This article introduces the special issue on New Theories in Employment Relations. The authors summarize the history of employment relations theory and reflect on the implications of recent disrupt...

New Directions in Employment Relations Theory: Understanding Fragmentation, Identity, and Legitimacy:

This paper examines cross-national differences in the development of sectoral collective bargaining in the European telecommunications industry following comparable changes in market regulations. The authors seek to explain why centralized, coordinated bargaining institutions were established in Austria and Sweden, both within incumbent telecommunications firms and at the sector level, while Germany and Denmark experienced decentralization and disorganization of bargaining at both levels. The authors argue that these outcomes resulted from differences in institutional loopholes employers were able to exploit to avoid centralized bargaining and past union structures that influenced patterns of interunion cooperation. These two explanatory factors were interrelated: the presence or absence of institutional loopholes affected the basis for cooperation between unions, while labor cooperation was an important power resource unions could draw on to close emerging loopholes. Findings demonstrate the importance of sector-level political dynamics for the construction or erosion of solidaristic bargaining structures under pressure from market liberalization.

Institutions and Inequality in Liberalizing Markets: Explaining Different Trajectories of Institutional Change in Social Europe

Social science research has long critiqued how professional ideals of public service can ignore chronic problems within the healthcare industry, placing unfair burden on the "heroism" of individual workers. Yet, fewer studies investigate how healthcare professionals actively negotiate such demands for service, amidst increasing workplace pressures and risks. This paper studies Filipino nurses' response to a government policy that banned them from working overseas in order to channel their labor to local hospitals during the COVID-19 pandemic. Based on 51 in-depth interviews, we argue that nurses' willingness to serve in the Philippines' COVID-19 hospitals hinged on the point at which the deployment ban interrupted their emigration trajectories. Specifically, nurses' decision to heed their government's call to service depended on whether they saw local hospital experience as valuable for their plans of working abroad. We introduce the concept of "clocking out" to describe how aspiring nurse migrants set limits to the time they devote to local service, as they pursue a career pathway beyond national borders. We discuss how this concept can inform scholarship on nurse retention and professional values, especially for developing nations in times of crisis. 

https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4917&context=soss_research

Clocking out: Nurses refusing to work in a time of pandemic

This book examines the new economic governance (NEG) regime that the EU adopted after 2008. Its novel research design captures the supranational formulation of NEG prescriptions and their uneven deployment across countries (Germany, Italy, Ireland, Romania), policy areas (employment relations, public services), and sectors (transport, water, healthcare). NEG led to a much more vertical mode of EU integration, and its commodification agenda unleashed a plethora of union and social-movement protests, including transnationally. The book presents findings that are crucial for the prospects of European democracy, as labour politics is essential in framing the struggles about the direction of NEG along a commodification–decommodification axis rather than a national–EU axis. To shed light on corresponding processes at EU level, it upscales insights on the historical role that labour movements have played in the development of democracy and welfare states. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core. 

