Labour Movements in a Post COVID-19 World

Call for papers

The call for papers is now open. If you would like to join us, please submit your paper abstract (150 words) here by 15 November 2021.

About the conference

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought to the fore the risks inherent in precarious and gig economy work, inequalities in access to care, the need for worker voice in creating safe workplaces, the fragility of global production networks and the urgent political demand for the state to ensure social protection. These crises have unsettled established political and economic relations and, for labour movements, given rise to urgent demands for the protection of the health, income and employment security of workers and their democratic rights both in and beyond the workplace. For some movements the crises also are a moment to envisage alternative social and economic models and a required transformation to a more equitable and low carbon economy.

This Asia-Pacific Conference of the International Sociological Association’s Research Committee on Labour Movements provides an opportunity for scholars, based both within and outside the region, to consider the agency and potential of workers and their labour movements to shape and make a post COVID-19 world. In particular we look forward to presentations addressing the following broad themes:

• changing labour regimes;
• worker representation in a post-pandemic world;
• trade unions and climate change;
• union responses to migrant labour in a time of COVID;
• organising in the platform economy;
• organising in supply chains;
• labour movements under authoritarianism;
• and international labour actors in the Asia-Pacific.

Further information