Previous Special Issues

Advanced economies have experienced serious labour and skills shortages over the last decade, amplifiedby the Covid-19 pandemic (ILO, 2024; OECD, 2023). While these shortages can be observed throughoutthe labour market in several countries, they are especially persistent in certain sectors, including healthcareand social work, accommodation and food services, information and communication technologies servicesas well as manufacturing or transport (Cedefop, 2024; Causa et al, 2022). Though the pandemic hasaccentuated the problem, several more structural explanatory factors have been put forward to account forthis phenomenon like population ageing and retirement, skills demand and gaps (particularly in relation totechnology and green transition), changing worker preferences, recruitment practices, and migration trends(Feist, 2024; Cedefop, 2024; Causa et al. 2022; ILO 2023; Niang et al. 2021). While the causes oflabour/skills shortages have been explored in depth, their consequences, particularly on industrial relations(IR) and human resource management (HRM), have received less attention. The angle adopted in the HRMliterature to tackle labour/skills shortages, recruitment difficulties and turnover is generally to focus onHRM practices conceived to attract and retain employees (see Renaud et al. 2023; Haines et al. 2010).

The latest issue (80-2) is now available in open access. This thematic issue has been edited by our guest editors: Patrice Jalette, Jean Charest, and Vassil Kirov. 

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“For some fifteen years now, diversity management has been promoting inclusion with a view to offering a more comprehensive vision of diversity in all its forms. Inclusion is a major challenge for organizations (Bruna et al., 2018; Cassel et al., 2022). It requires profound changes to the running of an organization in order to facilitate employee integration and to improve working conditions (Moon, 2018). Although inclusion has no universal definition (Chung et al., 2020), it has increasingly come to mean implementing certain managerial processes and strategies to increase not only the presence and training of minorities but also the efficiency of an organization by recognizing cultural and lifestyle differences as much as possible (Oswick & Noon, 2014; Laïchour & Chanlat, 2020; Adamson et al, 2021). At the same time, inclusion seems to have moved beyond a minority-specific approach and toward activities that promote the common interests of all workers (Fujimoto et al., 2014). In this sense, the aim is to help everyone perceive themselves as part of a group within which their "needs for belonging and singularity are simultaneously met" (Shore et al., 2018).”

This thematic issue has been edited by our guest editors: Loïc Fourot, Olivier Meier, Sophie Brière, Christian Makaya and Maria-Giuseppina Bruna.

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"To commemorate the Canadian Industrial Relations Association’s (CIRA-ACRI) 60th anniversary, Relations industrielles-Industrial Relations (RI-IR) and CIRA have agreed to publish a special issue to advance and consolidate knowledge in our field. For more than a century in North America, industrial relations scholars and practitioners have been studying work and employment problems, which remain age-old under capitalist models of production but are becoming more diverse and complex. For instance, while precarious work, occupational health and safety and technological change have always challenged workers, the global COVID-19 pandemic has shown that we have not come as far as we think in creating employment systems or labour policies that facilitate work-life balance, protect worker incomes against social risks, achieve employment equity, retain the people and skills required for effective operation of organizations and respect workers’ exercise of fundamental rights."

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“The articles in this special issue attempt to account for these emerging dynamics of workers struggle in platform capitalism through a comparative analysis of the relations that impel autonomous groupings and other protest initiatives towards more structured collective representation and unionization.
[…]
The eight articles provide insight into comparative analysis and debate about union dynamics in the era of platform capitalism. We bring together a geographically diverse range of case studies: three from Europe (Belgium, Spain, France); two from South America (Brazil); and three from Asia (China, India, Japan). ”

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Eight articles from different disciplines (work psychology, ergonomics, sociology of work, labour economics and management sciences) provide theoretical, methodological and empirical insights in their examination of the duality of technologies.

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In the same vein as current critical debates, the call for papers for this special issue aimed at renewing approaches to HRM by taking a more human approach to management (Taskin and Dietrich, 2016). In this issue, we wish to challenge the influences of organizational behaviour approaches and the instrumentalization of HRM. The perspective adopted focuses not only upon the critical analysis of current HRM practices, but also upon experiments relating to alternative approaches. Indeed, critical discourse must be supported by empirical studies that are anchored in the ‘field’, in the reality of work, close to the workers (including managers and senior leadership), and that realize not only the effects produced by traditional HRM (loss of meaning, dilution of the collective, distancing…), but also collective and individual strategies that are implemented in an attempt to reconstruct meaning and workplace communities. These studies should also focus on innovations aimed at a more pluralist HRM. That is, an HRM that directs its efforts towards the regulation of the employment relationship from an institutional complementarity perspective (state, union, business, community, etc.).

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In this issue we will explore these ‘new’ employment relationship boundaries. In response to criticism of research trends that focus too narrowly on so-called atypical jobs, which mask the fact that labour transformations ‘destabilize stables’ (Castel, 2009) or extend precariousness and risk to typical jobs (Vosko, 2007), it is necessary to study the characteristics associated with diversity in the employment relationship or, in other words, the effects stemming from the cohabitation of workers having different statuses and/or employers or parties giving the order in concrete work situations. Indeed, if solidarities arise in workplaces based on a common condition and a shared subordination (Castel, 2003), the coexistence of identical positions that have distinct employment statuses in the same work space clearly raises the question of the conditions for the emergence of these solidarities at work. Under the threat of unemployment and the precariousness of jobs, employees are driven to play a game of ‘competition between equals’, which contributes to the weakening of intra-categorical homogeneities. We see that it is a question of collective representation and class solidarity on the one hand, but on the other, and particularly in America, it is also about access to social protection.

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This special issue of Relations industrielles / Industrial Relations presents articles based on original research on fundamental changes to work and work arrangements that undermine workers’ health and safety, exacerbate health inequalities and pose major challenges to those who want to resist a 'race to the bottom' in working conditions and imagine and promote regulatory reforms to better protect workers and their health. The papers in this special issue not only make a contribution to knowledge about work intensification and employment precariousness and their impact on health and safety, but also shed light on further challenges presented by the current globalized work environment: the association of precariousness with international, regional and local employment-related mobility, both in developed and developing countries; the commuting difficulties faced by some workers in precarious employment; the non-standard work schedules resulting from work intensification pressures and the consequential health and work family balance difficulties; and the dilution of responsibility for health and safety and for workers’ compensation in international supply chains. One paper illustrates an old but still pervasive challenge: the production of a 'paradigm of doubt' which uses and even produces scientific uncertainty to obscure the effects of hazards to workers’ health, thus delaying the prevention and compensation of their negative effects on health

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