pdf/politicising-commodification-37tpc4q845.pdf

Politicising Commodification

Let us not mince words. We are living through some of the most tumultuous and dangerous times in recent memory. Whilst the rich wage an unrelenting class war on the poor, authoritarian rulers are trampling over hard-won democratic rights whilst provoking armed conflicts, and our planet is literally on the threshold of irreversible climate disaster. An entrenched neoliberal world order has few remedies for impending catastrophes and, in any event, is the cause of most of them. Provoked, for example, by Trump in the United States, Bolsanaro in Brazil, and Johnson, and now Truss, in the UK, nurses across the world have called for resistance to this iniquitous form of governance and its negative consequences for vulnerable healthcare systems (see Dillard-Wright, 2022; Jackson & Usher, 2019; McGibbon & Lukeman, 2019; McKeown, 2019; Montenegro et al., 2020). From Washington to Warsaw nurses have also begun to involve themselves in solidarity activism and political struggles (Korolczuk, 2016), yet neither scholars of employment relations, governments or employers necessarily expect nurses to be militant (Krachler et al., 2021). Writing in the UK, we have witnessed a government of immense ineptitude and corrupt self-interest operating at the expense of the population at large, and this has been matched globally by other governments in thrall to neoliberal economics. Flowing from this, citizens face unparalleled increases in cost of living, including unprecedented rises in energy costs and extensive food poverty. Recent lengthy exposure to austerity policies has eviscerated services and diminished people's capacity to cope. Many services now have huge waiting times, early years support has been devastated, and local charities who would normally have supported communities are collapsing. Such existential crises have contributed to a growing epidemic of mental distress which healthcare services are struggling to contain as denuded resources and staffing collide with increased demand. Amidst the immiseration, material and psychic, that has ensued an emergent protest movement is building around powerful slogans such as “Enough is Enough.”1 1 https://wesayenough.co.uk/ Why are we pointing this out in a journal whose readership is mental health nurses? Alongside other international nurses, we contend that nurses have a pressing obligation to grasp the nettle of health and welfare as highly politicized concerns and become more imaginatively and assertively involved in the resistance to attacks on social welfare, the integrity of communities and the democratic fabric of society (Dillard-Wright, 2022; Dillard-Wright & Shields-Haas, 2021; McKeown, 2019; Smith & Foth, 2021). There are a number of reasons for this plea: First, the people who make use of mental health services are clearly often at the sharp end of the aforementioned crises. People who carry serious mental illness diagnoses are typically concentrated in lower income groups are stigmatized and excluded from mainstream employment and have been subject to oppressive and punitive welfare policies including benefits sanctions. Lord Marmot's (2020) rigorous and independent inquiries and the UN Special Rapporteur report on extreme poverty and human rights in the UK (Alston, 2019) all confirmed that austerity measures were acts of deliberate political will, consciously widening inequality, with all the subsequent negative impact on mental and physical health. Though focused on the UK, these damning criticisms arguably hold for all governments that have pursued austerity policies and associated privatization and cuts to state-provided health and welfare. Second, neoliberal under-investment in public services has also resulted in substantial reductions year on year in the real value of staff wages and working conditions. The vexatious juxtaposition of government ministers cheer-leading clap for carers and subsequent denial of a proper pay rise has been firmly noted. Third, it has been observed how services have become increasingly coercive as funding, beds and staffing resources become over-stretched. This in turn plays into cycles of conflict between staff and service users. For staff who would rather work in a more consensual, relational environment this is upsetting and demotivating, but the most serious harm usually devolves to service users, further demoralizing staff concerned for patient welfare. As such, this represents a source of alienation from a preferred professional identity and an acute precipitant of moral injury for staff, who are then even more likely to consider leaving their job. Service users, survivors and refusers of mental health services are not necessarily passive victims of neoliberal austerity and economic disadvantage. Some of the most imaginative and concerted activism, grounded in sophisticated and intelligent political analysis, is being organized by critical, self-organized groups such as Recovery in the Bin2 2 https://recoveryinthebin.org/ and Black Triangle.3 3 https://blacktrianglecampaign.org/ These groups do not necessarily need or desire the support of organized care workers, especially if the offer reflects the sort of uncritical paternalism often found in services. However, politically astute, reciprocal, solidarity ought to be welcome, and to the mutual advantage of staff and service user/survivors. The forging of such alliances could create a winning coalition of forces and provide a space for ongoing consciousness raising around a politics of mental health. Creatively radical potential can be seen in instances such as a local peer-led mental health charity forming a resistance arm with plans to run civil disobedience workshops alongside grass-roots community activists. These and other community facilities are increasingly offering warming rooms and food deliveries, working alongside secondary care services. Nurses often stand accused of a political passivity or naivety. There can be some truth in this, but the obverse is also true. There have always been exemplar groups of radical healthcare workers across various