the implications of work mobility for families and communities in the construction industry.

We also welcome enquiries relating to other topics that look at the intersectionality of mobility, labour, industry and built environments.

Key Dates:

Expression of interest, including titles and abstracts, to the co-editors by: 15th April, 2019

Submit your paper via the journal website by 1^st September, 2019

Papers finalised and sent to the publisher 1^st March, 2019

Publication of the special issue expected in May, 2020

Notes for Prospective Authors

Please contact Michael Haan, Guest Editor, if you any questions about the special issue at mhaan2@uwo.ca. For any queries regarding the submission process please contact the journal’s Systems Manager, Jane Halteh at jane.halteh@gmail.com.

Papers submitted to Labour and Industry are managed using an online submission and review system with Editorial Manager http://www.edmgr.com/rlab/default.aspx. Please check the website for formatting requirements for submissions.

Authors should first register with Editorial Manager and when submitting their papers they should ensure all the author and co-author details are entered correctly. Any authors or co-authors who have previously submitted a paper to Labour and Industry, or reviewed a paper, should already be registered in the system, but they should check their details.

14th March 2019

IREC 2019

he 2019 IREC conference will be held on 2-3 September at the University of Bielefeld, with the theme ‘Transnational Labour Markets and Industrial Relations’.
The date is immediately before the ILERA European conference in Düsseldorf, which is a 2-hour train ride from Bielefeld.
Details at:
http://uni-bielefeld.de/soz/industrial-relations-in-europe-irec-2019/

8th March 2019

‘Researching (In)equalities at Work’: Postgraduate Researchers’ Methods Symposium

8th March 2019

Public Sector Pay and Employment

8th March 2019

ILERA announcement – 5 March 2019

8th March 2019

Seminar on Public Sector Pay and Employment

Public Sector Pay and Employment

The Centre for Research in Employment and Work (CREW) is holding a symposium on Public Sector Pay and Employment on Wed 20^th March 2019 from 1-6 pm at Hamilton House, The University of Greenwich.

This seminar comes at a critical time for the public sector.

SEMINAR:

After nearly a decade of pay restraint in the UK public sector, pay settlements are now being reached at higher levels than the previous 1% limit. The Government has tried to restrict the first post-cap increases, but faced with recruitment and retention difficulties, especially in the NHS, in schools and elsewhere, there are upward pressures that cannot be ignored. This symposium will examine aspects of Government Policy, employee relations and pay and reward strategies in the context of a post-1% world. It will examine pay rises, progression pay, staff shortages and skill requirements across large parts of the public sector.

This symposium brings together a strong range of speakers with expertise on how pay decisions are made and the pressures experienced by negotiators, and key issues related to reward and to the current and future skill requirements in the public sector.

Speakers:
Ken Mulkearn, Director, Incomes Data Research – ‘Pay developments in the public and private sectors 2018/19’.
Nicola Allison, Remuneration adviser to the Office of Manpower Economics – ‘Pay developments in the Pay Review Body world and evidence-based research’.
David Powell, Lead Officer, Pay Policy and Negotiations for the National Education Union – ‘Pay and progression for teachers in schools and academies’.
Paul Wallace, Director of Employment Relations and Reward for the NHS Employers – ‘The current three-year pay agreement and the skill and people requirements of the NHS’.
Simon Pannell, Principal Adviser (Employment and Negotiations) Local Government Association – ‘Pay and skill requirements in local government’.
Professor Ian Kessler, Kings College, London – ‘Reward and skill requirements into the 2020s’.

Chaired by Alastair Hatchett Visiting Fellow, CREW, University of Greenwich. Alastair was previously Head of Pay Services at Incomes Data Services.

21st February 2019

Title Call for Papers : theorising worker-employer relations in the new world of work

Theorising worker-employer relations in the new world of work: BSA Early Career Researcher (ECR) Forum

4th April 2019, Leeds University Business School

Call For Papers & Registration /bsa-early-career-forum-regional-event-theorising-worker-employer-relations-in-the-new-world-of-work/

This event provides an opportunity for ECRs to share their work with leading academics and other researchers investigating collective interest representation and documenting novel and unexpected forms of collective action that shape worker-employer relations.  The event will also explore the scope for collaboration to develop research agendas that could advance theoretical and empirical understanding in this area, to consider what, if anything, has emerged to replace formal bargaining institutions between workers and management and how this could be theorised.  Confirmed keynote speakers:

