At the 2025 annual conference of the Association of Industrial Relations Academics of Australia and New Zealand (AIRAANZ), the editors of the New Zealand Journal of Employment – Dr Felicity Lamm and Dr Erling Rasmussen - both received the Vic Taylor Long Term Contribution Award 2024. This prestigious award has had many well-known Australian and New Zealand recipients (see AIRAANZ Award, 2023).

During the presentation speeches, the academic achievements of Dr Lamm and Dr Rasmussen were outlined (see the brief overviews below). However, their contributions as editors of the NZJER and as authors of the New Zealand Employment Relations textbook were singled out as crucial achievements. They have been editors of the NZJER since 2004 and their textbook writing started in the late 1990s. In particular, the move towards genuine Open Access of the NZJER and textbooks were lauded as a way of opening academic research to practitioners and other interested parties (a discussion of the journey towards Open Access, see Rasmussen, Lamm & Molineaux, 2022).