Comparativism is no longer a purely academic exercise but has increasingly become an urgent necessity for industrial relations and legal practitioners, due to the growth of multinational enterprises and the impact of international and regional organizations aspiring to harmonize rules. The growing need for comprehensive, up-to-date, and readily available information on labour law and industrial relations in different countries led to the publication of the International Encyclopaedia for Labour Law and Industrial Relations, in which almost 100 international and national monographs have thus far been published. This book, Comparative Labour Law and Industrial Relations in Industrialized Market Economies, goes further than the Encyclopaedia inasmuch as most of the chapters provide comparative and integrated thematic treatment. The aim is to describe the salient characteristics and trends in labour law and industrial relations in the contemporary world.