The transformation of work and employment relations: COVID-19 and beyond

Introduction

The world of work has been transformed by the COVID-19 pandemic as it threatened public health and caused profound economic and social disruption. Globally, COVID-19 prompted a loss of working hours, unemployment and job insecurity, business closures, inflation and supply chain disruption, all of which exacerbated poverty and inequality (ILO 2021). In addition, new ways of working emerged with trends around remote working accelerating in response to lockdown requirements (Williamson et al. 2021). As noted by Andrew Stewart in this Special Issue, COVID-19 is an unavoidable topic in any contemporary discussion of work and employment:

[I]t is hard to ignore the development that has thrown the world into chaos, affecting so many people, costing lives and livelihoods, and causing us to reconsider so many things we took for granted or thought we understood (Stewart 2022, 1).

The crisis prompted various responses by industrial relations (IR) stakeholders to protect livelihoods and wellbeing. In Australia, the Morrison Coalition Government’s ‘JobKeeper’ scheme involved a massive injection of public funds into the economy to protect jobs, while unions and employer groups largely cooperated around award flexibilities and other reforms to support hard-hit industries (Bray et al. 2021). In Aotearoa New Zealand, the Ardern Labour Government similarly provided wage subsidies and loan schemes for businesses, alongside additional income support, changes to business taxes, and funding support for key sectors (Wilson 2020). Beyond the pandemic, broader shifts in the employment relations landscape continued to play out, and it remains uncertain how the post-COVID world of employment will look.

In this introduction to the Special Issue on the 2021 AIRAANZ Conference, we reflect on enduring and emerging issues in employment relations, with a focus on developments in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand as well as further abroad. While the impact of COVID-19 has inevitably been a central concern for industrial relations researchers over the last two years, our collection of papers draws on the wide range of ‘big issues’ emerging in the world of work beyond COVID-19. We begin with an overview of the sessions that took place at AIRAANZ’s first online conference, then turn to the Presidential Address delivered by Professor Andrew Stewart on the future of labour research, policy and regulation. We then introduce three papers that examine the impact of COVID-19 across key sectors and occupations – police work, domestic work and academia. This is followed by two papers examining broader gendered and generational transitions in the labour market. We conclude our Editorial Introduction with reflections on the future of work as we learn to live with COVID-19, including directions for future research in employment relations arising from this collection of papers.

AIRAANZ 2021: enduring and emerging issues in IR

The 2021 AIRAANZ Conference was the Association’s first foray into online conferencing – a decision necessitated by multiple factors arising from the pandemic, including public health orders, border closures and directives to work from home. Fond memories lingered from the previous year’s event in Queenstown, New Zealand, less than a month before the World Health Organization declared the COVID-19 outbreak a global pandemic and which fundamentally reshaped life and work as we knew it. The shift to an online mode provided a novel opportunity to rethink and innovate the overall structure as well as delivery of the conference over the three days. A dozen themed sessions, symposia and workshops were organised by different convenors, alongside sessions for doctoral students. While the number of papers presented was slightly fewer than in previous years, the conference continued its tradition of showcasing impactful and emerging research in industrial relations, as broadly defined. The online format generated lively debate and discussion, as well as involving a larger international audience than usual.

Many papers, unsurprisingly, focused on the impact of COVID-19 on work over the past year. The session on COVID-19 and equality law examined the implications on workplace equality, while the public sector stream focused on essential workers at the forefront of the pandemic effort. Implications of the pandemic for women’s work was explored in a session that included papers on care work, working from home (WFH), domestic work, and women’s careers. The impact on labour activism was reviewed in a session that examined the increased challenges that labour movements globally have faced, amidst constraints on collective action.

Beyond COVID-19, enduring topics in industrial relations research were also discussed alongside emerging issues in the field. A session on trade union training examined how unions can adapt organising and education for the digital world and renew strategies to restore union strength; a session on wage theft offered new research on this ongoing problem and evaluated current policy responses; the session on transformational employment relations in New Zealand examined changes in IR since the election of Jacinda Ardern’s Labour-led Government in 2017 and Labour’s unprecedented outright majority won in the midst of the COVID crisis three years later. Other sessions considered new developments in the care and protection of employees through an examination of workplace domestic violence policies; emerging issues around care and support work, including challenges for worker health and safety and for regulation in care work settings; as well as papers considering the importance of ideas in explaining employment relations systems and outcomes, which can be overlooked within a field that is often (and unrepentantly) empirical and applied.

