CfP: Industrial Relations in Europe Conference

More information on the call for papers here

We invite innovative papers that reflect on the current state and future of industrial relations in Europe. In the tradition of IREC, papers with a comparative or international dimension are especially welcome. In particular, authors are encouraged to address questions related to the following main topical clusters:

– The role of social dialogue in the twin transitions (digitalisation and decarbonisation).
– Enacting a Just Transition in regional and sectoral settings.
– Temperatures rises, extreme weather events and occupational safety and health.
– Well-being at work in changing times: remote and hybrid work, hyper-connectivity, the right to disconnect, and the rise of platform work.
– Adjusting legal frameworks and collective bargaining for digitalisation and emerging types of work (platform work).
– State regulation of collective bargaining and trade union activity.
– The role of employer organisations and trade unions in multi-employer collective bargaining.
– Emerging actors in industrial relations.
– New challenges for worker participation and labour relations at the company and workplace level in Europe.
– The debates around Social Europe and Val Duchesse reloaded.
– Inflation and collective bargaining.
– The return of strikes.
– Equality and diversity in workplace representation and collective bargaining.
– Structural inequalities and industrial relations.
– Migration and cross-border labour markets in Europe.

Authors are invited to submit their abstract in English or French to IREC2025@liser.lu. There will be an English-speaking and a French-speaking section at the conference. You can submit only one abstract for one presenting speaker to the conference. This means that at the conference, each participant can only present one paper but this does not prevent other presenters presenting papers where one is a co-author.

Abstracts in English or French should not exceed 300 words. Most sessions will have the duration of 1.5 hours. Sessions will include 3 or 4 papers (15 minutes presentation time per paper) and discussion. Abstracts will be peer-reviewed and selected for presentation.

Email for further information: IREC2025@liser.lu

Tentative list of keynote speakers (to be updated)
Professor Richard Hyman (London School of Economics, UK)
Dr. Christine Aumayr-Pintar (Eurofound, Dublin)
Associate Professor Maite Tapia (Michigan State University, US)

Important Dates
Abstract submission deadline: 31 January 2025.
Notification of acceptance: 31 March 2025 (or earlier).

Conference Date: 16-18 September 2025
Conference venue: Chambre des Salariés, Casino syndical, 63 Rue de Bonnevoie, L-1260 Luxembourg.

Registration fees: 350 EUR (PhD Students: 275 EUR). The conference will be held in-person.

New Book: Crises at Work: Economy, Climate and Pandemic

Steve Williams and Mark Erickson

https://bristoluniversitypress.co.uk/crises-at-work

Description
It is impossible to view the news at present without hearing talk of crisis. This timely book looks at how three major crises – the economy, pandemic and climate – are related to the crisis of work, making it more precarious, intense and unequal. Providing an original and critical synthesis of recent trends in the field, expert scholars offer a programme for transcending the crisis of work. Offering a timely contribution to understanding the important issues facing the world, this book presents an important new way of thinking about work in contemporary societies.

Event: Trade Unions & the British Industrial Relations Crisis: An Intellectual Biography of Hugh Clegg.

Date and Time: Wednesday 06 November 2024, 12:30 – 14:00 (light buffet lunch from 12:00)

Speaker: Peter Ackers, Emeritus Professor in the History of Industrial Relations, Loughborough University

Title: Trade Unions & the British Industrial Relations Crisis: An Intellectual Biography of Hugh Clegg.

Abstract: Hugh Clegg introduced academic Industrial Relations to the new Warwick University from the late 1960s, leading to the formation of an SSRC-funded Industrial Relations Research Unit (IRRU). He was also a founding Professor of what became Warwick Business School. Clegg was a central figure of post-war British Industrial Relations, the forerunner of Employment Relations and Human Resource Management, as taught in most Business Schools today. He defined ‘industrial democracy’ as collective bargaining with trade unions, laid the foundations for the pluralist approach to Industrial Relations, was a key figure in the post-war social sciences and a major public policy player. More widely, he was an important figure in the Cold War social democratic academic left, who broke with his earlier Communism to champion free trade unions in a liberal democratic society. He also produced the major Oxford University Press trade union history. This book aims to understand the politics and industrial relations of the post-war period in Britain (in which trade unions were central) through the life of a key public intellectual. It will help readers understand the political and social science roots of contemporary Employment Relations and Human Resource Management through a deep historical study of Clegg’s life and times, in the context of his post-war social democratic generation. It illustrates how the failures of post-war industrial relations led to Thatcherism.