disciplines. Currently, groups such as the Critical Mental Health Nurses' Network4 4 https://criticalmhnursing.org/ and Psychologists for Social Change,5 5 http://www.psychchange.org/ amongst others, are useful sites of radical ideas and action. Grass-roots collectives of healthcare workers and community activists, including nurses are active in a range of resistance and solidarity initiatives (see Angry Workers, 2022). Likewise, many nurses are active in their respective trade unions and this activism often extends into communities where nurses are also engaged in various forms of community activism and mutual aid, more so since the pandemic with ensuing recognition of shared vulnerability and compassionate concern for the most disadvantaged members of communities. Whilst this degree of nurse activism is welcome, arguably it is not enough and relies upon a minority of committed individuals. There is a stark need for nurses en masse to become more politically aware and active on a collective scale. We have collective outlets in our trade unions and other critical collectives but, again, too few nurses are fully active and arguably the unions suffer from divided representation and other organizing deficits. Nurse educators also have a key role to play. Nursing curricula could more concertedly include an emphasis on political analysis, including learning the lessons of history and engaging with critical intellectual tools informed by wide-ranging interdisciplinary knowledge. We valorize relational skills and an ethic of care in nurse education and practice, yet these ideals are more often than not presented as politically neutral. A true ethic of care and compassion for ourselves and our fellow human beings demands a corollary political morality to underpin it, and this can be fostered in teaching and learning environments. Interestingly, despite the insidious encroachment of the neoliberal gaze into higher education facilities, including attempts to stifle teaching of humanities perspectives, there is still the space to afford openings for critical debate and intelligent discussion of key issues. After all, nursing courses primarily claim to be focused on the development of critical thinking. We contend that the sort of resistances we favour could be more assertively reflected upon and debated in nursing classrooms with a view to extending this critical consciousness into practice and strategic domains. The obvious connection between social disadvantage and mental health detriment is already a crucial part of nurse education, but we now have opportunities to link such learning to better understanding the political-economic backdrop. To some extent, this is no more than a call for nurses to exercise their professionalism, albeit a more radically conscious professionalism. It is our contention that not to be more actively involved in resistance to the social detriments afflicting service users and communities is the more unprofessional stance. Otherwise, nurses are condemned to uncritically attempt to hold the line in increasingly under resourced and restrictive settings, doing the dirty work of coercion, contrary to their own and service users' well-being. Arguably, the psychological and emotional damage that results is exacerbated by political consciousness if this has no outlet in resistance; political impotence exacerbates moral injuries. Yet, our professional imperative for advocacy means that we must draw attention to the importance of social disadvantage in the clinical context at the level of individual patient care and, simultaneously, concern ourselves with advocacy on a broader political stage (Jackson & Usher, 2019; McKeown, 2022). The latter is best accomplished through our collective organizations, and thus it is incumbent on politically aware nurse advocates to become active within and between these representative organizations such as trade unions. An important start could be consciousness raising and action around the crucial five demands of the Enough is Enough campaign: securing a real pay rise, slashing energy bills, ending food poverty, providing decent homes for all and taxing the rich. In short, it is likely that not a jot of any of our practice matters if we are not tackling the root cause of much of today's mental distress and at least fighting for our most vulnerable humans. No amount of medication, CBT, IAPT or other psychologically informed or nursing interventions will shift this without complementary activist-inspired intervention. We need systemic change for patients and communities to survive and thrive. Whether we conceive of this as a public health or a political intervention we can and must do more. Otherwise, services and communities are at real risk of going under in the face of prevailing pressures. Enough really is enough. Now is the time for nurses the world over to take sides and actively be part of the resistance to social ills. Data sharing not applicable to this article as no datasets were generated or analysed during the current study. 

Are nurses at the point where enough is enough?

Scholars have intensely debated the conditions under which trade unions can successfully mobilize professionals We explore an internationally comparative perspective on mobilizing professionals by asking how two nurse unions in the United States and Germany successfully limited management's prerogative over staffing levels We found that German national institutions had little influence over the bargaining process; instead, factors at the level of organizations and their environment (leadership support, organizational restructuring, coalition‐building with supportive stakeholders and framing) enabled mobilization Based on a power resources perspective, we conclude that unions can mobilize professionals using militancy, even without much support from national institutions

The Role of Organizational Factors in Mobilizing Professionals: Evidence from Nurse Unions in the United States and Germany

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The Role of Organizational Factors in Mobilizing Professionals: Evidence from Nurse Unions in the United States and Germany