COVID-19 in Australia: impacts on work and regulation

Professor Andrew Stewart opens this Special Issue with a panoramic and trenchant article based on his AIRAANZ Conference 2021 Presidential Address. Stewart first points to an issue close to home: the financial devastation faced by tertiary institutions over the last two years (Hurley et al. 2021). This led to thousands of job losses and, in a dramatic acceleration of existing trends, large-scale casualisation and work intensification. Stewart then reflects on Australia’s labour market more generally. While some could continue to work in a ‘socially distanced’ way, workers in sectors like tourism and the creative arts experienced profound negative impacts (Pennington and Eltham 2021). Meanwhile, those in designated ‘essential’ jobs, like healthcare, faced stressful and often dangerous working conditions (Adelson et al. 2021). Overall, then, the employment situation became even more bleak for vulnerable workers and those in service sectors, which disproportionally impacted women and young workers. Stewart emphasises how the pandemic exacerbated existing gender inequalities in the labour market, an issue also considered by Poblete as well as Peetz and colleagues in this Special Issue. In addition to women being much more likely to work in sectors affected by closures or containment measures, WFH directives entrenched their disproportionate burden of unpaid care and domestic work (Craig and Churchill 2021).

The aged care sector is used by Stewart as an exemplar of how long-term structural problems, such as chronic under-funding, casualisation and a lack of collective bargaining, were intensified by the COVID-19 crisis. The experience of this sector also demonstrates the failure of employment regulation. Stewart then moves to consider the state of labour regulation and policy-making in Australia more generally, doubting that Australian labour law is ‘fit for purpose in the new world of work’. The paper draws attention to enduring problems including insecure work, stagnant wages, the gender pay gap, challenges to collective bargaining and a lack of evidence-based policy making. With respect to the Australian response to the COVID-19 pandemic, Stewart notes how an initially pragmatic and constructive approach soon dissipated with a ‘shift back to adversarialism’, leading to a missed opportunity for sustained cooperation:

It is … regrettable that, having invested time and effort in building what may have been the first constructive relationship between a Coalition government and the ACTU [Australian Council of Trade Unions] in many decades, and having seen the benefits of proper consultation, the government should so quickly revert to its pre-pandemic mode (Stewart 2022, 13).

Again, the COVID-19 experience illustrates the acceleration of negative trends alongside a failure to find relevant policy and regulatory responses to promote fairness, cooperation and longer-term efficiency at work. Looking across the Tasman, Stewart observes signs of a more positive approach under Jacinda Ardern’s Labour government, albeit from a lower regulatory base. Whether this endures remains to be seen.

COVID-19 and work: industry impacts

While COVID-19 had devastating social and economic effects globally, the impact across industries was not experienced equally. Border closures disproportionally impacted those sectors relying on international visitors, students and migrant workers, and lockdowns hit ‘non-essential’ customer-facing service work hardest. Much of the research focus to date has examined highly-visible issues such as the severe impact on hospitality and tourism (Pennington and Eltham 2021); work intensification and burnout in the healthcare sector (Adelson et al. 2021); or the experience of shifting to WFH for professional and office-based staff (Williamson et al. 2021). In this section of the Special Issue, we highlight papers from the conference that examined the impact of COVID-19 on three important but relatively neglected occupations – police officers, domestic workers and academics.

Police work

Bamberry and Neher examine the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on police workers’ emotional health and wellbeing in Australia. Their paper reports a thematic analysis of qualitative data from an online survey of 665 Police Federation of Australia members, around half of whom are front-line officers and the remainder mainly supervisors and managers. The authors find a significant increase in job stress due to COVID-19 as work became more complex and demanding, with increased exposure to hazards and some opposition from the public to the frequent changes in public health orders. The findings also support the proposition that stress and wellbeing is not just a function of job content or individual characteristics such as personal resilience, but also a product of how workers are managed and supported within their work environment. This argument is usefully articulated within an analytical framework that demonstrates how three sets of interconnected factors (individual, organisational and environmental) impact the social-emotional wellbeing of police service and, by extension, other workers.

Domestic work

According to the International Labour Organization (ILO), domestic work accounts for a considerable portion of the female workforce in Latin America, with most in informal and low-paid work arrangements (Salvador and Cossani 2020). In this Special Issue, Poblete (examines the strategies taken by governments in four countries (Argentina, Chile, Columbia and Paraguay) to protect the incomes of these workers as they suffered work loss during the pandemic. The paper is situated within a growing body of literature considering the impact of COVID-19 on the livelihood and health of informal workers, including domestic workers, in countries such as the United States and India (e.g. Pandey et al. 2021; Sumalatha et al. 2021) as well as Latin America (e.g. Pérez and Gandolfi 2020; Acciari et al. 2021).

