By Gregor Murray, CRIMT/School of Industrial Relations, Université de Montréal

At the behest of Relations industrielles/Industrial Relations and its editor, Mathieu Dupuis, this short essay offers some thoughts on RI/IR’s fourth decade (1975-1984)¹. This follows illuminating contributions on the preceding three decades and anticipates the four others to follow – all in honour of RI/IR’s 80 years of existence. 

During its fourth decade (1975-1984), RI/IR was edited by Gerard Dion - as it had been since its foundation in 1945. He was ably seconded by assistant editors Jean Boivin (until 31:1 in 1976) and, throughout most of this period, Jean Sexton, who would later become editor from 1991 (46:1) after the death of Gerard Dion in late 1990.

A quick overview of volumes 30 to 39 yields 468 articles, discussions and labour law reports (the clarity of these distinctions varying from one issue to the next) and 384 book reviews. This total of 852 contributions over the decade under consideration represented an average of just over 21 contributions per issue. This volume of scholarship remains a remarkable tribute to the energy and vision of these editors and the community of scholars on whom they relied. RI/IR is a veritable monument to the creation of a field of study and whose bilingualism reflected efforts to embrace a fuller linguistic duality in the Canadian context. 

Navigating industrial relations scholarship 
In a 1988 RI/IR contribution on the historical evolution of industrial relations scholarship in Canada, Anthony Giles and Gregor Murray sketched out a methodology for such inquiry. They pointed to the need to locate IR scholarship within both the broader political economy and institutional arrangements reflecting actor strategies. A first level, that of the underlying political economy, concerns change in the organization of production and services, geopolitics and technology. A second level focuses on the strategies of actors and their political projects, the institutional compromises that emerge from their interactions, and the knowledge regimes which habilitate them. A third level then should focus on the types of research undertaken, the emergence and influence of interpretative paradigms on that research and how that research is organized in universities and other institutions as scholars seek to account for change observed in the world of work. In other words, we should first understand mutations in the broader political economy before turning to actors and their institutions and, finally, to the focus and contours of the scholarship that seeks to account for the world of work thus observed (Murray and Giles, 1988). 

A quick overview of the 1975-1984 years
The initial years of this period in the most developed economies were characterized by stagflation, namely higher levels of inflation and unemployment resulting from the oil crisis of 1973 and beyond. The first half of the decade was dominated by efforts to tame inflation through wage and price controls, incomes policies and corporatist compromises. The second half dealt with the consequences, as restrictive monetary policies led to severe economic downturns. In particular, the early 1980s were associated with the rise of neoliberalism as manifested by the elections of both Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan in 1979. Neoliberal forces had long been gathering strength. Already in 1976, monetarist theories of money-fuelled inflation were recognized by a Nobel prize in economics awarded to Milton Friedman. Such policies became preeminent in the early 1980s with Margaret Thatcher’s refusal to countenance any alternative (TINA or There Is No Alternative). However, neoliberalism was not the only strand of thinking as the socialist François Mitterrand was elected to the presidency of France in 1981. 

The end of the Vietnam War in April 1975 marked the beginning of new era of geopolitical turmoil in southeast Asia (Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, China). So too, the toppling of the monarchy and the creation of an Islamic Republic in Iran marked the emergence of a new locus of power in the Middle East. China also emerged from a decade of cultural revolution to experiment with its unique brand of marketized “socialism with Chinese characteristics”. It was also a decade that entertained hopes for a path to democracy through the increasing sway of a discourse on international human rights. It’s perhaps not a coincidence that the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Lech Wałęsa in 1983 (Poland) and Desmond Tutu (South Africa) in 1984.

