Both on the ground and in the air, attention to detail can make all the difference between safety and disaster. Focused on pilots, Eva van der Fluit investigates what is needed in order to align the perspectives of all professionals they collaborate with so as to facilitate solid judgment and sound sense-making as the basis for their actions. This can lead to disagreements and conflict, which is not necessarily bad when they can manage, constructively, the pinnacle of differing paradigms at crucial moments. This can be defined as the sweet spot of conflict. This spot represents the essential moment at which all perspectives come to the table, are exchanged and lead to new insights. It takes special skills to manage such a process, many of which can be seen as mediation skills. If pilots, most often the captain, can successfully keep the communication process focused on the content and if they do not make it personal, the sweet spot may result in achieving a coordinated outcome, supported by all involved. The way pilots manage what is known as beginning conflict (as distinct from escalated conflict) has attracted the attention of other professionals such as doctors, lawyers, accountants and board members. Even at the lowest level of an organisation, important lessons may be learnt from the best practices developed in the airline industry.

Taking the Green Pledge presents a timely opportunity for mediators, and the corporations that use their services, to come together and maximise their effectiveness. Mobilising collective effort among the global mediation community can not only help to keep mediation uppermost in people’s minds as an option in the resolution of conflict but may also serve to make up, in some small way, the shortfall that arises through prolonged use of oil, gas and coal, in the face of global uncertainty.

Various of our academic board analysed employment law cases from last year.

Periods of annual leave must be taken into account when calculating whether an employee reached the threshold to be entitled to overtime payments.

The Federal Labour Court of Germany has continued to specify the requirements for the legality of age limits in employer-funded pension plans under German law. In this case, according to the Court, the employer could impose a maximum age of 55 as a requirement of entry to the company pension plan.

The Supreme Court has decided that the summary dismissal of an employee for violating a Covid-19 quarantine order by appearing at work is effective and justified.

It is not compulsory for the normal length of night work for firefighters to be shorter than the normal length of day work. It is allowed to provide for a maximum length of night work of 7 hours only for workers in the private sector and not for public-sector workers.

On 1 December 2021, just prior to the transposition deadline for Directive (EU) 2019/1937 on the protection of persons who report breaches of Union law (the ‘Whistleblowing Directive’), the Irish Supreme Court delivered a judgment that may have an impact on the Protected Disclosures (Amendment) Bill, the piece of legislation intended to be enacted in order to comply with the Whistleblowing Directive. The judgment noted that, while the Oireachtas (the Irish parliament) had envisaged that most complaints for which whistleblower protection would be sought would concern matters of public interest, the actual definition of ‘protected disclosure’ in the Protected Disclosures Act 2014 (the ‘2014 Act’) extends further than that and can cover complaints in the context of employment which are personal to the reporting person. While Ireland has missed the deadline and has yet to enact the Protected Disclosures (Amendment) Bill, one of the intended amendments has been changed since this judgment was delivered.

Peace judges must be treated like ordinary judges.

The Iaşi Court of Appeal in Romania has upheld a decision issued by the Vaslui Tribunal which found that an employee cannot be the subject of disciplinary action for the refusal to perform work during their weekly rest notwithstanding that a working time schedule imposed by the employer was based on the applicability of an internal company policy.

Working as a rider for the Deliveroo platform is a professional activity that can be performed as a self-employed worker, the Labour Tribunal of Brussels has decided, which also ruled out the possibility of Deliveroo riders enjoying the fiscally beneficial status available for workers active on electronic platforms of the collaborative economy (or ‘sharing economy’).

Theories on issue competition assume that there is only a limited number of issues that a person prioritises simultaneously. In this research note, we test this mechanism by using a panel study that was conducted among Belgian parents in 2019 and 2020. Between the two observations of the study, the country suffered a severe health crisis due to the COVID-19 pandemic. We investigate whether this crisis reduced the priority of environmental issues among respondents. Our results show that there was indeed a significant decline of some indicators for environmental concern, but not for others. Furthermore, we show that a higher priority for the health-related and economic consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic was associated with a steeper decline in environmental concern.

The underrepresentation of women in politics is a worldwide phenomenon and the Netherlands fit the pattern: about 39% of the Dutch MPs are female. Based on social role incongruity theory, it is expected that female politicians are evaluated more negatively than male politicians since women do not fit the dominant male politician role. However, most research is conducted in the United States, that is, a candidate-centred system where individual characteristics play an important role. This article focuses on the party-centred parliamentary context in which we examine (1) whether gender stereotypes are present among citizens and (2) to what extent these stereotypes influence the evaluation of politicians. We do this by conducting an experimental vignette survey design. We find that at the mass level there is no difference between the evaluation of male and female politicians, although gender stereotypes are present.

Following the municipal elections in the Walloon Region (Belgium) on 14 October 2018, 189 political groups won an absolute majority. Twenty-two of these decided not to exercise power alone, but favoured the formation of an oversized coalition by integrating a minority partner. The aim of this article is to identify the motivations behind the formation of a local coalition when one of the partners has an absolute majority. Semi-structured interviews with mayors and leaders of political groups in these municipalities make it possible to identify the motivations for, first, the choice to open and, second, the choice of a minority partner. By distinguishing between necessary and supporting motivations, this article shows that the search for greater representation is a necessary motivation for the choice to open, whereas personal affinities and memories of the past are necessary motivations for choosing minority partners. By prioritising motivations, this article shows that.

Judges and public prosecutors across Europe continue to be the main source of referral of cases to restorative justice programmes organised in the context of the criminal justice system. As a result, the training of these two groups of legal professionals regarding what restorative justice is and what it can offer to victims, offenders and the community has for many years been identified as a priority for the development of restorative justice in the European Union (EU). However, little information is available about what actually exists in terms of judicial training on restorative justice within the national judicial training institutions responsible for the initial and/or continuous training of judges and/or public prosecutors. Therefore, we developed an online survey on judicial training on restorative justice and invited 38 judicial training institutions operating in the (then) 28 EU Member States to participate in our study. We were able to make relevant observations regarding the reasons for the non-existence of restorative justice training in most of the judicial training institutions studied and identify important elements of the architecture of the restorative justice training offered by the judicial training institution of Czech Republic.

Restorative justice has frequently been presented as a new criminal justice paradigm, and as something that is radically different from punishment. I will argue that this ‘oppositioning’ is problematic for two reasons: first, because some cases of restorative justice constitute de facto punishment from the perspectives of some positions on what punishment is; second, because restorative justice could reasonably be more widely adopted as a new form of de jure punishment, which could potentially increase the use of restorative justice for the benefit of victims, offenders and society at large. In connection with the latter, I want to present some preliminary thoughts on how restorative justice could be incorporated into future criminal justice systems as de jure punishment. Furthermore, I will suggest that by insisting that restorative justice is radically different from punishment, restorative justice advocates may - contrary to their intentions − play into the hands of those who want to preserve the status quo rather than developing future criminal justice systems in the direction of restorative justice.