Abstract
Of the many intellectual challenges that the field of industrial relations has met with in recent decades, two are particularly serious. The first is the individualization of work in forms making it arduous or impossible to recognize the distinction between employer and employee, which is a precondition of an industrial relation – think of freelancing, the gig economy, new forms of self-employment. The European Journal of International Relations (EJIR) has long hosted research on these phenomena, including on the structural forces that reproduce workers’ economic dependence while obfuscating it. The second challenge is the environmental crisis, and specifically climate change. This raises the question of whether employers and employees, as producers, are now so strongly inter-dependent that labour is fully subordinate in the joint exploitation of natural resources – think of the Volkswagen emissions scandal. Industrial relations research and the EJIR have not been as present on this latter huge societal question.
This Special Issue, edited with passion and experience by Linda Clarke and Carla Lipsig-Mummé, helps to fill the void. Its articles map the dilemmas of trade unions with regard to climate change and disentangle the issues raised by the idea of a Just Transition to a carbon-neutral economy. They show evidence of variation and influence in trade union actions on climate change and will certainly inspire more research on the complex problems they present.
This issue also concludes the first volume under the stewardship of this new Editor. The transition, including to the online submission system, seems to have worked out smoothly. But the COVID-19 pandemic has made it a difficult year for all. In the absence of physical conferences, the comparative studies research community relies even more on journals like the EJIR to keep the flow of ideas and debates going. Exceptional gratitude is owed to all involved (in writing, reviewing, editing and producing) for keeping up the work on the journal in unprecedented difficult circumstances – which by redefining the rules and boundaries of work will certainly call for more research, including on these pages.