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COVID's Impacts on the Field of Labour and Employment Relations

2020; Wiley; Volume: 58; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/joms.12645

1467-6486

Adrienne E. Eaton, Charles Heckscher,

Employment and Welfare Studies

Journal of Management StudiesVolume 58, Issue 1 p. 275-279 CommentaryFree Access COVID's Impacts on the Field of Labour and Employment Relations Adrienne Eaton, Adrienne Eaton Rutgers UniversitySearch for more papers by this authorCharles Heckscher, Corresponding Author Charles Heckscher c.heckscher@rutgers.edu Rutgers University Address for reprints: Charles Heckscher, Rutgers University School of Management and Labor Relations, 50 Labor Center Way, New Brunswick, NJ 08901, USA (c.heckscher@rutgers.edu).Search for more papers by this author Adrienne Eaton, Adrienne Eaton Rutgers UniversitySearch for more papers by this authorCharles Heckscher, Corresponding Author Charles Heckscher c.heckscher@rutgers.edu Rutgers University Address for reprints: Charles Heckscher, Rutgers University School of Management and Labor Relations, 50 Labor Center Way, New Brunswick, NJ 08901, USA (c.heckscher@rutgers.edu).Search for more papers by this author First published: 04 October 2020 https://doi.org/10.1111/joms.12645Citations: 10AboutSectionsPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat The field of labour and employment relations covers work and employment from the perspective of workers, as distinct from the management-oriented field of HR. The COVID-19 crisis that spread across the globe in the early months of 2020 deeply affected employment and work in almost all sectors of the global economy. Already, many academic publishers in the field are demanding that articles and book manuscripts address it. More fundamentally, these developments pose challenges to some core assumptions of our field. Collective Bargaining and Post-War Employment Relations Systems Our field focuses on collective action by workers as a central means of improving work. The current situation shows its continued importance but raises fundamental questions about its nature and future. The legal frameworks for work regulation and collective bargaining have long been under attack across the advanced industrial democracies from changes in the economic and political environments. Traditionally the field has been locked into economic-heavy models of bargaining power which suggests that workers will have little power in a period of extreme unemployment. This crisis seems likely to provide new challenges to that approach. New directions may be more rooted in symbolic/moral power (Chun, 2011) and associational or relational power resultant from coalitions with a wider array of social justice and activist groups – such as the recent campaign for a $15 minimum wage (Hannah, 2016). The workplace has been the traditional site for organizing workers and exercising power, as well as the basis for solidarity. COVID has accelerated a growing dispersal of work that threatens this model. Some have explored more ‘transient’ types of solidarity (Heckscher and McCarthy, 2014), but there is as yet little clarity on whether these can sustain collective action and commitment over time. Some worker activism has continued to involve traditional in-person demonstrations even during the pandemic; but attention has swung towards tools of online organizing and protest that have been developing over the past decade. Unions have often been slow to incorporate these tools in their existing structures, but the COVID crisis raises the stakes. Labour-management cooperation has been an important theme of Employment Relations for over a century (Kochan and Rubinstein, 2000). Cooperative institutions are more established in Northern Europe than in the USA, yet everywhere they have been side-lined or ignored in initial unilateral responses by companies. But there have been exceptions. In the USA, some healthcare partnerships have mobilized around safety issues, redeployment, and process improvement. Evidence emerged from K-12 schools in New Jersey that districts with mature collaborative relations responded to the crisis with remarkable flexibility, creativity, and cooperation in adjusting to the crisis. Such cases will be a rich trove for future research. Government has always had a crucial role in shaping labour relations. Governments in the EU and the USA have taken divergent paths in dealing with the economic disruption of COVID. Europe has generally tried to protect existing jobs through short-term work, while the USA has tolerated much more job loss, cushioned by extension of unemployment benefits (Atlantic Council, 2020). The current crisis will provide opportunities to develop the debates between classical economists, who generally argue that the former approach will allow the economy to adapt more quickly to change, and those in our field who counter that maintaining stable employment relations is not only more humane but will enable companies and workers to rebound more quickly from the crisis. Research questions What models of employment relations at the firm or country level did a better job at protecting the health of healthcare and other essential workers and the incomes and living standards of low wage workers? Have unions or other forms of worker voice improved outcomes for workers in this moment? Have new forms of solidarity developed in this moment of physical isolation? Will the pandemic increase worker interest in collective action and organization and if so, in what forms? Are the new forms of digital organizing and mobilization more or less successful than older forms? The Structure of Work The increase in flexible (‘contingent’) work – its extent and consequences – has spawned running discussions in our field for some decades (International Labour Organization, 2016). The traditional labour approach was to protect existing jobs under collective bargaining contracts, which tends to leave gaps among short-term, migratory, or part-time workers. COVID has again raised the stakes: these same groups have largely been left out of the protections negotiated in Europe as well as in the USA ‘Gig’ workers, a relatively new category of contingent workers, lack access to the basic social safety net even in most developed countries. Some countries – including, surprisingly, the USA – adjusted their unemployment systems to expand coverage to gig or other self-employed workers. Policy variations in the coverage of non-traditional workers in the types, amounts and duration of unemployment insurance and other forms of social support create opportunities to evaluate the impact on these expansions and their sustainability. Huge percentages of the workforce are now working from home and may well continue to do so even once the acute danger of the virus passes. Popular media are already discussing the impact of this on the way workers are managed and the need for more coherent work/family policies either from the employer or the state. These work family conflicts are likely to be particularly acute for women workers and differ by class and possibly by race as well. It will also be important to examine the impact of the broken wall between work