Of the many intellectual challenges that the field of industrial relations has met with in recent decades, two are particularly serious. The first is the individualization of work in forms making it arduous or impossible to recognize the distinction between employer and employee, which is a precondition of an industrial relation – think of freelancing, the gig economy, new forms of self-employment. The European Journal of International Relations (EJIR) has long hosted research on these phenomena, including on the structural forces that reproduce workers’ economic dependence while obfuscating it. The second challenge is the environmental crisis, and specifically climate change. This raises the question of whether employers and employees, as producers, are now so strongly inter-dependent that labour is fully subordinate in the joint exploitation of natural resources – think of the Volkswagen emissions scandal. Industrial relations research and the EJIR have not been as present on this latter huge societal question.

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社论

在近几十年来，劳资关系领域遇到了许多智力挑战，其中两个挑战尤其严重。首先是工作形式的个体化，使得很难或不可能认识到雇主和雇员之间的区别，这是一种劳资关系的前提-考虑自由职业，零工经济，新的自雇形式。在欧洲国际关系学院（EJIR）长期对这些现象进行研究，包括研究在使工人的经济依赖变得模糊的同时重现工人经济依赖的结构性力量。第二个挑战是环境危机，尤其是气候变化。这就提出了一个问题，即雇主和雇员（作为生产者）现在是否是如此紧密地相互依存，以至于劳动力在联合开采自然资源中完全处于从属地位-想想大众汽车排放丑闻。在后一个巨大的社会问题上，劳资关系研究和EJIR还不存在。