Abstract
With this issue of the journal we enter our 20th year. The trends in European industrial relations have been far from encouraging. In the mid-1990s, when the European Journal of Industrial Relations was launched, the ‘social dimension’ of European integration seemed to offer realistic prospects of improved employment rights in countries (not least, in Britain) where worker protections were meagre. Relatively progressive governments were in office in most EU member states, and the 1995 enlargement extended social-democratic influence.
Yet as some suspected at the time, the rhetoric of ‘Social Europe’ served as cover for a dynamic of ‘negative integration’ in which market liberalism trumped social protection. The mantras of ‘market freedom’, ‘competitiveness’, ‘modernization’ and ‘structural reform’ have come to dominate an increasingly uninhibitedly neoliberal governance of the EU. Broadening without deepening has created a regulatory vacuum, in which only the market – in other words, financialized multinational capital – rules. The economic chaos precipitated by the anarchic world disorder has served not to discredit neoliberalism but to reinforce it, with austerity the preferred response: if not embraced ‘voluntarily’, imposed by the Troika, as yet a further turn of the screw in the erosion of civilized industrial relations.
Adverse conditions make the need for critical, engaged scholarship ever more essential. Now a firmly established source of analysis and information for both researchers and practitioners, the European Journal of Industrial Relations will continue its mission to encourage a cross-fertilization of knowledge and understanding from all parts of the continent. Our ‘optimism of the will’ remains the aspiration for effective reconstruction of worker rights and protections.
In our early years, locating high-quality comparative research was often a challenge. In this respect, the last two decades have seen major progress. We now have articles accepted for the next two years, and have moved to online first publication for all work in the pipeline.
My thanks to all who have supported the journal in its progress so far. La lutte continue!