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On 12th June 2015, a strike by contract workers was declared at Rampur terminal, All India Business in oil corporation (ABC) Ltd. The strike had disrupted the normal services of the terminal. Under such circumstances, Mr Ravi Sharma (Head human resources of the eastern region, ABC Ltd.) was unable to decide how to save the company from such a disorderly situation without any increased loss of production and manpower cost liabilities. Could Mr Ravi Sharma resolve the issue of strike through an approach of strategic rapprochement when the disruptions made by workers and local miscreants went out of control?

In-depth interview in the year 2019 was conducted with the protagonist Mr Ravi Sharma and the trade union members at the regional office of ABC Ltd., Kolkata and Rampur Terminal, respectively, to convert the narratives in the form of a fictitious case study. Four rounds of interviews were conducted by the author to complete the data collection procedure. The company™s-related information was sourced through a secondary database furnished by company™s officials. However, the data about the company, the key characters and other recognizable information have been disguised to preserve the confidentiality of information.

The strike was called by the contract workers at Rampur terminal for two primary reasons, namely, wage increase and giving preference to local people for employment whether regular or contract. Mr Ravi Sharma could pacify the unforeseen situation by adopting two-pronged strategies, namely, first, he could successfully gain the confidence of the union leader and secondly, set the environment for the conciliation proceeding so that agreement settled will not be failed to be implemented.

The case uses a system perspective of Industrial relation proposed by Dunlop (1958) to highlight the interplay between employer, government and trade unions influenced by politics and mafia that determine eventually the industrial peace in the organization.

This study aims to decrypt the efforts made by Chinese people's courts nationwide to protect the rights of Chinese posted workers in the Belt & Road (B&R) countries by investigating labour litigation cases with an extraterritorial application of Chinese labour law (under the “doctrine of overriding mandatory labour rules”).

This study collected all labour litigation from 2014 to 2018 brought forward by Chinese posted workers in Chinese courts against Chinese enterprises regarding the performance of employment contracts in the B&R countries where Chinese labour laws were mandatorily applied under the doctrine of overriding mandatory labour rules. The study adopted a qualitive research approach to analyse the compiled cases to explore their characteristics and effects.

This study found that the volume of labour disputes in the B&R countries had a somewhat positive correlation to the amount of investment from China. However, this correlation was rather superficial when compared with the correlation to the type of industrial sector (e.g. the construction sector) and to the claim category (e.g. remuneration claims). Moreover, labour disputes in both the B&R countries and China shared a great deal of similarity with regard to their concentration in certain sectors and in certain types of claims. Therefore, mandatorily applying Chinese labour law could be convenient for Chinese workers returning from abroad who seek remedies and could allow Chinese judges to issue affirmative decisions regardless of the territory in which the worker was posted.

The cases collected by this study were limited to those filed in China by Chinese workers who were hired by Chinese enterprises and sent to work in the B&R countries and did not include those filed in the B&R countries by Chinese posted workers. Future research should therefore attempt to gather a broader range of labour disputes to further clarify the issues and need for labour protection for Chinese posted workers in the B&R countries.

This study argues that the doctrine of overriding mandatory labour rules is not entirely unproblematic because it might arbitrarily rule out the standards set by foreign labour legislation that could be more favourable to workers or offer them greater protection. Therefore, giving judges a certain degree of discretion is imperative to allow them to apply foreign labour standards when they have been proven to benefit workers.

Apart from a handful of reports on individual cases, there have been very few empirical studies regarding the general picture of labour protection for Chinese posted workers in the B&R countries. This study has adopted a novel approach to collect information on labour disputes in the B&R countries and to facilitate a qualitative analysis to test the practical implications of the doctrine of overriding mandatory labour rules.

Saudi Arabia recently amended the Labour Law provisions governing the unfair dismissal of employees in the private sector. The previous version of the legislation, which had been in force for many years, had entitled employees to demand reinstatement or make a claim for fair financial compensation equal to the damages sustained. The recent amendments eliminated the right of a dismissed employee to seek reinstatement and also revised the rules relating to monetary compensation. The purpose of this paper is to critically analyse and evaluate the new approach, which has been criticized heavily. In addition, it suggests feasible alternative ways to handle unfair employee dismissal, which can be incorporated into the current Saudi Labour Law.

This paper presents an analysis of the existing approach to dealing with unfair employee termination in the Saudi Labour Law. It is based mainly on information collected from various legal materials, such as books, review of judgments issued by the Commission for the Settlement of Labour Disputes in Saudi Arabia and relevant Islamic rules.