·         Professor Miguel Martinez Lucio, University of Manchester

·         Professor Sian Moore, University of Greenwich

·         Professor Mark Stuart, University of Leeds

If you have any questions about the ECR Forum event please contact either Dr Jo Cutter (j.cutter@leeds.ac.uk ) or Dr Simon Joyce (S.Joyce1@leeds.ac.uk )

Deadline for abstracts 7^th March 2019 (please us the BSA link above)

_____________________________________________________

Best wishes

Jo

Dr Jo Cutter AFHEA

Lecturer in Work and Employment Relations

Centre for Employment Relations Innovation and Change

Leeds University Business School

+44 113 343 0202

https://business.leeds.ac.uk/jo-cutter/

Recent article: 

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1468-2427.12607

21st February 2019

BUIRA History of Industrial Relations Study Group

Women and Trade Unions

Tuesday 26 March 2019, 3.00pm for 3.20-5.00pm (Tea/ coffee from 3.00)

Room XXX, University of Westminster, 35 Marylebone Road, London NW1 5LS (opposite Madame Tussauds and nearly opposite Baker Street tube)

For further details or to reserve a place, please email Michael Gold (m.gold@rhul.ac.uk) or Linda Clarke (clarkel@wmin.ac.uk).

Programme:

3.00-3.20pm: Tea/ coffee/ refreshments

3.20-3.30: Welcome: Michael Gold and Linda Clarke (Chairs)

3.30-4.00: Nicole Busby and Rebecca Zahn

A Feminist Challenge to the Trade Union Movement

This presentation examines the characteristics of non-standard employment arrangements and work in the gig economy against a historical understanding of the ‘feminisation of work’. It argues that unions prioritise functions they adopt within the labour market and the labour law system, a process based on a gendered understanding of employment that has long limited their ability to respond adequately to women workers. It concludes by considering lessons that could be learned by ‘traditional’ trade unions to broaden their appeal to those working under non-standard arrangements within and beyond the gig economy.

4.00-4.30: Helen McCarthy

Working Mothers and Workplace Activism in Modern Britain

Since the earliest days of industrialisation in Britain, women's relationship with the trade union movement has been an uneasy one. It was commonly assumed that women lacked a strong commitment to paid work and were difficult to organise due to their frequently interrupted employment histories and domestic ties. From the 1880s, a new generation of female trade unionists challenged these assumptions, but wage-earning wives and mothers remained a 'problem' group in the eyes of union leaders and labour intellectuals well into the later twentieth century. This presentation explores the character of workplace activism amongst this group, who made up an increasing proportion of the female workforce from the 1940s, asking how well trade unions adapted to this changing workforce and how far they were willing to advocate for the particular needs of working mothers, most notably around childcare, maternity rights and part-time employment.

4.30-5.00pm: General discussion

5.00pm: Close (followed by drinks until 5.30pm)
 

The speakers:

Nicole Busby is Professor of Labour Law at the University of Strathclyde, teaching and researching in the areas of Labour and Employment Law, Discrimination Law and European Social Law and Policy. She is a member of the Equality and Human Rights Commission's Scotland Committee.

Helen McCarthy is Lecturer in Modern British History at St John's College, University of Cambridge. She is the author of two books: The British People and the League of Nations: Democracy, Citizenship and Internationalism, 1918-1945 (Manchester University Press, 2011), and Women of the World: The Rise of the Female Diplomat (Bloomsbury, 2014) and she is currently completing a third, entitled Double Lives: A History of Working Motherhood in Modern Britain (Bloomsbury, 2021). Helen is Managing Editor of the journal Twentieth Century British History, and tweets @HistorianHelen

Rebecca Zahn is Senior Lecturer at the University of Strathclyde. She researches in the field of labour law (national, European and comparative), with a particular focus on collective labour law. She is the author of New Labour Laws in Old Member States (CUP, 2017) and is currently working on a number of historical labour law projects.

21st February 2019

Employee voice from different perspectives

7th February 2019

PhD Scholarship: Digitalisation and the Future of Work: Platforms, Networks, and Workers

PhD Scholarship: Digitalisation and the Future of Work: Platforms, Networks, and Workers

This PhD scholarship offers three years’ funding, including tuition fees and a stipend of approximately £15,000 per year for candidates wishing to commence their studies in September 2019. The successful candidate will also receive a generous research support and conference allowance. You will also have access to a robust doctoral research training programme, dedicated research resources, training in transferable skills, visiting speaker seminar programme, and associate with existing research centres and groups.