In the Canadian context, Pierre Elliott Trudeau was prime minister of Canada for all but 9 months (1979-1980) of this decade. This notably led to the contested repatriation of the Canadian constitution (1982) and, perhaps most significantly for the subsequent evolution of labour law, the enshrinement of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms as an evaluative mechanism by which all future government legislation should be assessed. Riding the crest of the post-war boom and state modernization, the nationalist Parti Québécois was elected to govern the province of Quebec in 1976 and remained in power until 1985. There followed major legislative initiatives – all deemed to be favourable to workers and their representative unions, including major sets of reforms to the Quebec Labour Code and to the law on minimum standards. The defeat in a 1980 referendum on Quebec sovereignty also marked a major psychodrama. 

These tends translated into the world of work. Efforts to control wages resulted in iconic conflicts from which the power of trade unions emerged much diminished.  These included the 1978-1979 winter of discontent with public sector strikes in the United Kingdom, the 1981 dismissal of striking air traffic controllers by President Reagan, and Margaret Thatcher’s refusal to countenance the 1984-1985 miners’ strike in the United Kingdom. The close relationship between the Parti Québécois and unions in this province became increasingly fractious as the government sought to come to terms with the economic downturn of the early 1980s.  However, such trends are inevitably variegated as the 1974-1975 United Aircraft strike in Quebec led to an expansion of trade union rights (notably anti-strike breaking legislation but also the affirmation of the right to work in French) and the 1981 postal workers strike in the federal jurisdiction led to a first nationwide maternity leave rights.  

How then did the transformation of these years translate into the pages of RI\IR?

All aspects of people at work
A simple definition of industrial relations is the study of “all aspects of people at work” (Kochan and Katz,1980: 1). Some, notably Jean Boivin (1987), would later espouse a kind of holy trinity of a field of industrial relations comprised of labour relations (including collective bargaining and trade unions), human resource management (including the analysis of firms, quality of work and health and safety, and personnel policies), and public policies about work (including labour markets, labour market and social security policies and labour law).  The largest industrial relations units, as at Laval and Montreal universities, tended to recruit new hires according to this functional division of labour. 

The pages of RI/IR during the 1975-1984 period certainly validate this broad coverage. Drawing on a rough categorization of the 468 articles,  comments and reports (with apologies to thematic crossovers), the following composition conveys the range of scholarship: contributions to the field of study and its terminology and definition (8.3%), collective bargaining and workplace democracy (23.3%), trade unionism (11.8%), labour law (16.2%), labour markets (19.2%) and other public policies on work (5.3%), human resource management and organizational behaviour (14.5%), and health and safety at work (1.2%). The 384 book reviews cast the net even wider.

Key themes
Strikes and collective bargaining featured prominently, and so too studies of unions, their democracies and their strategies. The search for worker well-being through participation and human resource management strategies was also a key theme. So too were a wide range of labour market policies. Labour law contributions featured prominently where legal specialists were engaged in the continuous interrogation and construction of what Murray and Trudeau (2024) have labelled the Canadian Common Model, namely a common set of ideas and policies that characterizes labour regulation in Canada. Contributions invariably sought to assess the importance of each new legislative initiative and significant rulings by courts and labour tribunals as regards the implications for that model.

The emergence of collective bargaining in the public sector was also a key theme through this decade. Indeed, a first thematic initiative in the journal concerned the unionization of university professors. It asked if collective bargaining and academic freedom were compatible (1975, 30:4)? Whereas H.D. Woods maintained that they were not, a range of other opinions assessed or entertained this possibility, including a young Université Laval professor Jean Boivin and the then national director of research at CUPE, Gilbert Levine. Those familiar with labour relations at Université Laval will note the irony as Laval’s faculty union was first certified in 1975 and engaged in a landmark five-month strike the following year. Who could accuse RI/IR of being detached from the concerns of its immediate environment?

Another example of local colour was the occasional genuflexion to the catholic roots of RI/IR and its founding institution, Université Laval.  A 1982 book review by Gerard Dion considers the first of a three-volume history of the Catholic Church’s “Commission sacerdotale d'Études sociales” during Quebec’s Quiet Revolution – a subject on which Abbé Dion was uniquely qualified to comment since he and his colleagues at Université Laval (among whom, Dean Père Lévesque) had played such a prominent role in opposition to the Duplessis Government of the time. 