In this novel comparative contribution, Poblete observes state ambivalence over supporting domestic workers as employees (e.g. through legal protection) and/or as social security beneficiaries (e.g. through cash transfers). The paper draws on the historical institutionalism approach associated with Thelen and colleagues (Mahoney and Thelen 2010) to argue that governments practiced ‘conversion’ or ‘layering’ to moderately adapt pre-existing institutions to the COVID-19 context. The experience of COVID-19 thus exposes the limitations of regulatory approaches to work in this sector, as well as the vulnerabilities of domestic workers themselves, notwithstanding ratification of the ILO’s Domestic Workers’ Convention 189 (2011) by each of the four countries concerned.

Academic work

The mandatory shift to WFH imposed by governments across the developed world might have been expected to have a less obvious impact on academics given the relative autonomy enjoyed by most such workers in the university sector. However, a paper led by Peetz et al., and involving 23 other scholars, draws attention to the gendered impact of enforced WFH under COVID-19, reinforcing findings elsewhere (Andersen et al. 2020; Garrido-Vásquez et al. 2020; Krukowski et al. 2021). The results of a survey of 3000 academics across 14 universities in Australia and Canada demonstrate that, despite different institutional arrangements and pandemic responses, women in both countries were likely to experience reduced time to engage in the ‘sustained’ (cf. ‘episodic’) knowledge work needed to deliver valued publications and grant awards. Far more so than for men, this creative time was crowded out by domestic responsibilities, especially for those with children under lockdown, as well as a tendency to prioritise the more immediate demands of teaching, service and administration. Mirroring the medical concept of ‘long COVID’ (WHO, 2021), the authors raise the possibility of a ‘long Covid career effect’ whereby loss of knowledge work and research productivity during the pandemic has enduring implications for the careers and promotion prospects of female academics. In this way COVID-19 could further entrench gender inequality.

Beyond COVID-19: transitions in the labour market

Moving from the COVID-19 theme, two of our Special Issue contributions examine broader transitions in the Australian labour market. Maloney’s article examines whether gender differences exist in work-to-retirement transition among university staff. It is well known that women experience relative disadvantage in terms of retirement income, but far less is known about gender differences in the exercise of choice over retirement transitions. The study analyses data from the authoritative Work and Careers in Australian Universities Survey which involved 21,994 employees across 19 universities in 2011. The findings show gender differences both in retirement transition preferences and how far these are realised amongst workers aged over 50. Women are more likely to desire a reduction in workdays in their transition to retirement, while men are more likely to want to maintain their working arrangements or pursue a reduction in responsibilities. In terms of achieving their desired outcomes, however, women face greater challenges mainly due to a worse financial prospect after retirement. Choice for women is therefore constrained and frustrated by their disadvantaged career paths compared to men, notwithstanding the relatively generous pension scheme in the university sector.

In our final paper, Sullivan et al. offer a critical examination of the concepts of work flexibility and security which they interrogate using qualitative data from a survey of work preferences involving 388 undergraduate students. Security and flexibility are commonly seen as opposed in liberal-market Anglophone economies (Campbell and Burgess 2018), whereas in continental Europe the concept of ‘flexicurity’ views security as an enabler both of functional flexibility for employers and work-life balance flexibility for employees. Sullivan and colleagues develop this by analysing security and flexibility in terms of control. For their young labour market entrants, flexibility and security are seen as interdependent, interpreted in terms of how far they can offer ‘temporal, spatial and functional’ control over their work. The authors note how the idea of control has become more important due to the uncertainties and precarity exacerbated by technological and job change as well as, most immediately, COVID-19. The study offers important implications for employers and policy makers to help transition young workers into their professional lives, as well as a conceptual contribution in terms of approaching flexibility and security through the lens of ‘frontiers of control’.

Reflections and conclusion

The papers in this Special Issue testify to the relevance and originality of contributions to the 2021 AIRAANZ Conference, even under unique and challenging circumstances. The selection presented here draws attention to the scope and severity of the social, emotional and economic impacts of COVID-19, both immediately and potentially over the longer-term, across a variety of sectors and occupational groups. Also emphasised is the differential impact by gender and age, with women, younger and older workers being particularly disadvantaged in careers, job security, wage outcomes and retirement opportunities (see also e.g. Shah Goda et al. 2021; Gould and Kassa 2020). At this point, now three years into the pandemic with its radical implications for work and employment relations, it is useful to consider what research – and reforms – might be needed for the ‘post-COVID’ (or, more realistically, ‘living with COVID’) world.