The results of this examination clearly show that there are several flaws in the current approach to dealing with the issue of unfair dismissal of employees. To correct this situation, workable approaches have been suggested for possible consideration and incorporation into the Saudi Labour Law.

To the author’s knowledge, this is the first academic study to analyse the current approach to handling unfair employee dismissal in the Saudi Labour Law.

The purpose of this paper is to shed light on the unexplored characteristics of labor relations in Nepal against the backdrop of social exchange theory as it relates to labor relations.

The paper considers the psychological contract of promises and expectations from the social exchange theory on the ground in Nepal. To do so, the paper adopts an inductive method of investigation and reviews dispersed and unstructured archival data.

In terms of the psychological contract of promises and expectations, Nepalese workers and trade unions appear to have constituted a pressure group since they aligned themselves with Nepal's political parties. Consequently, the legal labor framework and behaviors of trade unions have produced highly politicized labor relations; very high and dense union memberships; vocal unions; a labor-supportive legal framework; union-influenced government and union-driven enterprise-level collective bargaining and collective dispute settlement.

The paper claims that although the system framework has flimsy prospects elsewhere in the world, it is strong in Nepal as a result of the recent Labor Act of 2017. For this very reason, the paper argues that Nepal's trade unions are in their sturdiest position ever and, therefore, that the country has evaded the crisis experienced in advanced and emerging economies in other parts of world. In theoretical terms, the article contributes from the social exchange theoretical perspective to the literature on the psychological contract of promises and expectations. It also has a bearing on emerging discourses and debates about the revitalization or reshaping of traditional industrial relations.

The issue of employment status lies at the heart of much conflict in the gig economy, with many gig economy workers effectively excluded from statutory employment protection because of it. Establishing employment status continues to be the gateway to accessing most UK statutory employment rights, a fact which makes the exclusion of casual workers from much statutory protection seem arbitrary and unjust. Employment status has been historically determined by common law conceptions of the contract of employment. This creates particular difficulties for casual workers, who have typically had to prove a requirement to perform personal service and to show that the contract was based on mutual obligations in order to be recognised as employees. The advent of the gig economy has seen the concept of employment status evolve as courts and legislators have struggled to adapt to a more flexible labour market. Likewise, gig economy employers have gone to considerable lengths to try to circumvent the legal protections available to their workers. This chapter will examine the evolving role of common law doctrine in defining employment status and the emergence of the category of ‘worker’ as an definition of employment status for those who work in the gig economy. It will analyse prominent cases involving gig economy employers (such as Uber BV v Aslam) and explore how these cases have re-defined contractual doctrine. Finally, the chapter will analyse the Taylor Review (2017) and examine the viability of a conceptual uncoupling of statutory employment protection from contractual doctrine.

This article examines in what way strategies of new independent trade unions in London – that achieved pioneering, victories to end outsourcing – offer learning opportunities for more established trade unions. It proposes to (re-)encourage a culture of class struggle trade unionism. The article builds on existing research that outlined the organising practices of these independent trade unions but breaks down the binary analysis of independent versus established trade unions. The author uses the acronym CARE (Collectivising individual grievances, Action, Relations of trust and care, Escalating confrontations) as an analytical framework for exploring class struggle trade unionism, and examines in what ways these strategies have been (re)-learnt by established trade unions through the example of independent trade unions. In doing so, this article contributes to a much wider debate on trade union renewal.

This article offers an insider perspective of an “academic activist” (Chatterton et al., 2007). The article draws on author’s experiences and reflection as the co-founder of the trade union United Voices of the World (UVW) created in 2014, and previously involvement in the establishment of the Independent Workers of Great Britain (IWGB) in 2012. Findings are based on author’s ethnographic engagement as well as a selection of 29 interviews from a much larger data set on independent trade unions comprising focus groups and interviews.

This article demonstrates that class struggle trade unionism has in some ways been remembered and hence pioneered by the new independent trade unions, yet they are possible in established trade unions alike.

This is the first time an article systematically explores the strategies that established trade unions can learn – and indeed are learning – from independent trade unions.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the actual legal effect of collective agreements by focusing on the litigation regarding the implementation of collective agreements in China where current literature on the topic is scarce.