The Project

The gig economy and platform-based working is increasingly being debated as an illustration of the impact of technology on the future world of work. This project will investigate platform-based working as a form of work organisation and investigate working practices and experiences. The focus will be on the under-researched area of intermediary firms, who have emerged to provide a bridge between workers and clients, filtering work requests to the platform. These emerging networks create long supply chains, many of which contain the features of fragmented and globally dispersed production. The research will adopt a case study approach to enable an in-depth exploration of the key issues. Research will involve the network itself as well as the experiences of workers in order to study the interaction and complex links between the two. Detailed research will enable an appreciation of the complex social units in terms of organising and operational principles, governance issues, power and social relations, and working conditions.

The candidate will be supervised from within the Work and Equalities Institute (WEI), alongside the Institute’s broader research interests concerning the future of work.

31st January 2019

Title: Event: 150 Years of the Trades Union Congress: The Future of Work and the Future of Unions

Title: Event: 150 Years of the Trades Union Congress: The Future of Work and the Future of Unions

On Monday 11^th February, we are holding an event to launch of a special issue of Employee Relations co-edited by Dr. Andy Hodder (University of Birmingham) and Paul Nowak (Deputy General Secretary, TUC). The special issue of the journal reflects on 150 years of the Trades Union Congress (TUC) and examines the challenges facing trade union movements today.

A roundtable of key academic figures in the field of industrial relations will consider: the relationship between the decline in collective bargaining and the rise in wage inequality; the UK’s productivity problem and the extent to which this may be resolved through the introduction of the new technologies of artificial intelligence; various new forms of institutional experimentation to regulate the employment relationship and strengthen employment protections; the TUC’s efforts to embed organising in the trade union movement.

The event will include a drinks reception and a question and answer session.

Location

Alan Walters Building: 223 Harvard Theatre, Harvard Lecture Theatre

Date

Monday 11th February 2019 (18:00-20:00)

For more information and to register, see here: https://www.birmingham.ac.uk/schools/business/events/2019/01/the-future-of-work-and-the-future-of-unions.aspx

31st January 2019

Public Sector Pay and Employment

31st January 2019

Industrial Relations Research Unit / OHRM Warwick Business School University of Warwick Seminar Series

Industrial Relations Research Unit / OHRM
Warwick Business School University of Warwick
Seminar Series
Seminars are held from 2.00 to 3.30pm with refreshments to follow
TERM 2 2018/19:
Wednesday 6th February Matthew Amengual – University of Oxford
‘Labour Standards in Global Supply Chains:
Do Buyers Respond to Factory Audits?’
Room: 2.214, Warwick Business School
Wednesday 13th March Chunyun Li – London School of Economics and Political Science
‘From Insurgency to Movement:
An Embryonic Counterhegemonic Labor Movement in South China’
Room: 2.214, Warwick Business School
TERM 3 2018/19:
Wednesday 1st May Heather Connolly – University of Leicester
‘Representing Precarious Workers in Europe’
Room: TBC, Warwick Business School
Wednesday 22nd May Maria Gavris – University of Warwick
‘Changes in National Systems of Labour Administration’
Room: TBC, Warwick Business School
Wednesday 5th June Ana Lopes – Newcastle University
‘Women’s Participation in Trade Unions’
Room: TBC, Warwick Business School

31st January 2019

**Abstract submission deadline extended to 28th January 2019**

16th January 2019

Work and Equalities Institute, The University of Manchester Seminar series January to May 2019

Work and Equalities Institute, The University of Manchester

Seminar series January to May 2019

Dr Emily Yarrow, University of Edinburgh Business School

‘An unequal opportunity? Female academics’ experiences of research evaluation in the UK'

Date:              Wednesday 16^th January 2019

Time:              15:30 – 17:00 Hrs (coffee/tea at 15:15)

Venue:          Alliance Manchester Business School East B7

Dr Edward Yates, Sheffield University Management School

Young workers and local economic development strategies in Greater Manchester

Date:              Wednesday 6^th February 2019

Time:              15:30 – 17:00 Hrs (coffee/tea at 15:15)

