Reflecting on Social Movement Unionism in Hong Kong: The Case of the Dockworkers’ Strike in 2013

By analysing the 2013 Hong Kong dockworkers’ strike, this article explores how workers, precariously situated in the world’s freest economy, fight for decent wages with the support of civil society. It is argued that the trade union movement in Hong Kong, a Special Administration Region of the People’s Republic of China, is a typical example of social movement unionism. It suggests that the rise of social movement unionism in Hong Kong was a practical strategy of social activists to support labour rights under the specific context of vulnerable structural power, weak institutional power, failed political unionism and a vibrant civil society. Social movement unionism has a “double-edged sword” effect on workers’ power: on the one hand, it has the potential to create societal power and strengthen associational power; on the other hand, it may compromise workers’ militancy and the possibility of stronger workplace bargaining power during workers’ struggle.     

Production Politics and Migrant Labour Advocacy in Singapore

Since 2005, NGO activism, calling for greater legal protection for contract migrant workers has been the most concerted challenge to Singapore’s migrant labour regime. Despite a severely restricted civil society space, migrant labour advocacy has delivered small but significant reforms to laws covering migrant labour. The existing literature on migrant labour advocacy focuses on the importance of civil society space in determining the outcomes of organised contention. In the Singapore context, the limitations of advocacy are emphasised and explained in terms of the illiberal nature of the People’s Action Party-state and the strategies deployed by non-governmental organisations. Such an approach is limited in its explanatory potential as it only states what political spaces are not available without examining how spaces for contention are created. In contrast, this article identifies the production politics between migrant workers and their employers as crucial in influencing the extent to which spaces for non-governmental organisation contention can be carved out. Accordingly, this article argues that forms of production politics leading to worker desertion from the workplace, rather than tactical accommodation, have provided non-governmental organisations with the impetus to push forward reform agendas within an authoritarian political environment.     

Post-socialist China: Labour relations in Korean-managed factories

Abstract

How are labour relations practiced in Korean-managed factories in China? It is often said that labour relations in Korean transnational factories are abusive, even despotic. In this article, I argue that the disciplinary nature of labour relations in Korean factories in China is more complex and so multi-dimensional that they cannot be characterised as a simple economic matter of labour exploitation. These relations entail hierarchical segregation, normalising workers' behaviour through fines and salary reductions, personal degradation and dissimilar cultural practices.     

Social Class in Contemporary Japan: Structures,Sorting and Strategy

This article accounts for why and how democratisation in Korea, although facilitated by social forces from below, has contributed to deepening social polarisation by accelerating economic liberalisation. In assessing this seemingly paradoxical dynamic of democratisation in Korea, this article offers an analysis of contemporary Korean politics and political economy alternative to currently prevailing approaches. Prevailing approaches tend to frame recent socio-economic and political changes in Korea brought about by democratisation and the financial crisis of 1997-98 as the encroachment of the market over the state, and of the external (the global) over the internal (the national), as if these bipolarised categories assume zero-sum relations. This article posits democratisation processes as class and social struggles and such factors as the global economy, the positioning of Korea in the world-system and the history of US intervention, that are typically perceived as external constituents, as active social and class forces. Informed by this framework, this article explores contemporary Korean politics and political economy as a set of contradictory processes of political and economic liberalisation, democratisation and “de-democratisation.”     

Class or Citizenship? Debating Workplace Conflict in China

While a new working class is in the process of remaking itself in China, the latest trend in labour studies has rejected the Marxist tradition which sees the social relations of production as the point of departure for analysing workplace conflict. According to the new current, influenced by post-structuralism, class is only one of the identities articulated by workers, and it can be understood only with reference to their discourses. By critically evaluating an important book by Ching Kwan Lee (Against the Law: Labor Protests in China's Rustbelt and Sunbelt), this article suggests that her approach generalising workers' protests with the notion of citizenship cannot satisfactorily explain the changing pattern of labour protests in China since 2004. By using fieldwork data and connecting the analysis of the social relations of production with the changing patterns of workers' struggle, this paper argues that migrant workers protests are a significant part of the emerging class conflict in China.     