Finally, we might note that what goes around comes around! Who might have imagined that a 1975 (30:2) article concerned the guaranteed annual income as a remedy to labour market ills and that another article by Arthur Donner and Fred Lazar (30:4) focused on industrial strategy – a subject of great concern in the current (2026) commercial turmoil in US-Canada trade relations. 

The pioneers
The work of the pioneers of the field of study of industrial relations is everywhere present in this fourth decade of RI/IR. Of course, the investment of Gerard Dion was omnipresent through articles, comments, book reviews and the underlying intellectual project of the field of study. RI/IR reported that the Canadian Industrial Relations Association (CIRA) made its first award of distinction to H.D. Woods in 1980 (35:3), who was later memorialized in a tribute after his death in 1983 (38:4). Gerard Dion was himself to receive this same CIRA tribute in 1982, just as the recipient in 1983 was Stuart Jamieson. From this time onwards, the award was to be known as the Dion Award in recognition of an outstanding contribution to the discipline or field of study. After the death of H.D. Woods, a first annual lecture in his name was introduced by his former colleague at McGill, Shirley Goldenberg, and delivered by Harry Arthurs in 1984 (39:4). Émile Gosselin, a founder of the School of Industrial Relations at Université de Montréal was also memorialized in the pages of RI/IR after his death in 1979 (34:4). 

A community of scholars
RI/IR could count on a wide range of scholars who constituted an epistemic community. It would be disingenuous to select individual names when the objective was demonstrably to construct a community of scholars. Some, of course, were already well established (Gerard Hebert, Claude Daoust, Viateur Larouche, Fernand Morin, Pierre Verge, H.D. Woods), whereas others were still emergent but would become notable contributors to the field (Jacques Bélanger, Rodrigue Blouin, Jean Boivin. Jean-Michel Cousineau, Alexander Matjeko, Joe Rose, James Thwaites, Mark Thompson, and so many others...). Professor Pierre Verge at Université Laval was the engine behind an astounding range of contributions to the journal during this decade, including articles, labour law commentaries and book reviews and not least providing a vista into labour and legal developments in Latin America. A range of faithful international correspondents offered a tangible demonstration of RI/IR’s reach. We would be remiss not to mention the numerous contributions of Professor Dimitri Weiss in France. This community of scholars was apparently unaffected by instruments of academic subordination such as journal rankings and other neoliberal incursions that would in future years in many such journals give license to disdain different types of contribution to the intellectual life of the community. 

From a community of scholars to a community of practitioners
A notable feature of RI/IR during this decade and a demonstration of its outreach was the ability to showcase the voice of world-of-work practitioners. A good example was a 1975 contribution (30:3) by André Raynauld, then Chair of the Economic Council of Canada, on inflation and fiscal policy arguing that if Canada could not get a grip on levels of inflation it would undermine the economic growth and prosperity that had characterized the postwar years.  In 1978 (33:3), Carl Goldenberg, both a senator and certainly Canada’s preeminent labour relations mediator, addressed the question of continuity and change in labour relations. He concluded with a vibrant pluralist plea that, given the inevitably of conflicts of interests and the absence of panacea in labour relations, “we must look to honest dialogue, a spirit of compromise and, above all, a sense of responsibility to produce more civilized results”. 

