The Impact of China’s Labor Contract Law on Workers

ILRF\u27s report examines the impact of the Labor Contract Law on workplaces in China’s export manufacturing hubs. ILRF argues for various strategies, from a greater emphasis on collective bargaining to community-based legal education, to ensure full implementation of the Labor Contract Law

Resistance, Repression, Responsiveness: Workers and the State in China

This dissertation examines the impact of labor unrest under authoritarianism. It uses evidence from China to explore the possibility that autocracies, especially state socialist and post-socialist ones, are uniquely vulnerable to worker resistance and therefore react to it in a dual manner, at once repressive and responsive. Drawing on an original dataset of strikes, protests, and riots by Chinese workers, I find that increases in unrest are correlated with both increases in public security spending (repression) and pro-labor rulings in formally adjudicated employment disputes (responsiveness). Using a “most similar” case comparison informed by field theory, I then show how in Jiangsu’s portion of the Yangtze River Delta, moderate industrial contention is paired with governance that can be characterized as preemption, caution, and nudging, while in Guangdong’s portion of the Pearl River Delta, high contention is paired with reaction, experimentation, and crackdowns. Thus, consistent with the dissertation’s quantitative analysis, repression and responsiveness are stronger where resistance is more widespread, but governance is also qualitatively different. I argue that, at the level of local governments and local officials, there is a logic to this divergence between the cases: militant workers make a liability of the state’s commitment to stability, thereby threatening the careers of officials, who must, as a consequence, demonstrate grit and creativity. Two issues remain: the role of regional political elites and diffusion between regions. I find that the ideologies of particular local politicians do not alter the protest-policy relationship. However, even as protest tactics diffuse outward from the country’s hotspots of contention, official counter-measures against protests also spread. Worker resistance thus profoundly influences authoritarian rule, but not in a linear manner

Counting Contention

In the past few years, a growing number of academics and activists have launched projects aimed at counting contention in the realm of Chinese labour. This essay explores the power and limitations of such efforts, detailing the inevitable data problems involved in any quantitative approach to documenting protests in China. It also examines the ethics involved in how we collect such data and the questions we ask of it