Abstract
Even before the Covid-19 crisis, academics and policy analysts were becoming aware of the cumulative impact that are increasingly placing strains on the existing regulatory design of New Zealand’s labour market. These forces include decades of globlisation, increasing international migration flows, various manifestations of the digital and technological revolution, rapid growth of digital-Taylorism as a form of labour control, and perhaps the most devastating in the longer term, the potential impacts of climate change.
 It is increasingly recognised that these forces will have a significant long-term impact on labour markets, however, the Covid-19 crisis has shown how rapidly the world can change. This article outlines the (maybe) good, the (sometimes) bad, and then ugly of the Covid-19 pandemic and its economic consequences on New Zealand’s labour relations, labour architecture, and the future of labour law.
Highlights
The Covid-19 pandemic and its economic consequences have provided a severe and real-life stress test of the regulatory architecture of New Zealand’s labour relations and labour law
Stress testing is a term that has shifted from engineering into the language of economics and banking but in all these disciplines, stress testing is something of a hypothetical concept
In the case of labour law, the difficulty is further compounded as decisions arising as a result of the Covid-19 crisis are only beginning to emerge from the Employment Relations Authority and are unlikely to reach the courts for some months
Summary
The Covid-19 pandemic and its economic consequences have provided a severe and real-life stress test of the regulatory architecture of New Zealand’s labour relations and labour law. In the case of labour law, the difficulty is further compounded as decisions arising as a result of the Covid-19 crisis are only beginning to emerge from the Employment Relations Authority (the Authority) and are unlikely to reach the courts for some months.
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