Industrielle Beziehungen

Germany, with its unique social partnership model, firm-level co-determination, and high automation potential across its dominant industrial sector, provides an intriguing case for examining works councils’ effect on automation risks in more...

Brexit has had significant implications for European Works Councils in multinational companies operating in the United Kingdom. This international comparative case study examines these implications based on 60 cases, employing qualitative content...

The study investigates how employees allocated their additional time arising from short-time work in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic.Short-time work is a radical form of working time reduction. In contrast to existing studies that focus on the...

This paper documents and analyses the demise of works councils in Germany in the period 2007–2022. Using representative panel data, we show that the share of plants with a works council has fallen in the private but not in the public sector in...

This article looks at the formation of structures of collective organizing among Lagos’ metal scrap dealers since the early 2010s. While the development of their activities from the 1990s has been premised on the commodification of labor and...

Discussions of Sudan’s role in red sea geopolitics often focuses on its strategic location and the larger regional politics that shape power within the region. The Kella movement, the dockworkers, are key actors in shaping not just the city of...

Starting from the idea that African industrial relation systems has been always organized around permanent and indefinite-term employment, this paper investigates the ability of unions to include or exclude the “new” informal workers in their...

This article reviews quantitative research on unions and collective bargaining in Sub-Saharan Africa. It discusses the consequences of unions for wages, inequality, economic performance and employer-employee relations. The article also highlights...

This article applies the concept of the workplace public sphere to worker-led cooperatives and explores how industrial relations are practiced within a cooperative public sphere. To address this question, a normative theoretical framework is first...

Beyond framing analysis and power resource approach, the public sphere hardly plays any role in industrial relations research. A more recent strand of literature, however, calls for a closer examination of the interaction between the world of work...

This article explores the significance and dynamics of labor political publics through the example of a conflict over industrial transformation. To capture the specific nature of labor mobilizations and conflicts, the concept of workplace publics is...

Trade unions in Germany are experiencing a resurgence. Recent disputes in the public sector demonstrate that building organizational power requires linking employees’ immediate interests with the common good. In this article, we argue that in...

Over the past two decades, care work has become an important topic in public discourse, which have largely revolved around diagnoses of crisis and the modernization potential of care. In this article we focus on how care workers in different sectors...

The article discusses a number of proposals for the reform of regulations governing the still widespread use of atypical employment forms. We distinguish between mini-jobs, midi-jobs, fixed-term contracts, temporary agency work and also include solo...

In this article, I propose to expand and reformulate existing power resource approaches by incorporating emotional power into their domain. Emotions have so far received no systematic attention by trade union research. While some promising...

Staff councils represent employees and civil servants in the German public sector and are key actors in co-determination. Nevertheless, so far, they have received only little attention in both public discourses and industrial relations research....

Drawing on a case study of construction work in Switzerland, this article explores the potential application of labour process theory (LPT) to analysis of climate change-related work conflicts. A multi-level analysis promises to aid in the...

The article analyses the climate policy of the German Trade Union Federation over the last 30 years. It defines a new form of eco social partnership unionism where unions use existing institutions to adapt to the challenges of climate change without...

The ecological and digital transformation presents companies with the challenge of changing business models and innovation paths. The dual system of industrial relations in Germany has so far offered few opportunities for trade unions and works...

The socio-ecological transformation is a key issue on the political agenda of the EU and its member states, as seen in the Green Deal. However, despite joint declarations, there are differences in the national transition paths. The UNDP Development...