‘This your strike is affecting our children’ : a story of a host community’s intervention on the front line of university–workers disputes in southwest Nigeria.

Babarinde, Ibukunolu, Butler, Christina, Hannon, Enda and Biobaku (2025) ‘This your strike is affecting our children’ : a story of a host community’s intervention on the front line of university–workers disputes in southwest Nigeria. Work, Employment and Society, ISSN (print) 0950-0170 (Epub Ahead of Print)

Abstract

While it is common to regard the traditional actors such as the employers and their representatives, employees and their representatives, and the state as the main actors in industrial relations (IR), this on-the-frontline article shows that host communities (HCs) can be recognised as IR actors in their own right. This article illustrates that the interventions of HCs in IR can be independent – contrary to how HCs are characterised as subordinates to trade unions in community unionism literature. Through Biobaku’s accounts of the interventions of a university’s host community from the Yorùbá society of southwest Nigeria, this article offers empirical contributions to the literature of neo-pluralism and decolonisation of IR in the context of the Global South, where formal and indigenous actors co-form the IR system.

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