Labor militancy and Taiwan's export-led industrialization

This article focuses on the various patterns of labor militancy in the process of Taiwan's export-led industrialization. It elaborates the variables that contribute to the various patterns of labor militancy and the possible causal relationships between them from three crucial dimensions — economic performances of export-led industrialization, the effects of a politicized environment, and the interaction between labor activists, government and rank-and-filers. By using evidence from Taiwan, it develops a two-dimensional diagram and testifies four propositions. First, export-led industrialization is not always associated with the deterioration of living standards and increasing material hardships, neither does it inevitably give rise to anti-system labor militancy. Secondly, the rise and the intensity of labor militancy have much to do with a politicized environment. Thirdly, when a politicized setting is given, labor militancy which arises in the midst of export expansion tends to be instrumentalist, whilst that arising in export contraction is prone to be anti-system. Lastly, no matter what type of labor militancy, it is more likely that the labor rank-and filers with withdraw from the militant mobilization when their economic claims are met, while the labor activists and politicians persist until they have been granted political concessions.     

Gender,Work and Resistance: South Korean Textile Industry in the 1970s

This paper examines the forces behind South Korean women workers' labour activism in the 1970s, an era of rapid export-orientated industrialisation. Most of the labour strikes initiated by women occurred in the labour-intensive manufacturing sector, and they were in sharp contrast to the overall labour quiescence of male workers during the same period. The actions of South Korean women refute widely held assumptions about the docility of Asian women workers. This case study suggests that women rebel when their lives undergo drastic changes under a set of macro and micro circumstances. Women dialectically interact with the capitalist-patriarchal structure as conscious human agents, and the result of such interaction is their gender- and class-based collective resistance.     

Shifting Tides of Informal Worker Resistance in Mexico: A Domestic Work-Construction Contrast

Informal workers in Mexico, the majority of the country's workforce, have organised to demand rights, but with varying results. In this article, we contrast recent organising by Mexico's domestic workers and informal construction workers. Household worker movements have succeeded in institutionalising significant new organisations and raising public awareness. Construction workers, despite earlier militant counterexamples, have remained trapped by corporatist structures, and their organising capacity has atrophied. We place these outcomes in the context of the overall decline of labour, suggesting conclusions for the limits and possibilities of contemporary Mexican labour mobilisation.     

Pursuing Post-democratisation: The Resilience of Politics by Public Security in Contemporary South Korea

This article analyses the disputed election of President Park Geun-hye and her administration’s confrontation of left-nationalist politicians and other social movements during her first year in office. We argue that the Park administration’s policies resonate with contemporary discussions of “post-democratisation,” a process whereby social rights are increasingly subordinated to market logics and state power insulated from popular challenges. Under the conservative governments of Lee Myung-bak and Park Geun-hye, this process has been animated by a mode of confrontation known in South Korea as “politics by public security.” This politics targets social conflict and political dissent as threats to national security and has involved both illegal interventions by state institutions – such as the 2012 electoral interference by state agencies including the National Intelligence Service – and a cultural politics that affirms but revises the narrative of Korean democratisation by obfuscating the nature of the democracy movement and by attempting to restore the honour of conservative forces associated with former dictatorships. In order to better understand this conjuncture, we explore its origin within a tacit alliance between both former public security prosecutors-cum-conservative politicians and a movement of conservative intellectuals known as the New Right.     

Paid work and socio-political consciousness of garment workers in Bangladesh

During the era of globalization, while international capital and world market factories are shaping the course of industrialization and “development” in many countries, it remains to be seen how far such “development” is conducive to increasing and improving women's paid work specifically, and labour rights, and empowerment in general. Using my research in Bangladesh, I juxtapose garment workers' experience to assess the implications of world market factories on women workers, their wages, work conditions, skill development, organizational links, and empowerment. In this article, I argue that women's multiple responsibilities and specific social locations as women and paid workers create distinctive form of activism and political consciousness. In addition, I suggest that the intersections of women's lives in the family and the workplace and their networks with other women create what Morgan and Bookman (1988) call “double consciousness” as women and as workers. This double consciousness generates multiple forms of resistance and social movements against the nexus between the state, multinational and local entrepreneurs.     

