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This chapter discusses the evolution of the Chinese labour market. It explains the Soviet origins of the labour system and its distinctive Chinese characteristics. The process of economic reform in rural and urban China is compared. The theoretical framework of the Lewis model was adopted for analysis.

One of the major claims made for the current development of the global economy in relation to the production of goods and services is that multinationals are a conduit for the transfer of technology and with it, skills. This chapter looks at the competing hypotheses regarding the impact of globalization on the different types of education and training (ET) and labour market systems in Germany, Korea, Singapore, and Britain. This also involves looking at skill transfer and the development policies of multinationals. The final section of the chapter reports on the impact of multinational ownership on ‘key’ skills training and application in one major British subsidiary of a foreign multinational. It is argued that key or core skills — those relating to teamwork, communication, problem solving, and the use of IT — and which are required for high-performance workplaces, provide a litmus test of the convergence thesis. If the impact of globalization is that these skills are transferable across national borders, then the convergence thesis will have passed a particularly stringent test.

This chapter examines the internal tensions and dynamics of labor systems during times of reform and crisis by focusing on four critical transformative phases: social reproduction and protection, labor allocation, and the labor process. Corresponding to these four phases are four domains of government policy: human resource development, social policy, employment policy, and labor relations. If processes of labor transformation define labor systems structurally, their institutional or regulatory dimension refers in the first instance to the terms of employment, formal and informal, that specify the mutual rights and obligations relating sellers and buyers of labor power. This chapter locates the constitution of labor systems within the industrial and economic sectors of national economies. It also suggests an approach to understanding the diverse changes in the circumstances of livelihood and employment among Asian manufacturing workers over the past thirty years of industrialization, globalization, and market reform.

Stalin and his coterie's pursuit of their own goals left large swathes of their country in dire poverty. As became apparent from the mounting flow of complaints to the center, some sectors of the economy, most notably agriculture and the labor camp system were — after years of relentless exploitation — on the verge of crisis. This chapter examines the leadership's response to these signs of crisis. It focuses on these two policy areas that presented particular problems to the leadership in the late Stalin era and that would subsequently lie at the heart of the new course followed by the post-Stalin leadership.

This chapter discusses further developments for guestworkers around the world. As efforts to protect labor standards, make immigration temporary, or manage migration, guestworker programs have failed and still fail, whether they are in the United States, the Middle East, South Africa, or the Pacific Rim. Yet as labor supply systems designed to quarantine immigrant workers from natives and keep them a caste apart, they have been very effective. They have drawn nations together in a new, government-crafted dependency, in which the world's wealthy nations import foreigners to do their hardest, dirtiest, and often their most intimate work. The chapter argues that this, indeed, was their true purpose and their most pernicious legacy.

This chapter compares and contrasts the U.S. and French systems of labor market regulation. The U.S. system is specialized: Regulating authority is dispersed among a host of different agencies each with a relatively narrow jurisdiction, and as a result with responsibility for a very limited domain. Authority is further divided between the federal and the state governments. The French system is a unified or general system: a single agency is responsible for the enforcement of the whole labor code. As a result, the French system is a street-level bureaucracy in which considerable power and authority rests with the line agents, the work inspectors themselves. As a result, the French system is considerably more flexible and able to adjust to variations in economic and social conditions across the territory but also over time than is the U.S. system. The contrast is of broader importance because the French system was adopted by Spain (and Italy) and from there spread to Latin America. The chapter goes on to discuss the various managerial issues posed by the two systems and the problems of reconciling their contrasting dynamics in a unified global trading regime.

This chapter examines the political tensions and instabilities associated with economic reform in China, South Korea, Thailand, and the Philippines. It discusses the labor politics of reform by focusing on regulatory contestation by groups of workers who variably share the circumstances of particular labor systems, and who seek collectively, and sometimes in concert with other groups, to influence policies affecting the adequacy and security of their economic livelihood. Before assessing the nature and role of labor politics in regulatory change, the chapter considers the foundational, structurally determined conflicts that drive labor opposition. It then explores six strategies employed by workers to influence labor regimes and social policy: trade union activism; social-movement unionism; labor-oriented nongovernmental organizations; broad popular-sector social movements; engagement with labor-friendly political parties; and the generalized threat of social disorder. It also challenges a union-centric view of Asian labor politics that too often marginalizes the role of labor through its failure to embrace a broad range of modalities of labor influence.

