Introduction to the Special Issue on the Contribution of Industrial Relations to Understanding the Future of Work and Employment

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. More and more, practitioners must deal with what some call a “polycrisis”—several crises happening at once (e.g., population aging, inflation, changing worker preferences, remote work and/or a return to face-to-face work, generational demographic shifts). These crises combine with and exacerbate each other, thus making classic labour problems more unpredictable and complex. To explain this emergent diversity and complexity, we rely on a community of industrial relations scholars who theorize on work and employment from holistic, international and multi-disciplinary perspectives, while being firmly grounded in the empirical realities of local contexts and workplaces. We rely on industrial relations scholars who are constantly engaging in critique, while remaining open to a diversity of ideas, interests, stakeholders, levels of analysis and methodologies that help us both understand work and employment problems and also offer solutions. Initially founded as the Canadian Industrial Relations Research Institute (CIRRI), CIRA-ACRI is now a diverse network of specialists from unions, employers, governments and universities across Canada and around the world. CIRA-ACRI sponsors conferences, encourages high-quality research and practice and facilitates relationship-building between members. In keeping with its mission to promote research in our field, CIRA-ACRI wanted to celebrate and make room for the richness of industrial relations scholarship through a special issue on the following question: what can industrial relations tell us about the future of work and employment? The ultimate aim was to generate papers for the advancement of research and teaching in industrial relations, thus building a future for our field of study and providing researchers with an opportunity to advance theoretical reflection on contemporary realities and the future of work and employment. We sent out an open call for this special RI-IR issue on November 15, 2021. The response was excellent. From doctoral students, junior scholars and full professors we received 28 submissions, each of which went through double-blind peer review by dozens of reviewers whom we sincerely thank for their time and careful attention. Eight papers were finally selected for the special issue, and they are each summarized below. The first three papers compare (and contrast) industrial relations with other fields that generations of industrial relations scholars have both heavily critiqued and also heavily relied on to develop their own frameworks and theories. Taken together, these papers propose to reenergize our field’s long reliance on and integration with fields such as labour law as well as our attempts to reconcile perceived fundamental differences with fields like labour economics and organizational behaviour. Probably no discipline has done more to help define and shape industrial relations as its own field of study than has economics, particularly in North America. Bruce Kaufman has written extensively about how early industrial relations scholars had interests that overlapped considerably with those of early institutional economists. Interestingly, one of the 2021 Nobel Prize winners in …