Introduction to the Special Issue on the Contribution of Industrial Relations to Understanding the Future of Work and Employment

To commemorate the Canadian Industrial Relations Association’s (CIRA-ACRI) 60th anniversary, Relations industrielles-Industrial Relations (RI-IR) and CIRA have agreed to publish a special issue to advance and consolidate knowledge in our field. For more than a century in North America, industrial relations scholars and practitioners have been studying work and employment problems, which remain age-old under capitalist models of production but are becoming more diverse and complex. For instance, while precarious work, occupational health and safety and technological change have always challenged workers, the global COVID-19 pandemic has shown that we have not come as far as we think in creating employment systems or labour policies that facilitate work-life balance, protect worker incomes against social risks, achieve employment equity, retain the people and skills required for effective operation of organizations and respect workers’ exercise of fundamental rights. More and more, practitioners must deal with what some call a “polycrisis”—several crises happening at once (e.g., population aging, inflation, changing worker preferences, remote work and/or a return to face-to-face work, generational demographic shifts). These crises combine with and exacerbate each other, thus making classic labour problems more unpredictable and complex. --Introduction

Publisher: Département des relations industrielles de l’Université Laval