In 1980 (35-3), Jean Cournoyer, a former minister of labour in Quebec reflected on public and parapublic sector bargaining and firmly maintained that her Majesty does not negotiate with her subjects and that the determination of public sector wages must remain in the realm of parliamentary prerogative. This was a theme to which a 1982 (37-2) symposium returned with a focus on recent negotiations in the Quebec public sector. One of the contributors was Lucien Bouchard, then a lawyer, who had been the employer representative in the most recent round of public sector bargaining and also co-author of the Martin-Bouchard report on the reform of public sector bargaining. Bouchard would later to become Quebec Premier (1996-2001). He made a plea to find a certain equilibrium between the productivity and advantageous working conditions of an ever-expanding public sector in Quebec and its private sector in the throes of an economic downturn, job loss and the need for new investment. This plea would anticipate a dramatic reversal of the most recent round of Quebec public sector negotiations when, in the context of the 1982-1983 recession, the René Lévesque Government renounced planned wage increases and decreed a 20% reduction of wages of public sector workers one year prior to the expiry of existing collective agreements, thus leading to a series of strikes, albeit of diminishing impact. Still on the theme of practitioners, who could have imagined that a then young professor at Université de Montréal, Stéphane Dion, and who would later become a prominent political leader and future Canadian Ambassador to France, would in 1984 (39:3) write one of his first academic articles on unions and municipal politics in France?

Finally, to illustrate RI/IR’s international reach, in 1982 (37:1).  the director general of the International Labour Organization (ILO), Francis Blanchard, outlined what the ILO perceived to be the key challenges for the coming decade. Among these, Blanchard pointed to the adaptation of collective bargaining and tripartism to a new economic and social context, the role of worker participation in improving both the quality of work and of production, the need to introduce forms of negotiation and conflict resolution as a way to meet worker expectations in the public services, the implications of the reconfiguration of the labour market towards service industries, rise of the service sector and the role of the ILO in meeting the vast needs of Third-World (developing) countries through both support for collective bargaining and tripartite mechanisms so often favoured by ILO conventions but also in exploring new mechanisms to meet the vast needs of the informal sector. 

Constructing a field of study
Before Google Scholar and its comparables, researchers suffered from a dearth of bibliographic tools to conduct their research. Gérard Dion was also convinced of the need to consolidate the vocabulary for the field of study to which he had contributed so much over previous decades. Ever concerned with the means to build the industrial relations community, Gerard Dion revealed his lexicographical talents in multiple ways, including terminological commentaries and the publication of his landmark dictionaries. The 1972 publication of his Vocabulaire français-anglais des relations professionnelles: Glossary of Terms Used in Industrial Relations (English-French) led to a second edition in 1974 and then to an entirely new dictionary in 1976, which was a prelude to his greatly expanded second edition, his veritable magna opus, in 1986. Reviewing the 1976 publication, both Shirely Goldenberg (1978, 33:1) and Dimitr Weiss (1978, 33:2) emphasized the debt of gratitude owed to Gérard Dion for this painstaking work. We might also mention the terminological investment of his frequent collaborator, Dimitri Weiss (1978 33:2), on the definition of the field of study and Dion’s multiple reviews from 1977 of the landmark Queen’s University publication, The Current Industrial Relations Scene, coordinated by Don Wood and Pradeep Kumar. The pages of RI/IR also frequently published, commented on or reviewed key publications from different ministries of labour and the International Labour Organization. 

Another feature of Dion’s innovation was the devotion of entire issues of the journal to cumulative indexes of its content. This first appeared in 1970 (25:4) covering the content of the journal from its founding (1945-1970) as well as the industrial relations conferences held at Université (1946-1970). In 1980 (35: 4), with the assistance of Jean Eudes Désgagnés (1970 and 1980) and Claudine Leclerc (1980), he published a comprehensive analytical update. Such efforts were a precursor of what technological change would bring. The index also offered a vision of the range of themes explored at the annual Université Laval conference of industrial relations, which typically attracted hundreds of practitioners. Themes ranged from inflation, indexation and social conflicts (1975) to the reform of the Quebec Labour Code (1979) and the state’s role in minimum working conditions (1980). 