Biography: Peter Ackers is Emeritus Professor in the History of Industrial Relations, Loughborough University. His research bridges contemporary social science and historical approaches to work and employment relations. On the contemporary HRM side, he has published widely on Employee Involvement, Voice and union-management Partnership, leading to the co-edited collection: Johnstone & Ackers, Finding a Voice at Work? New Perspectives on Employment Relations, Oxford University Press, 2015. He is also a Labour Historian, with an interest in Christian Nonconformity, who co-edited, Ackers & Reid, Alternatives to State-Socialism in Britain: Other Worlds of Labour in the Twentieth Century, Palgrave, 2016. Combining these two strands is Peter’s research on the history of British Industrial Relations, as both a practical public arena and an academic social science field. A particular interest is the development of pluralist and social democratic ideas, culminating in his Trade Unions & the British Industrial Relations Crisis: An Intellectual Biography of Hugh Clegg, Routledge 2024.
The seminar title is that of my new book (link below). If readers click this link and PREVIEW BOOK they can read the Introduction & an early chapter.
Trade Unions & the British Industrial Relations Crisis: An Intellectual Biography of Hugh Clegg, Routledge 2024
https://www.routledge.com/Trade-Unions-and-the-British-Industrial-Relations-Crisis-An-Intellectual-Biography-of-Hugh-Clegg/Ackers/p/book/9781032422909
Location: The seminar will be hybrid (In-person at WBS and Online via Zoom). Please email Louise Cullen (irruoffice@wbs.ac.uk) if you are attending in-person (for security purposes and entry in the WBS building).

Register:  https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/irru-202425-speaker-series-with-peter-ackers-tickets-1037682786147?aff=oddtdtcreator

4. CfP AIRAANZ 2025 Conference paper abstracts extended

Navigating the Nexus: Politics, Profession, and Practice in Industrial Relations
3-5 February 2025, Wellington, New Zealand

The Association of Industrial Relations Academics of Australia and New Zealand (AIRAANZ) is pleased to announce that the AIRAANZ 2025 Conference will be co-hosted by Te Herenga Waka Victoria University of Wellington and Te Kunenga ki Pūrehuroa Massey University and held in Wellington, New Zealand from Monday 3 to Wednesday 5 February 2025. The conference will be in-person.
The conference theme is ‘Navigating the Nexus: Politics, Profession, and Practice in Industrial Relations’. We encourage submissions relating to topics including, but not limited to, the following areas:

  • Addressing inequalities in low-paid and insecure forms of work
  • First People perspectives and Indigeneity in labour
  • Political economy of employment regulation
  • Challenges relating to gender, work and family
  • Prospects for IR: academic and practitioner perspectives
  • Deregulation and reregulation of labour markets
  • Climate change, work and sustainability
  • Migrant labour and politics
  • Politics and economies of care work
  • Political economy of health and safety
  • Workplace and domestic violence
  • Flexible work in a post-pandemic era
  • AI, gig work and worker rights
  • Future of ‘embodied work’
  • Politics and practice of diversity, equity and inclusion

We invite you to submit your abstracts and papers to Abstract and Paper Submission

Key dates

Paper Abstract due *EXTENDED*11 October 2024
HDR Students abstract due *EXTENDED*11 October 2024
Early bird registration06 December 2024

For more details on the conference, please visit the AIRAANZ conference website: https://www.airaanz.org/conference/airaanz-conference-2025

CfP Work and Equalities Institute Sixth Fairness at Work conference

Fairness reimagined:
Multidisciplinary perspectives about work

The University of Manchester
21st – 22nd January 2025
Deadline extended: Friday 11th October 2024

The conference aims to bring together academics and practitioners to discuss how questions of fairness and equality are being reimagined to humanise and improve work in what remains a socially, politically and economically challenging landscape.

