(Re‐)Locating the Local and National in the Global: Multi‐Scalar Political Alignment in Transnational European Dockworker Union Campaigns

Labour activists have called for greater international co‐ordination among trade unions in response to the assault on organized labour by global capital, but such co‐ordination faces many hurdles. Under what conditions can unions overcome those barriers and co‐ordinate effectively to achieve campaign goals? I examine this question through a comparison of European‐level international solidarity with Portuguese, Greek and English affiliates of the International Dockworkers Council involved in labour disputes. The divergent outcomes of otherwise similar cases reveal the critical role of politics and strategy at different scales and sites of union organization in determining the successful exercise of labour internationalism.     

A ‘Decent Cuppa’: Worker Power and Consumer Power in the Sri Lankan Tea Sector

Consumers are increasingly seen as playing an important role in global labour governance through the establishment of voluntary certification programmes that promise better economic and social conditions for workers in global value chains. In the Sri Lankan tea sector, however, these private forms of governance (Rainforest Alliance (RA), UTZ Certified and the Ethical Tea Partnership (ETP)) at best have no effect and at worst are associated with indecent forms of work. Rather, conditions of work are defended by powerful trade unions that exercise structural power via their strategic position in the value chain and associational power through links with political parties and residual ethnic ties within and between nation‐states. It is evident that through close collaboration between the International Labour Organization (ILO) and the tea sector unions, workers are able to leverage institutional power through both national and international labour standards to reinforce decent work for those at the very bottom of the global value chain.     

Where Do Unions Add Value? Predominant Organizing Principle,Union Strength and Manufacturing Productivity Growth in the OECD

This article deploys comparative historical data on 14 OECD countries to examine the significance of predominant union structure for the impact of union strength on the (medium‐term) growth in hourly labour productivity in manufacturing. The analysis shows that where craft and general unionism predominates, union strength has a deleterious impact on productivity growth. Where enterprise unionism predominates, union strength is irrelevant. However, where industrial unionism predominates, union strength promotes productivity growth. These effects exist independently of established economic influences on aggregate productivity growth. The findings are interpreted as displaying the importance of the character of the governance that unions provide for their productivity impact.     

Labour Market Dualism and Diversification in Japan

The Japanese labour market has been regarded as ‘dualistic’ in terms of employment status (regular vs non‐regular). While it is true, this perspective misses recent changes in regular employment in terms of labour flexibility. The government has attempted labour market deregulation since the 1990s to increase the flexibility of not only non‐regular but also regular employment, and the labour market has become more diversified. Labour unions lack power resources to resist these neoliberal changes, however, because of their insufficient access to policy‐making, low union density and a lack of solidarity against the background of economic stagnation and competition under globalization.     

Between Fragmentation and Centralization: South Korean Industrial Relations in Transition

This study investigates profound changes in South Korean industrial relations after the Asian financial crisis of 1997. Korea's neoliberal labour reforms have produced a large number of non‐standard workers, deepening the union representation gap. Realizing that the fragmented enterprise unions could not adequately protect workers from this degradation of labour, trade union leaders began a major organizational drive at the industry level and tried to institutionalize sectoral bargaining. A political space for union centralization was partially opened because the state needed labour's co‐operation to implement neoliberal reform packages. However, disorganized centralization in Korea, where important decisions on wages and working conditions have been negotiated mainly at the company level, has faced limitations in achieving meaningful changes in the dualistic structure of the labour market. This study concludes with a review of changes in Korea's labour law in 2010 and a discussion on the effects of the law on bargaining rights of non‐standard workers and the incipient industry‐level bargaining. This trend towards union centralization may continue, but the notable gap between the formal bargaining structure and actual practice is expected to widen.     

Strength in Networks: Employment Rights Organizations and the Problem of Co‐Ordination

In recent decades, alternative organizations and movements —‘quasi‐unions’— have emerged to fill gaps in the US system of representation caused by union decline. We examine the record of quasi‐unions and find that although they have sometimes helped workers who lack other means of representation, they have significant limitations and are unlikely to replace unions as the primary means of representation. But networks, consisting of sets of diverse actors including unions and quasi‐unions, are more promising. They have already shown power in specific campaigns, but they have yet to do so for more sustained strategies. By looking at analogous cases, we identify institutional bases for sustained networks, including shared information platforms, behavioural norms, common mission and governance mechanisms that go well beyond what now exists in labour alliances and campaigns. There are substantial resistances to these network institutions because of the history of fragmentation and autonomy among both unions and quasi‐unions; yet we also identify positive potential for network formation.     

Inclusion or Dualization? The Political Economy of Employment Relations in Italian and Greek Telecommunications

Recent literature argues that trade unions in restructuring service industries have responded to the challenges of the post‐industrial era by accepting different forms of labour market dualization. This article examines two case studies from Italy and Greece, in which unions adopted divergent responses to intensified market pressures unleashed by the liberalization of national telecommunications markets. In the Italian case, collective bargaining was successfully centralized, resulting in the inclusion of traditional labour market ‘outsiders’. In contrast, bargaining centralization failed in Greek telecommunications, leading to intensified dualization. These different paths of institutional change are explained as resulting from differences in ideological cleavages among unions and distinct legacies in employers’ associations.     