and home life that many white collar workers are reporting. Home work is also challenging to regulate within established legal frameworks. The use of computer technology has reached a take-off point in many companies. COVID has accelerated and emphasized some aspects of that shift: factories operating largely with robots; dispersed workforces online working under close electronic supervision; a spurt in collaborative tools enabling flexible teaming. An intense debate is under way over the potentials and the dangers of AI and robotics; a growing view suggests that these technologies have a bifurcating effect, deskilling or eliminating some jobs while increasing skills and potential in others. There will be much need for further research in the near future. The COVID crisis has shone a spotlight on health care systems around the world. There are immediate questions about the role of front-line health workers in reopening and restructuring work. For the longer run, our field needs more attention to the special problems of workers in care work, including elder and child care and education, and exploration of policies by governments and employers around older or disabled workers who are at special risk from the virus. Research questions Has the impact of working at home been different for women and men? Are there employer or government policies that eased these impacts? Can and should work at home be regulated in some way? For instance, many white collar workers have poor home workstations. What are the consequences of this and how can they be addressed? To what extent or in what sectors and with what consequences for workers has the pandemic accelerated the use of AI, machine learning and robotics? Economic Inequality The increase in inequality has been widely discussed by labour scholars (Abraham, 2010) as well as the ‘mainstream’ field. While inequality has been more marked in the USA than in the EU, labour unions across the board have struggled to stem a trend that is growing everywhere. In the USA the recent focus has been on increasing the minimum wage; in other countries unions have fought to maintain social policies that spread risk. It is already apparent that a consequence of COVID is a further increase in inequality (Blundell et al., 2020). The impact of unemployment has fallen most heavily on the poor and low-skilled, while the continued strength of the stock market (as of this writing) has primarily protected the wealthy. While some within our field have long sought to downplay class as a meaningful construct, many others, particularly those influenced by Marxist analysis, view it as central to the study of work. The disproportionate impact of the virus on low wage workers has brought visibility to the often terrible conditions of those workers, especially those in healthcare and in the food supply chain, and as a result has heightened attention to redistribution. In this regard, our field of study is more relevant than ever. Research questions Which sectors and countries saw increases in income inequality as a result of the pandemic and shutdowns? What was the impact of specific employment institutions (collective bargaining, unemployment insurance, etc.) on any differences in these outcomes? Gender, Racial, and Ethnic Divides The combination of the disproportionate deaths from COVID among both Black and Latinx Americans (Webb Hooper et al., 2020) followed by the uprisings after the death of George Floyd has elevated the issue of racism throughout all institutions in the United States and beyond and should heighten the focus on race and intersectionality in our field. Critical Race Theory and Intersectionality question the focus on class and the workplace as the nexus for organizing and instead argue that racial, gender and other non-economic identities must move to the centre of scholarly analysis of movement formation and mobilization. Tamara Lee and Maite Tapia have been calling for this refocus for some time now (Lee and Tapia, 2020). Though there is evident overlap between class and social marginalization, there have been relatively few attempts to integrate the two perspectives. One approach has suggested that racial tensions are used deliberately to maintain economic inequality. But for the most part the attention to ‘identity’ and ‘class’ issues have pursued different paths. The reconciliation of class-focused and identity-focused approaches to labour will be a major theme of our field in the decades to come. Research questions To what extent has the worker organizing that has taken place during the pandemic focused on identity, especially race, versus occupation or class? As a theoretical matter, are police unions different from other public sector unions, and therefore, not deserving of legal protections, as some argue? What is the impact, if any, of unionization on racial disparities across a variety of public services including policing? While these are some of the interesting challenges the COVID crisis suggests to us, there are no doubt many others. It feels ghoulish to say so, but the crisis has created rich questions and data (though also methodological challenges) for our field. REFERENCES Abraham, K. (2010). Labor in the New Economy. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press. Atlantic Council (2020). The US and Europe Have Addressed COVID Unemployment in Divergent Ways: The Differences are Revealing. 8 June 2020. Available at https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/new-atlanticist/the-us-and-europe-have-addressed-covid-unemployment-in-divergent-ways-the-differences-are-revealing/ Blundell, R., Costa Dias, M., Joyce, R. and Xu, X. (2020). ‘COVID-19 and inequalities’. Fiscal Studies, 41, 291– 319. Chun, J. J. (2011). Organizing at the Margins: The Symbolic Politics of Labor in South Korea and the United States. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Hannah, M. (2016). ‘The fight for 15: Can the organizing model that helped pass Seattle’s $15 minimum wage legislation fill the gap left by the decline in unions’. Washington University Journal of Law & Policy, 51, 257– 77. Heckscher, C. and McCarthy, J. (2014). ‘Transient solidarities: Commitment and collective action in post-industrial societies’. British Journal of Industrial Relations, 52, 627– 57. International Labour Organization (2016). Non-Standard Employment around the World: Understanding Challenges, Shaping Prospects. Available at https://www.ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/–-dgreports/–-dcomm/–-publ/documents/publication/wcms_534497.pdf Kochan, T. A. and Rubinstein, S. A. (2000). ‘Toward a stakeholder theory of the firm: The Saturn partnership’. Organization Science, 11, 367– 86. Lee, T. and Tapia, M. (2020). Confronting Race and Other Social Identity Erasures: The Case for Critical Industrial Relations Theory. (unpublished manuscript). Webb Hooper, M., Nápoles, A. M. and Pérez-Stable, E. J. (2020). ‘COVID-19 and Racial/Ethnic Disparities’. JAMA: The Journal of the American Medical Association, May. https://doi.org/10.1001/jama.2020.8598 Citing Literature Volume58, Issue1Special Issue: Corporate Entrepreneurship and Family Business: Learning Across DisciplinesJanuary 2021Pages 275-279 ReferencesRelatedInformation