Keeping labour mobility informal: the lack of legality of Central Asian migrants in Kazakhstan

Kazakhstan's legal–regulatory framework provides for a small number of quotas for highly skilled foreign workers but has no provisions for legal employment of semi-skilled or low-skilled migrants from the Central Asian states, who enter under the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) visa-free regime and work informally in construction, household and service sectors. The lack of acknowledgement of the scale of informal labour migration has denoted an act of strategic neglect on the part of the state, allowing it to render migrant labour illegal, disposable, and keep migrants legally and statistically invisible. Unable to obtain a legal status, migrants nominally comply with the existing legal framework as they also circumvent and subvert it. The article details the entrenched informal regime of labour migration and explains why recent efforts to ‘legalize’ labour through the introduction of a labour patent (licence), as is the case in Russia, are unlikely to bring in significant reforms.     

Migrant Workers in the Pearl River Delta: Discourse and Narratives about Work as Sites of Struggle

ABSTRACT

With the introduction of capitalist labor relations into China certain attitudes, competencies, and values associated with global capitalism seem to be increasingly valorized. This article analyzes the values and principles ascribed to migrant workers as part of practices linked to modes of government. The author confronts the dominant form of cultural construction of migrant workers through the Shenzhen official press with migrant workers' own narratives about their experience of work (dagong) in the city as the narratives are mediated through two different sites, namely, participant observation, interviews with rural migrants, and a body of unpublished letters to the editor acquired from several magazines dedicated to migrant workers. The article sheds light on the ways in which migrant workers' narratives confirm or, on the contrary, contest the pivotal elements of the hegemonic construction. Three different narratives that migrant workers produce about their own lives and about Shenzhen are examined. These narratives range from affirmations of dominant discourses about migrant workers and expressions of disillusionment about such discourses, to strategic uses of dominant discourses to justify the claims made by migrant workers.     

Haven under erasure?: Hong Kong,global Asia and human rights

Discussions of Hong Kong's human rights situation tend to focus on the ex-colony's struggle to protect civil and political rights against the encroachment of the Chinese state. Without contradicting the well-grounded concern with Hong Kong's human rights future articulated in these discussions, this article offers a complementary narrative of human rights development in post-1997 Hong Kong that looks beyond the national frame of such discussions. Drawing attention to Hong Kong's position as a regional centre in the struggle for human rights in Asia under globalisation, the article argues that the activities of local and transnational human rights advocacy groups in the city show positive and promising possibilities of coalitional solidarity on the ground of human rights. Notably, the protests against national security legislation opened up opportunities of articulating diverse struggles for the rights of various social groups, including migrant groups, with the local struggle for civil and political rights. A perspective of Global Asia enables a reading of this important episode in Hong Kong's struggle for human rights that suggests more open-ended future possibilities than the common nationally-framed accounts.     

Changing South Korean Water Policy after Political and Economic Liberalisation

This study explores the way in which South Korean water policy has been dynamically (re-)constructed by continuing political contestations among diverse social forces acting in and through the state in the face of political and economic liberalisation. The path-dependency of the state-driven water resource policy under the former authoritarian regime did not disappear even after the democratisation. It was difficult to transform the old authoritarian and hierarchical water governance to the newly democratic and environmentally friendly one because the Ministry of Construction, as a main actor in driving water policy under the authoritarian regimes, did not give up its interest in a dam-based policy orientation, although it did partially accept institutional tools for democratic policy making, such as public hearings and the participation of civil society in the process of establishing the water policy plan. It also showed democratic and environment-friendly gestures using the rhetoric of environmentalism and localisation. Overall, this article emphasises the importance of the path-dependency of the past authoritarian regimes under democratised society to better understand the current democratic regime’s policy orientation.     

Explaining Strike Outcomes in Chile: Associational Power,Structural Power,and Spatial Strategies

Research on strikes has traditionally focused on how economic, institutional, and political variables shape strike patterns. Recent work examines how workers' structural, associational, and symbolic power facilitate strikes. Building on this research, this article asks, what factors determine strike outcomes? It analyzes four strikes at MADECO, Chile's largest copper manufacturer, across democratic, authoritarian, and postauthoritarian regimes. Using qualitative and documentary evidence, it argues that strike outcomes reflect workers' capacity to halt or disrupt production and to access government allies who can pressure management to settle strikes in workers' favor. Outcomes vary based on the political composition of government, workers' capacity to halt production, and industry's and government's dependence on foreign investment. MADECO workers' location in Santiago, near national officials, allowed them to mobilize at the local, national, and international scales to pressure management. Comparisons with other strikes in Chile, Argentina, and Peru identify similar mobilization patterns.     

