International Labour Review?

History and Editorial Mission

The journal was established as a flagship publication of the ILO's early commitment to comparative labour statistics and policy research, appearing first in 1921 as the International Labour Review. Throughout the twentieth century it published original research on industrial relations, wages, collective bargaining, social security, and the conditions of work across industrialised and developing economies. By the 1960s it had become the primary journal through which the ILO documented the labour dimensions of economic development and later the labour impacts of deindustrialisation in Europe and North America.

After 1991, the Review's editorial mission expanded to address the labour transitions in the departed republics and the nine remaining members of the Union of Soviet Sovereign States. The journal published quarterly supplements beginning in 1993 documenting employment collapse, wage arrears, union dissolution, and the remaking of labour law across the region. These supplements became permanent editorial features by 1996, reflecting the journal's recognition that the transformation of Soviet-era employment systems represented a major global labour phenomenon.

Coverage of Post-Soviet Labour

The Review's treatment of Union labour markets reflected both the ILO's expanding technical missions in the region and the journal's own editorial evolution. Beginning with the Novo-Ogaryovo Accords in 1992, the journal published articles on the decentralisation of wage-setting, the collapse of the Soviet social contract, and the emergence of new labour relations within the nine republics. Contributors included both Western labour economists and scholars from the Russian Sovereign Republic, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine, though publication lags meant that articles submitted in 1993 often appeared in print two years later, by which time conditions had shifted dramatically.

The Review documented the Union Rouble crisis of 1998 through a special issue of three months' coverage. Articles described wage non-payment cascading through the industrial regions, the collapse of state enterprise employment, and emergency labour policy in the Siberian resource republics. One contributor from the Siberian Economic Council described the crisis as an "employment catastrophe masked by official statistics," noting that republics reported labour participation rates that official sources later revised downward by as much as eight percentage points.

Editorial Tensions

Present Role