Industrial Relations, 1975 to 2025

In introducing his new book, A Concise Introduction to Employment Relations (Elger: 2005), Richard Hyman notes that if anyone were inventing the subject today, they would not think of calling it industrial relations, which does tend to imply manufacturing industry, whereas the world of work today primarily involves very different forms of productive activity, including much external to the boundaries of the contract of employment and large organizations. Offering a critical discussion of Polanyi is one of the themes Hyman uses to analyse the landscape of contemporary work, the sustained assault on workers living standards and collective organizations, and the possibilities for a counter-mobilization by workers to confront the challenges of Covid-19 and its aftermath, international politics and European war, and climate politics and the green transition.