Venue:          Alliance Manchester Business School 3.008

Dr Jean Jenkins, Cardiff Business School

Title to be confirmed

Date:              Wednesday 13^th March 2019

Time:              15:30 – 17:00 Hrs (coffee/tea at 15:15)

Venue:          Alliance Manchester Business School 3.008

Prof Irena Grugulis, Leeds University Business School

Title to be confirmed

Date:              Wednesday 8^th May 2019

Time:              15:30 – 17:00 Hrs (coffee/tea at 15:15)

Venue: Alliance Manchester Business School 3.008

11th December 2018

The School of Management at Swansea University are recruiting

he School of Management at Swansea University are recruiting in the area of People and Organisations:

Lecturer in People & Organisations: https://www.swansea.ac.uk/personnel/jobs/details.php?nPostingID=29518&nPostingTargetID=44292&option=52&sort=DESC&respnr=1&ID=QHUFK026203F3VBQB7VLO8NXD&LOV4=7813&LOV5=9450&JOBADLG=UK&Resultsperpage=20&lg=UK&mask=suext

Senior Lecturer in People & Organisations: https://www.swansea.ac.uk/personnel/jobs/details.php?nPostingID=29538&nPostingTargetID=44313&option=52&sort=DESC&respnr=1&ID=QHUFK026203F3VBQB7VLO8NXD&LOV4=7813&LOV5=9450&JOBADLG=UK&Resultsperpage=20&lg=UK&mask=suext  

For informal enquiries, please contact Professor Geraint Harvey (g.harvey@swansea.ac.uk).

11th December 2018

Doctoral program in Human Resources and Labor Relations at Michigan State University (USA

11th December 2018

The Emerging Industrial Relations of China’, edited by William Brown and Chang Kai

The Emerging Industrial Relations of China’, edited by William Brown
and Chang Kai, published by Cambridge University Press, is now available
in paperback at £22.99.
Described as a ‘first-rate volume’ by Bruce Kaufman in Relations
Industrielles/Industrial Relations: ‘The major paradox they draw
attention to is that China and its government leaders have opted for a
policy of greater collective organization of industrial relations in
reaction to intensified market pressures and worker dissatisfaction,
while most other nations of the world have gone in the opposite
direction of deregulation and individualization of employment relations.’

11th December 2018

ILERA 12th European Congress 2019

In September 2019 the International Labor and Employment Relations Association (ILERA) will hold its 12th European Congress in Düsseldorf, Germany. The theme of the congress will be “Perspectives of Employment Relations in Europe” and thematic tracks will focus on issues such as equality & poverty, the regulation of labor, industrial democracy & workers’ voice as well as the quality of work & digitalization. The congress website and call for paper can be accessed at www.ilera2019.eu .

11th December 2018

BUIRA Conference 2019 Uncertain Futures/Fractured Worlds

BUIRA Conference 2019

Uncertain Futures/Fractured Worlds:

The future of employment regulation and rights after Brexit.

Newcastle University Business School, 1-3 July 2019

Call for papers now open

As the withdrawal of the UK from the European Union occurs only months prior to our conference next year, a major question we need to discuss will be around the uncertain future of employment legislation and regulation post Brexit. 

A substantial amount of UK employment legislation is grounded in EU law.  Does this mean that the withdrawal from the EU will mean UK employment rights currently guaranteed by EU law would no longer be so guaranteed?  Theresa May had confirmed that workers’ existing legal rights will be guaranteed during her period in office – but her position has looked untenable for some time now, even more so recently.  A post-Brexit government could seek to amend or remove any of these.  Of course, what would be amended or removed is a much more open question, since it is affected by the political ideology of a future Government. We are fully aware of previous Conservative administrations’ long-standing opposition to many EU social rights.

What then, could be the effect on individuals who rely directly on EU law (i.e. the right to equal pay, agency workers, working time rights)?

Empirical (both quantitative and qualitative), analytical, conceptual and methodological papers are all welcome. We would particularly appreciate submissions from early career researchers and doctoral students. Papers concerning topics under the following headings will be particularly welcome:

• Migrant workers from the EU and their position
• Challenges for Trade Unions
• Implications for Equality and Diversity
• The EU and the (future of the) Social Dimension

Submission details

Abstracts of papers should be submitted via https://www.buira.org/admin/submissions/create

Deadline for submission of abstracts: Monday, 14^th January 2019.