The prostitute

Migrant domestic workers rarely take part in — let alone organize — public protests in the countries where they work. Public protests are virtually unheard of among migrant domestic workers in Singapore, Taiwan, and Malaysia, and especially in the Middle East and the Gulf States. Over the past decade and a half, however, migrant domestic workers in Hong Kong — mostly Filipinas and Indonesian women — have become highly active, organizing and participating in political protests. Hong Kong's migrant domestic workers protest in a place where they are guest workers and temporary migrants, denied the opportunity of becoming legal citizens or permanent residents. Increasingly, these workers, their grassroots activist organizations, and the nongovernmental organizations with which they are affiliated frame their concerns in terms of global, transnational, and human rights, not merely local migrant worker rights. This article takes the “Consulate Hopping Protest and Hall of Shame Awards” event — part of the anti-World Trade Organization protests in Hong Kong in 2005 — as an ethnographic example of domestic worker protest and as an entrée through which to ask what it is about Hong Kong and about the position of women migrant workers — whose mobility and voice is both a product and a symptom of globalization — that literally permits public protests and shapes their form and content. The article illustrates how migrant workers’ protests and activism have been shaped by domestic worker subjectivities, by the dynamics of inter-ethnic worker affiliations, and by the sociohistorical context of Hong Kong as a post-colonial “global city” and a “neoliberal space of exception.”     

Parties over: The demise of Egypt's opposition parties

Heeding Eberhard Kienle's deliberalisation argument and Maye Kassem's work on legislative elections in Egypt, the article explores the government's tactics in causing fragmentation in Egypt's legalised political parties. In this vein, it extends both arguments applying them to opposition parties in Egypt. Since 1998, the Political Parties Committee (PPC) has closed seven of the sixteen legal opposition parties. The government is not only stifling group development, but also preventing prominent independent members of parliament (MPs) from using already existing parties to challenge the ruling National Democratic Party (NDP). By examining the government's tactics towards opposition parties, this article shows that a re-entrenchment of authoritarianism has emerged, and argues that Egypt's democratisation process has ended.     

Dilemmas in the making of civil society in Korean political reform

As Korea moves from a state-dominated to a civilian-driven society, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have emerged as an institutional hybrid that undertakes public functions through private initiatives. Recently NGOs have gone beyond diverse social issues to promote political reform. On 12 January 2000, Citizens' Alliance for General Elections (CAGE) — a loosely coupled coalition of NGOs formed to reform the nomination process and realize citizen political sovereignty — ousted 59 of 86 disfavored candidates from the political stage in the 16^th General Elections in 2000. The coalition gained public support and persuaded the government to revise election law and readjust electoral constituencies. NGOs such as CAGE have thus become salient political actors and credible public institutions propelling democratic transition. Yet CAGE activities were never made legal and failed to mobilize voters — the 16^th elections had the lowest voter turnout in Korean history left regional party monopoly intact, and provided no clear vision for political reform. CAGE inability to generate grassroots collective action exacerbated its own lack of focus, even as its success diminshed the role of conventional political actors. These limitations, representing instructive dilemmas in the making of civil society, suggest that NGOs need to specify their functions, increase civic engagement, and promote citizen networks and cooperation for the common good in a society.     

L'affaiblissement du Parlement français dans la dernière législature de la Troisième République (1936–1940)

SUMMARY

In this article, Simone Lassig examines franchise reforms in the federal states of the German Empire before 1914. She is critical of restricting the history of the German Empire to the history of Prussia. From this viewpoint, electoral reforms in several of the German federal states are used to indicate the capacity of the political elites to resolve problems related to the system. When we observe southern and central Germany, it can be shown that the old elites were capable of learning. Although the non-socialist parties opposed every form of mass politics until the turn of the century, by limiting the right to vote, after that they opened up to the increasing demands for participation from the lower levels of society. Tendencies towards democrati;tation appeared not only in many new electoral laws, but also in the political culture, expecially in the development of new methods of parliamentary conflict. Legitimation of authoriry gained a new status: the parliamentary resolution of conflicts was revalued as against legal restrictions, and facilitated the partial integration of the formerly excluded workers' party. The concept, scarcely challenged in research, that there was only a primitive level of democratization in Wilhelmine Germany should be reconsidered at least, as a result of this analysis.