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

• Author: Adrienne Eaton,Charles Heckscher
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/joms.12645
• Date: 01 January 2021
• Published date: 01 January 2021

© 2020 Society for the Advancement of Management Studies and John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

COVID’s Impacts on the Field of Labour and

Employment Relations

Adrienne Eaton and Charles Heckscher

Rutgers University

Keywords: collective bargaining, COVID, inequality, labour, racial justice

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 af-

fected 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 ad-

dress it. More fundamentally, these developments pose challenges to some core assump-

tions 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 bar-

gaining 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 unem-

ployment. This crisis seems likely to provide new challenges to that approach. New direc-

tions 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

Journal of Man agement Studi es 58:1 Januar y 2021

doi:10. 1111/jo ms.1 264 5

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).