Journal of Industrial Relations

This paper focuses on the legal remedies for age discrimination and dismissal of older workers, identifying the factors that courts and tribunals in Australia and the United Kingdom (UK) consider when calculating compensation for two forms of damages: injury to feelings and future losses. A secondary aim is to determine whether these factors adequately consider the unique workforce participation challenges faced by older workers in both countries. Considering the similarities between Australian and UK age discrimination law and given that the latter jurisdiction has had considerably more successful cases than the former, this study adopts a comparative approach and draws on UK cases to inform the development of Australian age discrimination law. Analysis of all successful Australian and a selection of successful UK age discrimination and dismissal cases spanning from 2017 to 2020 suggests that Australian law might be strengthened by: adopting a scale of awards similar to the guidelines established in Vento v Chief Constable of West Yorkshire Police [2002] EWCA Civ 1871 (‘Vento’) for recognising and awarding injury to feelings; and by more readily awarding future losses, particularly for claimants who plan to work or who are already working past retirement age.

This paper uses micro-data from the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) Survey to examine the relationship between gender role attitudes and the labour supply of men and women. Using the Wellington decomposition technique, the paper also considers how much of the change in the gender gap in labour force participation (LFP) between 2001/5 and 2015/19 may be explained by changes in the gender role attitudes of adult women and men. The results show a 6.5 percentage point convergence in the gender gap in LFP between the two periods. Nearly half the convergence arises from a change in the schooling attainment of men and women. Just over one-third is due to changes in gender role attitudes (faster adoption of egalitarian gender role attitudes by women).

This study takes a mutual gains perspective to investigate how a labour‒management partnership (LMP) impacts organisational occupational and health safety (OHS) performance and creates a safe workplace. It develops a model linking employee psychological safety with a collaborative industrial relations (IR) climate and ultimately organisational OHS performance. The research context is China ‒ where LMP is driven by the Party-state in managing labour relations. To test the proposed linkage model, multi-level structural equation modelling is conducted, using matched employer‒employee data from 205 companies and 7229 employees in an industrial park in the Yangtze River Delta. The results support the use of the linkage model, demonstrating that partnership decision-making increases psychological safety, in turn developing a collaborative IR climate, ultimately reducing the number of accidents. This study contributes to partnership research by exploring the underlying mechanisms of how a partnership arising from the logic of neo-pluralism successfully delivers mutual gains for employees and employers in a non-pluralist context. It has wider implications for collaborative management and OHS management in a developing country.

This article examines unions’ role in mitigating the impact of COVID-19 on hotel workers in Siem Reap, Cambodia's most popular tourist destination. The article analyses the experiences of unionised and non-unionised hotel workers before and during the pandemic, drawing on data collected from one non-unionised and three unionised hotels. Data was collected through in-depth qualitative interviews with management, workers, workplace union officials, as well as with national federation leaders and government officials. Our analysis of that data revealed that unionised hotel workers received far better support from their employers and the government than non-unionised hotel workers, and that their unions played an important role in securing these benefits. This suggests that, in the absence of union power, international reputation was not enough to protect workers during COVID-19.

In the fields of labour market research and industrial relations research, there is increasing interest in post-colonial societies and the labour market outcomes of indigenous peoples. However, existing research has generally underexplored the Greenlandic labour market. This is particularly true for factors associated with the Greenlandic Inuit population's employment outcomes. In this article, we investigate barriers and potentials for labour market participation in Greenland, focusing on individual-level factors that promote or inhibit the likelihood of being employed. We use a unique, nationally representative survey of the working-age population and explore these factors through a series of logistic regression analyses. We find that educational attainment, positive self-assessed health, and the number of people in the household were positively related to employment. Our most important findings and contributions are that respondents who answered the survey in Greenlandic were less likely to be employed compared to those who answered it in Danish. Furthermore, if a respondent was born in Greenland, compared to being born in Denmark, it lowers the likelihood of being employed. We interpret this disparity as evidence of an ethnically segregated labour market with indications of discrimination.

Literature commonly links the role of informality in collective bargaining to industrial relations systems based on voluntarism and decentralized negotiation settings. According to this view, informal processes won’t exist or at best play a marginal role in institutionally strong industrial relations systems, where formal rules define the roles, rights and duties of actors in the system. Yet, even in highly regulated contexts, formal and informal mechanisms very often co-exist and complement each other to help reach agreements or solve conflicts among actors. A relational approach and social network analysis applied to the study of the retail sector in Italy, Netherlands and Spain allows to understand the role of informality in countries with different industrial relations regimes. The analysis shows the importance of informal interactions and events in all countries, irrespectively of the industrial relations regime, and confirms the positive contribution of relational approaches to the study of collective bargaining linking with the literature on the embeddedness theory and structural holes.

With the rise of social media, unions are increasingly performing their identity on the digital scene. While this displacement has generated much academic speculation, the literature still largely ignores how unions concretely stage ‘who they are’ on social media. This article elaborates upon Goffman's approach to identity performance by analysing how eight Quebecois trade unions present themselves online. The findings highlight four types of online identity performance: self-caricaturing bureaucracy, fading service provider, opponent polarizing and community narcissizing identity performance. The article makes two main contributions to the literature. First, it enriches debates about unions’ use of social media by showing that digital technologies may not be considered as universally good, bad or neutral for unions’ online identities. Second, it contributes to discussions about the nature of unions’ identities by highlighting how communicational spaces help to shape them.

The article Employment stability and decent work published in the Journal of Industrial Relations by Murphy and Turner presents evidence forming the basis of a claim that job instability has not increased in Ireland between 1998 and 2021. This contrasts with a rich literature in industrial relations and the sociology of work and organizations, which documents the fundamental transformation of employment relationships since the 1990s toward greater insecurity. In this response paper, I question the empirical foundations of Murphy and Turner's claims. Analyzing the same data set used in their study, I provide clear evidence that an increase in job instability consistent with the precarious work literature has been hiding in plain sight. I also engage with their efforts at theorizing the nature of the recent transformation of employment relationships in Ireland specifically, and in Liberal Market Economies more broadly. In doing so, I suggest research avenues that go beyond a polarized debate in whether or not job instability has increased in order to contribute to a more complex understanding of contemporary changes in career trajectories.

Labour market dynamics are complex, limiting the capacity for consensus on a singular phenomenon to account for patterns. In this paper, we present a range of broader empirical trends from the Irish labour market that suggests the possible impact of neoliberal-type policies in the Irish market has been counterbalanced by strong human capital and skills development, growth in higher level occupations and employment protection. Though precarious work is a feature of parts of the labour market, the theoretical assumptions underpinning precarious work we argue should not be extrapolated to explain changes in job stability in the labour market at large.