ABSTRACT
Industrial relations in the service sector take on very different forms depending on the different branches of industry and the institutional resources that are present in each country. Relations between management and labour in various sub-sectors of service industries are rendered particularly difficult by a single major factor: the frequency of atypical work relations, meaning arrangements which do not correspond to traditional salaried employment and cannot be identified as strictly self-employment relations. The difficulty implied in regulating and standardising professional work activities stems from the very nature of the work: it is performed on a contractual basis for the purpose of implementing specific projects or solving complex problems, and quite often it is carried out at the client’s facilities. In the service industries, the possibility of replacing human labour with technological investments is structurally limited, and the interaction with the outside world is often a key element in the work performance.
