WHAT RECOVERY FOR INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS?
The global Covid-19 pandemic has affected work in an unprecedented way. The International Labour Organisation in 2020 registered a 8.8% fall in worked hours globally, the largest fall on record. If it can be hoped that the contraction will only be temporary, the events of the last year have raised lasting questions on the way we think about work and industrial relations.The state capacity to intervene rapidly and imperiously in the management of the economy questions the ideas of a state retreat and of unstoppable ‘neoliberal convergence’ (Baccaro and Howell 2017). Radical innovations in social security systems challenge the idea of institutional path dependency. The need for rapid and legitimate decisions about work has given new legitimation to the often dismissed instrument of social dialogue in many countries. At national level as well as in the EU, the established policy consensus on the nature of public debt has been revisited, and the Recovery Plan presents a number of employment policy opportunities. Constraints on movement in the public space, and even to and around the workplace, forces new forms of worker socialization, organization and mobilization. The extensive adoption of work from home undermines the work –life distinction and proposes new, deep forms of inequality. The realization that some of the worst treated employees are performing essential jobs for our society calls for rethinking the value of work.
Programme
16 September
h. 09.00-11.00 (CET)
Pre-Congress (streamed on SNS Youtube Channel)
Restructuring and labour struggles after Covid: the GKN case
17 September
h 15.00-16.30 (CET)
Closing Plenary Session (streamed on SNS Youtube Channel)
Donatella Della Porta | SNS, Italy
Trade unions as social movement organisations
Ines Wagner | Institute for Social Research, Oslo
(Un)making European labour markets: the case of shipbuilding