The search for theory: a field of study, a discipline, contending paradigms? 
There were multiple efforts over the decade to impart a theoretical coherence to the field of study. Separate 1982 contributions by both Syed Hameed and Stanley Young (37 :1) depicted the field of study as increasingly multi-paradigmatic. In particular, Hameed identified power as the potential unifying theme in the contending readings offered by British pluralism, the systems approach and the radical perspective. In contrast, Roy Adams (1983, 38:3) and Viateur Larouche and Esther Déom (1984, 39:1) concluded that the systems approach offered the most compelling avenue for theoretical development and coherence. 

Also noteworthy were the many middle-range theoretical contributions by international luminaries. One can only imagine the editorial satisfaction in securing contributions by theorists such as Jack Barbash (1979, 34:4), Jean-Daniel Reynaud (1980, 35:1) and Adolf Sturmthal (1982 37:4). It’s also important to mention the consistent effort to introduce foundational works through the 384 book reviews during this period. To name just a few: Les relations de travail à l’usine by Renaud Sainsaulieu (1975, 30:3); Industrialism and Industrial Man Reconsidered by John T., Frederick H. Harbison, Clark Kerr, Charles A. Myers (1975 30:4);  Les cadres : la formation d’un groupe social by Luc Boltanski (1983 38 :4);  Politique d’éducation et organisation industrielle en France et en Allemagne : essai d’analyse sociétale  by M. Maurice, F. Sellier and J.-J. Silvestre (1983 38 :4); The Elements of Industrial Relations by Jack Barbash (1984, 30:4); Trade Unions: The Logic of Collective Action by Colin Crouch (1984, 39:1); and The Social Organization of Industrial Conflict: Control and Resistance in the Workplace, by P.K. Edwards and Hugh Scullion (1983, 38:1). The reviews in RI/IR served multiple purposes: certainly, a forum for linguistic transfers by reviewing translated works (cf. Michel Crozier and Erhard Friedberg 1983, 38:2; Henry Mintzberg 1984, 39 :4); but also, a curator of major works in a developing field. Always apparent was the inspired editorial hand of Gerard Dion, who wanted to ensure that access to these works might enter into the mind palaces of colleagues and students alike but also, no doubt, his conviction that that it would not do any harm for a particular colleague to read a foundational work.  

The publication of the first H.D. Woods lecture at the annual conference of the Canadian Industrial Relations Association (1984, 39:4) allowed Harry Arthurs of a wonderful opportunity for provocation in a field too often distracted in the practical maintenance of its short-term systemic requirements.  Reflecting on the ark of industrial relations research separating the report of the Woods Task Force on Labour Relations in 1968 and the Macdonald Commission (aka the Royal Commission on the Economic Union and Development Prospects for Canada) which reported in 1984, Arthurs drew a contrast between the liberal pluralism of the former and the neoliberalism of the latter which ,he believed, contradicted many of the underlying presumptions of the Woods Task Force. He cautioned that public policy was only likely to draw on industrial relations research when convenient and that much of the research underlying the Woods Task Force had become anachronistic by its failure to anticipate external events, to reach beyond conventional wisdom and to establish a genuinely interdisciplinary basis beyond the practical and ephemeral requirements of public policy opportunism.

The other worlds of industrial relations
In his influential history of US industrial relations scholarship, Bruce Kaufman (1993) identified an historic fracture between a unitary focus on human resources and organizational goals and a more pluralistic focus on labour markets and collective bargaining. The 1980 book, Collective Bargaining and Industrial Relations, by Thomas Kochan and Harry Katz aspired to address this fracture, which certainly remained evident in the parallel but seldom interacting contributions from these different paradigmatic approaches in the pages of RI/IR.  In a review symposium of that book in t he pages of the US journal, Industrial Relations, Richard Hyman (1982) evoked another world of IR, which appeared largely absent in the book by Kochan and Katz (and more surprisingly again in that of Kaufman a decade later). Hyman was referring to a wide range of critical scholarship in labour economics, labour law, labour sociology and labour history. This scholarship was present in ongoing debates in the United Kingdom but was largely absent in the United States. This was a theme also to be taken up in the Canadian context by Anthony Giles and Gregor Murray in their 1988 historical review of industrial relations scholarship, where they sought to give new life to the so-called radical perspective of critical political economy. 

