ABSTRACT
This chapter is concerned with the international context of a topic that comes with many names, for example, employee relations, employment relations, labor relations, union relations, industrial relations. Here we will primarily use the term “employee relations.” And since this text is concerned with the international context, we will use the term “international employee relations (IER).” Normally this content deals primarily with the development and current status of labor unions, primarily in manufacturing and extraction industries and the public sector. However, in recent years, many countries have developed alternatives to unions to represent the interests of employees, such as works councils, co-determination, and workers’ cooperatives, and manufacturing has become a smaller component of most countries’ labor forces, that is, the service and information technology sectors have become the largest sectors in most countries’ economies. So this chapter will use the term employee relations to cover worker relations in its broadest context in all economic and government sectors as well as in an international sense, dealing with unions as well as with other forms of employee representation.