The papers in this collection suggest that perhaps the point of departure for all IR stakeholders (researchers, employers, policy makers and trade unions) is the heightened focus that the pandemic places on worker wellbeing. As in any economic crisis, but in this case one driven by acute threats to health, it was vulnerable and low-paid workers that generally experienced most stress under COVID-19. Yet, many others in more secure and well-rewarded employment also used the reset opportunity provided by lockdowns and WFH to question whether they wanted to return to a world of intense and less than meaningful work. As vaccinations helped us emerge from the restrictions of COVID-19, employers across a raft of industries were shocked to find that they could not find sufficient labour on similar terms as before. Labour shortages and the so-called ‘Great Resignation’ testify to an increased questioning and, where feasible, rejection of jobs ‘toxic’ to personal self-worth and wellbeing (Sull et al. 2022).

It is in everyone’s interest to better understand and address employee stressor factors, including those linked to job design and work intensity as well as extrinsic factors such as pay. Considerations around stress, burnout, mental health and wellbeing are becoming mainstreamed rather than confined to the union movement and progressive elements within HR. Organisational policies and management practices will continue to need to consider mental health and wellbeing alongside physical safety at work and support mechanisms for workers managing ongoing psychological and emotional impacts from the pandemic. Future research may therefore examine the longer-term impacts of COVID-19 on worker wellbeing and the effectiveness of strategies to manage these impacts.

Employee ‘voice’ and involvement is a crucial part of effective, worker-centred wellbeing strategies. More general questions also arise in terms of employee representation in the future. Will there be greater appetite for union organisation in the post-pandemic world? Will employers and policy makers become more amenable to an inclusive and stakeholder-driven employment agenda, or continue to disorganise and decollectivize work in the pursuit of short-term cost and ‘efficiency’ gains? How might all of this link to the rapidly developing discourse around sustainable work and the green economy?

Workplace flexibility is another important issue. At the organisation level, many businesses and public sector employers are already remodelling flexible employment through innovations such as the four-day week and ‘hybrid’ patterns that combine WFH with office-based arrangements. Relevant questions here include how will this be managed, and who will benefit most and least? This is not just a matter of employers versus workforce, but also encompasses differences within the workforce too. For example, women and younger workers might be worse placed to benefit from policies that involve remote working. Future research on precarious work, careers and flexible working in the post-pandemic environment needs to continually interrogate developments and impacts in terms of critical demographic features such as gender, age and race.

Finally, the political economy of COVID, or the role of the state in reshaping the post-pandemic workplace and labour market, is another important research area which IR scholars are well-equipped to address. COVID reveals the true extent of precarious employment, yet also how ‘essential’ are such low-paid and so-called ‘unskilled’ workers to a functioning economy. What are the key dynamics that will decide whether any post-pandemic settlement better values and protects those in insecure, routinised yet vital work – drivers, cleaners, rubbish collectors, supermarket workers, health care assistants – or seeks to return to business as before?

In closing, we reiterate Hodder and Martinez Lucio (2021) reflections in this journal on how the experience of COVID demonstrates the resilience, relevance and value of employment relations as a field of study. Work is central to questions of how a society and economy functions, sustains, and transforms itself. Prior to the pandemic, debates around the ‘future of work’ were often abstract and posited in remote and technicist terms (e.g. ‘Industrie 4.0’). The experience of the pandemic not only mainstreamed issues to do with vulnerable work, undervalued work, safety and mental health, new forms of work and how these are differentiated by gender age and race; it also lifted a lid on a plethora of potentially radical policy options open to the state, previously seen to be off limits. In this sense COVID-19 has shown the need and importance of understanding the world of work, and also how it might be changed.

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Mihajla Gavin

Dr Mihajla Gavin is a Lecturer at the University of Technology Sydney Business School. She completed her PhD at the University of Sydney in 2019, which examined how teacher trade unions have responded to neoliberal education reform in recent decades. Her current research focuses on the restructuring of teachers’ work and conditions of work in school education, worker voice, and gender and employment relations.

Mahan Poorhosseinzadeh

Mahan Poorhosseinzadeh is a Lecturer at the Australian Institute of Business (AIB) in the Human Resource Management discipline. Prior to her position at AIB, she was an academic in the department of Employment Relations and Human Resources and a research fellow at the Centre for Work, Organisation and Wellbeing at Griffith Business School. She researches and publishes in the area of women and career progression and women’s underrepresentation in senior positions and her research interests include equal opportunity at work; gender and work; women in leadership; women/minority entrepreneurship; flexible work arrangements and inclusive leadership.

Jim Arrowsmith

Jim Arrowsmith is Professor in the School of Management, Massey University where he teaches strategic and international HRM. He has published over sixty articles in leading international journals in these areas. Jim has also acted as a consultant for employers, government agencies and trade unions, including a recent series of projects for the International Labour Organisation (ILO) advising Pacific Island Countries on labour regulation and reform.