Was this other world of industrial relations present in the pages of RI/IR? While the predominant impression during the 1975-1984 decade is one of a still fairly self-absorbed community. Paraphrasing Leonard Cohen (1992), it’s also probably fair to say that there were cracks where this alternative light could get in, as manifested in articles by Anthony Giles (1982, 37:1), Carla Lipsig-Mummé (38:3), and Sol Barkin (38:4). And the book reviews were actively shadowing this other world of industrial relations with reviews of the burgeoning literature embracing alternative paradigms, with reviews of authors such as Michael Burawoy (36:1), John Storey (37:2), and John Kelly (38:2). Book reviews also offered a window onto alternative interpretations of the past by labour historians such as Victor Levant (33:4), Bryan Palmer (36:1), James Struthers (39:3), and Laurel Sefton-McDowell (39:4). 

When we mention these other worlds of industrial relations, it’s also important to think of feminism and gender studies, for which there was, according to Anne Forrest’s revisionist history, “no room in the discourse” (1993, 48:3). However, these questions did begin to appear,  with contributions on work of equal value (1977, 32:3) and equal pay in the public sector (1978: 33:3), female labour force participation (37:2), male-female pay differentials (37:4), as well as book reviews on notable contributions such as those of Julie White and Alice Cook (36:2) and Pat and Hugh Armstrong (39:4). 

Acknowledging the contribution of RI/IR
The research community on the world of work in Canada and beyond owes a tremendous debt of gratitude to RI/IR and the Département des relations industrielles that has supported it so steadfastly over past decades. That it has done so seamlessly in two languages (French and English) – a tribute to Canada’s linguistic (albeit asymmetric) duality - is even more remarkable. It’s this collective effort to build a community that offers an enduring legacy and an object lesson for the future on the importance of building collective capacity in a field that seeks to cover all aspects of people at work and to promote the dignity of work and the mechanisms to achieve that dignity.

References
Adams, R.J. (1983). Competing Paradigms in Industrial Relations. Relations
industrielles / Industrial Relations 38(3): 508–531.

Arthurs, H.W. (1984). Understanding «Understanding»: Industrial Relations Research and Policy in Canada from 1969 to 1984... and Beyond. Relations industrielles/Industrial Relations 39(4): 753-761.

Boivin, J. (1987). Les relations industrielles: une pratique et une discipline. Relations industrielles / Industrial Relations 42(1): 179–196.

Cohen, L. (1992). Anthem. The Future. Sony Music.

Forrest, A. (1993). Women and industrial relations theory: no room in the discourse. Relations industrielles 48(3): 409-440.

Hyman, R. (1982). Symposium on Thomas Kochan’s Collective Bargaining and Industrial Relations. Industrial Relations 21(1):100-114.

Kaufman, B. E. (1993). The origins & evolution of the field of industrial relations in the United States. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Kochan, T.A. & Katz, H.C. (1980). Collective bargaining and industrial relations. Homewood, IL: Richard D. Irwin.

Larouche, V. & Déom, E. (1984). L'approche systémique en relations industrielles. Relations industrielles / Industrial Relations 39(1) : 114–145.

Murray, G. & Giles, A. (1988). Toward an Historical Understanding of Industrial
Relations Theory in Canada. Relations industrielles / Industrial Relations 43(4): 780–811.

Murray, G. & Trudeau G. (2024). "Federalism as Institutional Experimentation: The
Case of the Canadian Common Model." Canadian Labour and Employment Law Journal (CLELJ) 25(2): 231-278.

1. Although only identified as RI/IR from 2000 (a reasonable accommodation made to those who struggled over the French language pronunciation), we will us the RI/IR abbreviation.