Fairness and equality are urgent matters in the changing context of work and are central to achieving growth, development and social justice. Against this backdrop, multidisciplinary dialogue between diverse actors and projects is essential to identify sustainable directions and discuss the challenges of articulating an inclusive and transformational language of fairness that is sustained by concrete initiatives, commitments and accountabilities to create a credible roadmap for positive, transformational change.

The conference looks to contribute to our understanding of these challenges, exploring and showcasing how workers, organisations, unions, regulatory actors, among others, are engaging with contested ideas about fairness and using windows of opportunity to mobilize views, approaches and action.

Contributions are invited that engage with these ideas as well as broader issues on equality and fairness at work, including but not limited to the areas of equality, diversity and intersectionality, stress and well-being, dignity at work, labour and employment relations, technology and work, decent work, and key elements of employment relations such as pay, pensions and working time, regulation of work, as well as the link between human rights and employment rights. Papers examining these themes at the micro (individual), meso or macro level are welcome.

Download the call.
Venue: The University of Manchester
Cost: £200 Waged/£50 Unwaged and low-waged
(includes all food and drink and conference dinner)
Please send 500-word abstracts or 1000 words for session stream proposals to fairwrc@manchester.ac.uk by October 11th, 2024.

Call for Stewardship of BUIRA

The term of office for the Bristol team will end in 2025 after the Annual Conference.

The BUIRA Executive Committee invites applications for the next 3 year term of office (2025-28).

Applications should provide details of the stewardship team (President, Secretary, Treasurer, Communications, Membership), any administrative support at the host institution, and a brief outline of any planned activities in addition to the Association’s current activities.

Applications emailed to admin@buira.org by 15 November 2024

Event: Health & Safety At Work Act – 50 Years On Still fit for purpose?

Bookings for this conference will close on Sunday 17 November 2024.

https://www.history.ac.uk/events/health-safety-work-act-50-years-still-fit-purpose 

The History & Policy Trade Union and Employment Forum presents: Health & Safety At Work Act – 50 Years On Still fit for purpose?

2024 marks the 50th anniversary of the introduction of the Health & Safety at Work Act in 1974. At the time the Act, drawn up following the Robens report of 1972, provided a sea change in the provision of workplace safety by proposing wholesale, fundamental changes to employers’ duties, risk management and the inspectorate. 50 years on and the workplace and working arrangements have changed significantly and this conference will pose the question – Is the Act still fit for purpose?

We have brought together experts from the field of academia as well was senior trade unionists who specialise in health and safety for their members. The Conference will also be addressed by Dame Judith Hackitt, past Chair of the H&S Executive and currently Chair of the Industry Safety Steering Group for the building industry providing advice to government.

The Conference will be held in the Institute of Historical Research, on Monday 25th November 2024. Commencing at 10.00 am it will run to 3.30 pm with lunch provided, followed by a reception.

Admission: £25.00

You can now view the provisional conference programme

Research grant call on behalf of the Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Caucus (EDICa)

The Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Caucus (EDICa) (funded by UKRI and the British Academy) is looking to fund approximately 5-6 projects (total budget of around £300-350K) through the third round of its Flexible fund (awards are made at 80% FEC).

The theme of the call is the organisation of work/enabling workspaces in the UK’s research and innovation ecosystem.

To be eligible to apply you must submit an Expression of Interest (very short form) by 30 September 2024.

The deadline for applications is 31 October 2024.

To access all the wider information you should need for now, click on this link.

We are especially keen to seek interest and applications from a range of groups who are under-represented in successful grant applications from such associated funding bodies (a full list of what that entails can be accessed from the link above).

More general details of what EDICa is about and aiming to achieve can be found here.

If you have any questions and queries about this call, and not addressed by the EDICa website, please in the first instance email: edicaucus@hw.ac.uk

There will be two webinars (the second will be a repeat of the first) in the coming weeks to find out more, as well as ask questions, etc.

The webinars are yet to be fully confirmed, but we expect them to be: Wednesday, 21 August (11.00 to 12.00) and Tuesday, 10 September (14.00 to 15.00) – both UK time and will be on Zoom and recorded.