The 6th European Congress of the International Industrial Relations Associations European (IIRA) Congress was held in Oslo 25-29 June, 2001. The congress is here summarized and special attention is given to the gap between the occupational health and safety issues on the one hand, and the other issues of industrial relations on the other hand.
Some 340 people from nearly 40 countries met in a sunny Oslo for the IIRA congress.
Most were researchers, but there were also a fair number of practitioners from the social partners
and from diverse EU-bodies. The largest group came as usual from the host country, but there were also very many
Brits and several participants from each of the three Nordic neighbours, Germany, US, Italy and Australia.
The rest represented all of the EU and most other countries in Europe plus some nations outside the subcontinent,
including a few developing countries. The wide representation was very fruitful, as conferences are perhaps most
important as informal meeting points. Yet, with 116 papers in 13 parallel workshops, it was hard to get more than a
glimpse of the many strands within the international IR debate (as is unavoidably the case at scientific
meetings of any size). You can find the program and papers at www.iira2001.org. The debate was structured along three tracks:
I. Structural and economic changes affecting IR, with workshops on:
- Flexibility and diversity in labour markets
- Tri-partite concertation and social partnership
- Unemployment and employment strategies
II. Upgrading the workplace:
- Work and professions in a cultural perspective
- Learning and vocational training
- Participative organisational changes
- Participation and involvement at work
- Health and safety at work
III. Social partners in a changing Europe:
- Trade unions in transition
- Multinational companies and European work councils
- EMU and the Europeanisation of collective bargaining
- Trends in national collective bargaining
The papers covered a wide range of issues, from practical case studies to more
theoretical macro models. However, in keeping with the applied perspective of
IR, most dealt with how more or less concrete changes in one or more background
factor affected various working conditions and/or the relation between the social
partners. There was one pervasive theme in all this variety, namely change:
change within
organisations, in unions and unionisation, in bargaining and other relations
between the social partners, in labour markets and the employment relation,
in the economy and the structure of production and from national to inter /multinational
industrial relations.
Unfortunately, another theme — implicit, but evident — was the neglect of occupational health and safety (OHS) as an aspect of the employment relation. Like other social scientists — e.g. work sociologists or labour historians — IR researchers may mention the health risks of work but rarely study the tripartite relations and activities to overcome these risks. This, despite the fact that the OHS activity at societal and workplace levels often surpasses wages and employment in such 'classic' IR factors as amount of labour law to regulate the relation between labour and capital, in priority given by workers, in rights and extent of participation, in interaction between the social partners and in the extent of policy making and debates.
The IR community's disregard of this corresponds to the scarce interest in the political-organisational aspects, especially the complex organisational processes, within the OHS community. Researchers and practitioners of OHS rarely study subjects as power and interest, management of OHS quality, or the influence of work organisation. They usually have a medical-technical focus, calling 'for more R&D and information to solve the problem', despite that most injuries and diseases are caused by lack of action, not by lack of applicable OHS-advice.
However, the Oslo-conference tried to bring these one-eyed traditions in contact with each other. All since the 1970s reforms, Norwegian OHS politics has — at least in theory and debate — an unusually broad and change-oriented perspective. In keeping with this, the organisers included a workshop on health and safety at work. This attracted a fairly large group of participants, who discussed papers linking OHS to international trends on working conditions, the casualisation of labour, productivity, business development strategies, workers compensation, and the strength of worker participation.Yet, this initiative did not alter how the large majority of IR-researchers define the field. Although OHS aspects were also discussed in a few papers in other workshops, most of the obvious links were passed over. For example, there was a Norwegian paper on worker participation in organisational change, which neglected their Work Environment Law, despite the fact that this is the main legislation to award workers right for such participation. Another paper discussed corporatism but didn't mention that tripartite decision making on OHS regulations is an old, widespread and contested tradition. A third discussed the balance between regulation and self-regulation in the European social model, without a word on the extensive debate and politics on the transformation from prescriptive to process regulation of OHS e.g. as 'regulated self-regulation' or reflexive law within the EU since the 70s.
Looking at the program for the coming IR-conferences, 2002 in Toronto and Cape Town and 2003 in Berlin, this demarcation between OHS and other IR issues will continue. If the extensive knowledge of the IR field is to help us integrate OHS considerations into the general management, the researchers and practitioners within OHS have to do most of the job. Learning from feminism (no other comparisons intended) we have to realise that mainstreaming of OHS into IR will not be done from the inside. We must win a place for the political organisational OHS perspective by again and again demonstrating that you cannot understand the employment relation without also taking in its working environment aspects.
Kaj Frick
National Institute for Working Life
S-112 79 Stockholm
Sweden
Tel: +46-8-730 99 40
Fax: +46-8-83 35 10
E-mail:Kaj.Frick@niwl.se