Regulation, Change and the Work Environment

Abstract

This special issue of Relations industrielles / Industrial Relations presents articles based on original research on fundamental changes to work and work arrangements that undermine workers’ health and safety, exacerbate health inequalities and pose major challenges to those who want to resist a 'race to the bottom' in working conditions and imagine and promote regulatory reforms to better protect workers and their health. The papers in this special issue not only make a contribution to knowledge about work intensification and employment precariousness and their impact on health and safety, but also shed light on further challenges presented by the current globalized work environment: the association of precariousness with international, regional and local employment related mobility, both in developed and developing countries; the commuting difficulties faced by some workers in precarious employment; the non-standard work schedules resulting from work intensification pressures and the consequential health and work family balance difficulties; and the dilution of responsibility for health and safety and for workers’ compensation in international supply chains. One paper illustrates an old but still pervasive challenge: the production of a 'paradigm of doubt' which uses and even produces scientific uncertainty to obscure the effects of hazards to workers’ health, thus delaying the prevention and compensation of their negative effects on health. The articles in this special issue all result from presentations made by their authors at the International Conference on Regulation, Change and the Work Environment1 that was held in December 2015 at the University of Ottawa. The idea for the conference series that culminated in this conference emerged in discussions with colleagues from Australia, the United Kingdom, Canada and France about the importance of ensuring networking opportunities and support for the next generation of scholars committed to the pursuit of research in the field of work environment and regulation in the context of globalization. To this end, a first symposium was hosted by the Cardiff Work Environment Research Centre at Cardiff University in the summer of 2014, where English speaking scholars from the Global North and the Global South, and from a variety of disciplines, met to discuss research on work organization, governance and the regulatory aspects of occupational health and safety and the work environment (Quinlan et al., 2015). The Ottawa conference took a further step in consolidating an international research network in our field, bringing together English speaking participants from Australia, Canada, China, the UK and the USA, on the one hand, and French speaking scholars from Belgium, Canada (Quebec) and France on the other. All of these scholars have been pursuing research on similar issues, addressing occupational health and safety challenges often arising from globalized labour markets that are associated with a rise in precarious employment, an increasingly geographically mobile workforce, and the ”fissuring” of the workplace, to borrow the term of David Weil (2014). The contributions to this issue report on research findings from studies conducted in workplaces and regulatory environments that are quite different from each other, undertaken by scholars from various disciplines, including sociology, law, industrial relations/labour and management studies, communications and ergonomics. Yet the results of these studies, be they from countries with advanced economies, such as Canada, Australia or France, or emerging economies such as China, provide a relatively concordant portrait of the challenges raised by the need for effective regulation of working conditions for the purpose of protecting workers’ health and safety, and ensuring adequate access to healthcare and income support when injuries or illnesses arise because of work. To facilitate our understanding of the cross-cutting messages of these studies, in this introduction we define key concepts underpinning the conference activities and, by extension, the articles in this issue. We will first consider 'regulation' in the field of occupational health and safety, then 'change' looking at precarious employment, employment-related geographical mobility and globalization. We will then present highlights from each paper touching on these issues, and, when necessary, place them in their geographical and historical context.