Abstracts are refereed anonymously by BUIRA Executive Committee members.

23rd November 2018

BUIRA 2019 Stream/ Panel Event – Progressive Employers and Positive Employment Relations.

BUIRA 2019 Stream/ Panel Event – Progressive Employers and Positive Employment Relations – Newcastle – 1-3 July 2019.

Current trends in radical and pluralist industrial relations tend to emphasise employee organizing from below and trade unions as independent social movements, on the one hand; or state regulation from above, on the other (see Heery 2016). In the latter spirit, the 2017 Labour Party manifesto promised to 'roll out sectoral collective bargaining'. The missing link is these narratives is the progressive employer, or what Hyman (2015) has termed, 'good capitalism'. Even the large Partnership literature (see Johnstone 2015), has tended to focus on trade union behaviour.

Organized workers need stable employer recognition for unions to thrive (Simms 2013), something it's almost impossible for the state to impose without substantial employer support. As Ackers (2015) argues, trade union legitimacy power rests on a diamond of stakeholders: employees, the state (political parties), public opinion and employers. Arguably, the last play an important role in shaping the others. More widely, good working conditions and policies to counter the spread of cut-price employment policies like zero-hour contracts, depend on labour market leadership by progressive employers, unionised and non-union.

Progressive employers, such Lever and Cadbury, played a central role in the C20th rise of joint regulations (Clegg et al 1964, Clegg 1985, 1994). British 'Paternalists' not only championed good stable working conditions and employee welfare, but as 'sophisticated moderns' (Fox 1974) promoted and spread trade unions and pluralist IR among the 'standard modern' mainstream. Public employers also spread good employment practice.

This stream/ panel (depending on numbers) invites papers on any aspect of the progressive employer, past, present or future. We are particularly interested in examples of active agency in Developing Positive Employment Relations ((Johnstone & Wilkinson 2016), which challenge the current picture of employers as passive receivers of employment rules. Any employer that promotes good employee working conditions will qualify!

Peter Ackers & Stewart Johnstone

The organisers are happy to discuss ideas for potential submissions peter.ackers1@virginmedia.com; stewart.johnstone@ncl.ac.uk

23rd November 2018

Is whistleblowing the new normal?

HE UNIVERSITY OF GREENWICH WORK AND EMPLOYMENT RESEARCH UNIT /
CENTRE FOR RESEARCH ON EMPLOYMENT AND WORK
 
 Is whistleblowing the new normal?
 
Wednesday 12^th December 2018
TIME: 15.00 – 18.00
 
VENUE:  Room HH102, Hamilton House, Park Vista, Greenwich SE10 9LZ
 
In the context of whistleblowing, policy-makers have recently started to shift the focus from the person of the whistleblower towards the recipients of whistleblowing, i.e. those whom whistleblowers call upon to stop wrongdoing. Increasingly, organisations are implementing speak-up policies through procedures, training, and in-house or outsourced hotlines. Is this a new form of managerialism? Is it, as some voice scholars wrote recently (Barry & Wilkinson, 2016 BJIR), "pro-social or pro-management"? On the other hand, research shows that external whistleblowing is most often a result of badly managed internal whistleblowing. Hence, the way organisations institutionalise whistleblowing warrants our attention. This seminar discusses the institutionalisation of whistleblowing, around four pieces of recent research.

Dr Erik Mygind du Plessis, Copenhagen Business School.
"Speaking truth through power: Conceptualizing internal hotlines using Foucault's dispositive."

Prof David Lewis, Middlesex University.
"What information about whistleblowing do the FTSE top 100 firms post on their website?"

Dr Mahaut Fanchini, University of Paris-Dauphine.
“The co-construction of whistleblowing: How expectations of the recipient frame ‘acceptable’ whistleblowing narratives."

Arron Phillips, University of Greenwich.
"Do trade union members blow the whistle differently? Exploring data from a UK whistleblower advice line."

 
Chaired by Dr Wim Vandekerckhove, University of Greenwich

Speakers:
 
Erik Du Plessis is assistant Professor at the Department of Management, Politics and Philosophy at Copenhagen Business School. His research explores ways in which whistleblowing is institutionalised. Previous studies include whistleblowing in the context of Danish trade unions.