This book has investigated the implications of three decades of market-oriented economic reform for Asian workers. Using a conceptual framework that centers on labor systems and their regulatory regimes, it has drawn together disparate literatures on institutional change, labor relations, social policy, and development that directly or indirectly help elucidate the labor implications of market reform. It has also discussed the industrial sectors of the four Asian countries to illustrate contrasting contexts and trajectories of reform in the region. Finally, it has suggested a more general analytical framework that focuses on the dynamic relationship between two dimensions, or faces, of labor market reform: labor market deregulation and labor market reregulation.

This chapter focuses on how, from the time penal labor laws were liberalized in the 1880s until they were abolished in 1926, Indian nationalists charged that indenture was unfree and resembled slavery. Indian nationalists, living in an increasingly commercial and industrialized society, pushed for abolition on the reasoning that a free labor system was more economically rational than indenture. Most prominent were the Sadharan Brahmo Samaj and the Indian Association, two groups foundational to the long history of Indian nationalism. The chapter then looks at the Bengali writer Ramkumar Vidyaratna and his social novel Sketches of Coolie Life (1888). Drawing direct comparisons with the emancipation of enslaved Africans, Vidyaratna's work rested upon the assumption that labor was a commodity that should naturally be free to seek employment wherever it desired, an idea plausible partly because a disposable waged workforce in eastern India had become a general feature of economic life.

This chapter examines aspects of labor systems reform that are centered less on liberalization and deregulation and more on institutional reregulation and social compensation. The 1980s hegemonic consolidation of a new market-oriented, regulatory paradigm set in motion major global transformations in the nature of interstate economic relations and in the role of states in national economies. Of particular interest were associated changes in regimes of social and labor regulation and in the labor systems through which economic accumulation, economic livelihood, and social integration are secured and mutually articulated. This new orthodoxy is referred to as the Washington Consensus. This chapter first considers the role of the state under market reform before discussing globalization in relation to state displacement and state transformation. It then locates market reform within the context of economic structural change and institutional regulation and goes on to assess the labor implications of deregulatory reform. It also explores the economic and social tensions associated with deregulatory reform and the anticipatory institutional responses to such tensions that are now embedded in the Washington Consensus.

This chapter examines tensions and conflicts in the labor processes of manufacturing firms and how those tensions have been addressed by employers and states. It considers six common strategies used to manage tensions in the labor process: coercion, social pyramiding, institutional segregation of incompatible labor systems, mutual commitment employment systems, new mechanisms of collective conflict resolution, and programs that promote worker participation. It shows that regulatory change, driven by the sometimes incompatible pressures of industrial upgrading, growing employment contingency, increased labor conflict, and the unintended outcomes of expanded worker protections, has had the effect of re-engaging government in enterprise-labor practices and in the labor process more generally.

This chapter examines the interdependencies and tensions between the Russian colonizers and the indigenous people of Russian America. The first half of the chapter examines the roles of indigenous people in the colony's economy. It emphasizes how the unique hunting skills and kayak technologies of the Aleuts and the Alutiiq combined with the technologies introduced by the Russians and the forces of the market to create a labor system in Russian America that was radically different from those in Siberia as well as in the American colonies of other countries. The second half of the chapter looks at how Russian incursion onto Tlingit territory of southeast Alaska fundamentally changed the dynamics of the overseas colony. With their colonial activity centered in the new capital of Novo-Arkhangel’sk, the Russians had to worry much more about the security of their colonists, and make new overtures for the pacification of Native Alaskans.

This chapter points out the difficulties in distinguishing “free” and “unfree” laborers in the Indian Ocean World during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It chronicles the development of a “new system of slavery” that led to the migration of millions of indentured African and Asian laborers throughout the region. It explores the origins of the indentured labor system and points out that there is a connection between pre-emancipation and post-emancipation labor systems, examining the structural links between such systems. The chapter discusses European slave trading in the region, providing estimates for slaves traded. It discusses efforts to emancipate slaves in Bencoolen and abolish slave trading in Bengal and it compares the activities of the Indian Ocean vice-admiralty courts with the Atlantic courts. It argues for a pan-oceanic perspective in the scholarship, pointing out that actions of Indian Ocean officials had impacts that resonated far beyond the region.

This chapter discusses the impact of labor-market regimes in the economic history of the United States. It discusses the contrast between the labor systems of the antebellum northern and southern economies, and moves on to the shifts in labor-market regimes shaped by the Civil War, the world wars, and the Great Depression. These regime shifts shaped labor-market outcomes, such as wages, working conditions, and employment, as well as the dynamics of technology and human capital accumulation.