[Review of the book \u3ci\u3eThe Four Little Dragons: The Spread of Industrialization in East Asia\u3c/i\u3e]

[Excerpt] This slim and eminently readable volume presents the 1990 Edwin O. Reischauer lectures delivered by Ezra Vogel, the Henry Ford II Professor of Social Sciences at Harvard University and a leading scholar on Asia. In the first chapter Vogel establishes the context for the experiences of the late late industrializes . Japan and the Four Little Dragons (Hong Kong, Korea, Singapore, and Taiwan). The next three chapters are devoted to the experiences of Taiwan, Korea, and Hong Kong and Singapore, respectively. The last chapter offers an explanation for the dragons\u27 successes

Communicating Across Cultures

[Excerpt] Communication is the key to so many things a steward does, and good communication skills are something experienced stewards develop. But even experienced stewards have special challenges when the communication is between people of different cultures

Bridging Cultural Differences

[Excerpt] How you say it can matter as much as what you say

After Bangladesh, Labor Unions Can Save Lives

[Excerpt] The factory collapse in Bangladesh that killed more than 1,100 workers should be a pivot point for the global apparel industry, moving consumers to demand more accountability from brand-name companies that subcontract production to supply-chain factories around the world. Sadly, the history of workplace tragedies in so many of these factories suggests that after consumers in rich countries express horror and call for reforms, the demands for better worker protections die down and the marketplace for cheap apparel abides. But this cycle can finally be broken if demands for change start to focus on workers’ right to form trade unions

Review of the book \u3ci\u3eThe Chinese Worker After Socialism\u3c/i\u3e

In The Chinese Worker after Socialism, William Hurst employs subnational comparison to explain different outcomes for workers in the process of reform of state-owned industry in China. In particular, Hurst provides in-depth analysis of regional variation of the sequencing and volume of layoffs, how the local state attempted to handle unemployment, actual outcomes in re-employment, and the dynamics of worker protest. By taking subnational regions as the unit of analysis, we see that the process of smashing the iron rice bowl has not been a unified and coherent project but rather one that has been messy, uneven, and subject to great variation in timing and outcomes. This variation is explained by differences in the political economy of each region

[Review of the Book \u3ci\u3eTrade Conditions and Labor Rights: U.S. Initiatives, Dominican and Central American Responses\u3c/i\u3e]

[Excerpt] With Trade Conditions and Labor Rights, Henry J. Frundt makes a signal contribution to the debate on workers’ rights in a rapidly globalizing economy. Can economic pressure by the United States compel poor countries to enhance workers\u27 rights and improve institutions to enforce those rights? Does labor rights conditionally —more bluntly, the threat of diminished access to the U.S. market for countries and companies that violate workers’ rights—promote labor rights and labor standards? Or does conditionality hurt the very workers it is supposed to help by keeping products out of the U.S. market and slowing economic growth and investment in developing countries

China Since Tiananmen: The Labor Movement

[Excerpt] The twenty years since 1989 have brought two major developments in worker activism. First, whereas workers were part of the mass uprising in the Tiananmen movement, albeit as subordinate partners to the students, labor activism since then has been almost entirely confined to the working class. While the ranks of aggrieved workers have proliferated (expanding from workers in the state-owned sector to include migrant workers) and the forms and incidents of labor activism have multiplied, there is hardly any sign of mobilization that transcends class or regional lines. Second, we observe that a long-term decline in worker power at the point of production – power that was previously institutionalized in skill hierarchies, union representation, democratic management, permanent or long-term employment, and other conditions of service constitutive of the socialist social contract - is going on even as workers gain more power (at least on paper) outside the workplace. New labor laws have broadened workers\u27 rights and expanded administrative and judicial channels for resolving labor conflicts. These legal and bureaucratic procedures have atomized and depoliticized labor activism even as they have engendered and intensified mobilization outside official limits

Workers’ Rights in the Global Economy

[Excerpt] Fresh information, insightful analysis, and sharp controversy marked presentations by eminent experts and advocates at the distinguished panel on workers\u27 rights in the global economy at the annual meeting in New Orleans

[Review of the Book \u3ci\u3eAdvancing Theory in Labour Law and Industrial Relations in a Global Context\u3c/i\u3e]

[Excerpt] The ideas and insights in Advancing Theory are an important contribution to the on-the-ground social justice movement challenging corporate rule in the global economy. It can even help rescue labor law and industrial relations as intellectual disciplines and career trajectories for a new generation of students and practitioners excited about thinking globally and acting locally

A Question of Timing

US labour law violates ILO standards not at the margins, but at the core