Read more
This book explores rising labor unrest in China as it integrates into the global political economy. The book highlights the tensions present between China's efforts to internationalize and accept claims to respect freedom of association rights, and its continuing insistence on a restrictive, and often punitive, approach to worker organizations. The author examines how the global labor movement can support the improvement of working conditions in Chinese factories. The book presents a novel multi-level approach capturing how trade unions and labor rights NGOs have mobilized along different pathways while attempting to influence labor standards in Chinese supply chains since 1989: within the ILO, within the European Union, leveraging global brands or directly supporting domestic labor rights NGOs. Based on extensive fieldwork in Europe, the US and China, the book shows that activists, by operating at multiple scales, were on some occasions able to support improvements over time. It also indicates how a politically and economically strong state such as China can affect transnational labor activism, by directly and indirectly undermining the opportunities that organized civil societies have to participate in the evolving global labor governance architecture.
List of contents
1. Introduction: Multilevel labor activism, transnational institutions, and China .- 2. Defining the shadow of the dragon: China's internal and external strength .- 3. The international-organizational pathway: The case of the ILO .- 4. The bilateral pathway: The European Union and China .- 5. The market pathway .- 6. The civil society pathway .- 7. Conclusion: Labor transnationalism in global markets and plural institutional settings.
About the author
Sabrina Zajakis Junior Professor of Globalization Conflicts, Social Movements, and Labor at the Institute for Social Movements, Ruhr-University Bochum, Germany. She is Founding Member of the Institute for Protest ad Social Movement Research in Berlin and Head of the research group "Transnational Alliances between Social Movements and Trade Unions in Europe". Her other research focuses on protests in Germany and pathways of labor rights activism between Asia and Europe in a comparative perspective.
Summary
This book explores rising labor unrest in China as it integrates into the global political economy. The book highlights the tensions present between China’s efforts to internationalize and accept claims to respect freedom of association rights, and its continuing insistence on a restrictive, and often punitive, approach to worker organizations. The author examines how the global labor movement can support the improvement of working conditions in Chinese factories. The book presents a novel multi-level approach capturing how trade unions and labor rights NGOs have mobilized along different pathways while attempting to influence labor standards in Chinese supply chains since 1989: within the ILO, within the European Union, leveraging global brands or directly supporting domestic labor rights NGOs. Based on extensive fieldwork in Europe, the US and China, the book shows that activists, by operating at multiple scales, were on some occasions able to support improvements over time. It also indicates how a politically and economically strong state such as China can affect transnational labor activism, by directly and indirectly undermining the opportunities that organized civil societies have to participate in the evolving global labor governance architecture.
Additional text
“This is a very good book, and I liked the book a lot after reading it. … The rich information of this book makes it an excellent introduction to the field as well as to the case of China. Zajak is no doubt a first-rate labor scholar, and this book will be a must read to anyone interested in transnational activism or labor-rights activism in China.” (Dingxin Zhao, Mobilization, Vol. 22, September, 2017)
Report
"This is a very good book, and I liked the book a lot after reading it. ... The rich information of this book makes it an excellent introduction to the field as well as to the case of China. Zajak is no doubt a first-rate labor scholar, and this book will be a must read to anyone interested in transnational activism or labor-rights activism in China." (Dingxin Zhao, Mobilization, Vol. 22, September, 2017)