This paper deploys both quantitative and qualitative methods to investigate the features of litigation regarding collective agreements. The judgments on collective agreement by people’s courts nationwide from 1 January 2014 to 31 December 2018 provide the primary empirical data. The intrinsic features of collective agreement disputes are investigated to delineate different sorts of theoretically presumed legal effect, namely contractual, normative and other (if any). A number of collective agreement templates and texts have been gathered and analysed to further explore the factors leading to collective agreement disputes. A dozen of labour law professionals, workers, scholars and trade union officials, were interviewed to verify the findings.

The number of collective agreement disputes is relatively small compared to the number of valid collective agreements or the volume of other labour disputes. This study found no litigation initiated by trade unions to claim a remedy against a violation of a collective agreement by an employer. However, a growing number of cases were filed by individual workers to complain about the terms and conditions of their individual employment agreements in contradiction to the existing collective agreement. These data do not mean that collective agreements lack problems or have no significance in action. A novel effect – a “substitution effect” – is evident in the existing labour litigations and relatively popular amongst employers, as they often refer to the collective agreement when a written individual agreement, as the mandatory document, is absent. The advent of substitution effect reflects a pragmatic view amongst Chinese labour law professionals, employers and workers.

Due to the recent establishment of the online judgments database, this study has focused on collective agreement litigation in people’s courts from 2014 to 2018, which is representative of the national trend of such disputes and thus provides valuable insights. Future studies should cover a wider time span and extend to the collective agreement disputes subject to labour arbitration to provide a fuller picture of the challenges and potential solutions.

By understanding the legal effect of collective agreements in reality, the legislature, workers and employers can act accordingly to enhance or empower it. The insignificant volume of both contractual and normative claims on collective agreements indicates the pressing need to inject something concrete into both substantive rights and the implementation mechanisms of collective agreements. The existence of substitution claims illustrates the room for further implementation of written individual agreements to reduce the need to borrow from collective agreements to fill the void left by the absence of individual agreements.

This study uniquely evaluates collective agreement disputes in China to seek their true legal effect, finding the substitution effect of collective agreements that was absent from the prior literature. The features of collective agreements are reflected in this work, together with public policy and theoretical implications.

The purpose of this study is to examine the impact of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) on indigenous contractors in a developing economy with a view to enhancing their performance.

The study used a purposive sampling technique to select 37 indigenous contractors with ongoing construction contracts in Osun State, Nigeria who provided data for the study. A structured interview protocol was used to elicit the required information from the interviewees and frequency, percentage and content analysis were used for data analysis.

The results showed that the critical impact of COVID-19 on indigenous contractors in a developing economy is: time overrun, loss of profit and creation of dispute. Further results showed that other impacts are a disruption in supply of labour, locally sourced materials are with additional cost, the additional cost of implementing COVID-19 protocols, difficulty in sourcing imported materials and absence of new jobs with the corresponding retrenchment of workers.

The study recommended special palliatives for the indigenous contractors from the government so as to cushion the impact of the pandemic on them, thereby enhance their survival and performance. A special arbitration panel is set up in each state of the federation to look at disputes arising from the aftermath of the pandemic, this is with a view to adequately compensate indigenous contractors with genuine and properly compiled claims. inferring from the findings of the study, it suffices to say that the severity of the impact of the pandemic is very high on indigenous contractors in developing economies, as such a better preparedness strategy could lessen the impact of such pandemic in the future.

The study is an attempt to unearth the impact of COVID-19 on indigenous contractors with ongoing construction contracts in a developing economy. The study will be of value to construction stakeholders in providing the information needed to devise strategies to minimise the impact of a pandemic on indigenous contractors in future projects thereby enhance their performance.

This chapter begins by introducing trade unions: their purpose in representing members, different perspectives on the role and impact of trade unions and the opposition they face within the workplace. The chapter proceeds to discuss the role of, and particular challenges faced by, trade unions in the civil aviation industry. There follows a discussion of the role of women in civil aviation and both the crucial role played by women within trade unions and the role of trade unions in representing the interests of women. The chapter closes with a discussion of the role women might play in the revitalisation of the labour movement within the civil aviation industry.

After decades of declining strike rates in the industrialized world, recent years have seen a surge of militant walkouts in the global South, political strikes in Europe, and unconventional strikes in nonunion sectors in the United States. This new diversity of strike action calls for a new theoretical framework. In this paper, we review the historical strengths and limits of traditions of strike theory in the United States. Building on the emerging power resources approach, we propose a model based on a multidimensional view of associational power, power resources, and arenas of conflict in the economy, state, and civil society. We demonstrate the utility of our approach via a case analysis of strikes in the “Fight for $15” campaign in the United States.