Justice for Janitors in Los Angeles: Lessons from Three Rounds of Negotiations

We examine an important recent organizing success of the US labour movement: the 'Justice for Janitors' campaign in Los Angeles. This campaign has spanned a complete business cycle and shows the union's capacity for growth over time. It illustrates the potential for unions to overcome pro–employer bias of labour laws, as well as their efficacy in appealing to the wider public. It exposes the importance of building coalitions, as well as the value of union analysis of legal, industrial, and political conditions. Our analysis suggests conditions under which unions might survive and thrive in the service sector in the twenty–first century.     

Community Organizing and Employee Representation

The decline in the scope and power of American unions has led to a search for new strategies and new organizational forms to better succeed in representing the interests of employees in the labour market. This paper examines the role of community‐based organizations of the sort that proved so powerful during the Civil Rights Movement. The subject of the paper is a strong national network of community organizations that is neighbourhood‐based and draws heavily on churches and other community institutions. The organizations are put together in neighbourhoods, yet they also wield power at the city and state levels. The paper describes the organizations and examines and assesses their labour market policies. The second part of the paper takes up organizational issues and, in particular, describes how the structure and culture of these organizations enable them to avoid some of the organizational perils that have befallen unions and other social movement organizations. The paper concludes by comparing these organizations with traditional unions and by discussing their prospects for growth as well as their limitations.     

Regulating Labour Standards via Supply Chains: Combining Public/Private Interventions to Improve Workplace Compliance

Concern over global labour standards has led to a profusion of non‐governmental forms of regulation. Systematic evaluation of these systems has been very limited to date. This article empirically explores an innovative system to regulate labour standards in the US garment industry combining public enforcement power and private monitoring, thereby drawing on different elements of global labour standards systems. We examine the impact of this system over time and in two distinct markets on employer compliance with minimum wage laws and find that these initiatives are associated with substantial reductions in minimum wage violations. The system therefore offers a useful model for international labour standards regulatory systems.     

Skills and Industrial Relations in Coordinated Market Economies — Continuing Vocational Training in Denmark,the Netherlands,Austria and Switzerland

This article offers the first systematic study of the institutional and political conditions under which collective agreements finance and organize continuing vocational training (CVT). Combining Mill's methods of agreement and difference with pattern matching, it identifies proactive small and medium enterprises, proactive public policies, proactive trade unions, and links between CVT and wage bargaining as probable conditions for CVT by collective labour agreement. The most important finding is that the research on the development of political–economic institutions in coordinated market economies has to analyse more carefully how state activities and the behaviour of small and medium‐sized firms affect the coordination of economic activities in skills formation.     

Remaking the World of Chinese Labour: A 30‐Year Retrospective

Over the past 30 years, labour relations, and, indeed, the entirety of working‐class politics in China, have been dramatically altered by economic reforms. In this review, we focus on the two key processes of commodification and casualization and their implications for workers. On the one hand, these processes have resulted in the destruction of the old social contract and the emergence of marketized employment relations. This has implied a loss of the job security and generous benefits enjoyed by workers in the planned economy. On the other hand, commodification and casualization have produced significant but localized resistance from the Chinese working class. Up until now, the activities of labour non‐governmental organizations and of the official trade unions have contributed to the state's effort of individualizing and institutionalizing labour conflict resolution through labour law and arbitration mechanisms. Finally, we provide a brief discussion of the impact of 2008's Labour Contract Law and the outbreak of the economic crisis on labour relations. We conclude that the continual imbalance of power at the point of production presents a real dilemma for the Chinese state as it attempts to shift away from a model of development dependent on exports.     

Back to the Future? US Labour in the New Gilded Age

This article argues that the twenty‐first century US labour movement has increasingly come to resemble its counterpart in the Gilded Age 100 years ago. Starting in the 1970s, deindustrialization and deregulation have gradually undermined the New Deal labour relations system, and have led to the proliferation of precarious labour. The labour movement then began to experiment with alternative labour organizing strategies and increasingly sought out political alliances with other progressive movements, reproducing practices that were widespread among US unions prior to the New Deal era. Although many of these experiments have succeeded on a small scale, they face intransigent opposition from employers and anti‐union organizations, and whether they can be expanded enough to generate a new labour movement upsurge remains to be seen.     

There is power in a union? Union members' preferences and the conditional effect of labour unions on left parties in different welfare state programmes

This article studies the effect of labour unions on policy-making in six different parts of the welfare state (passive and active labour market policy, employment protection, old-age pensions, health care and education) in OECD countries after 1980 with a two-level strategy: At the micro-level, we investigate union members’ preferences. Ordered logit regression analyses indicate that union members favour generous social policies more strongly than non-members. Moreover, this effect is stronger for programmes closely related to the labour market than for programmes without a strong labour market link. At the macro-level, we investigate the conditional effect of unions on left parties expecting the former to push the left towards more generous labour market-related (but not towards less-labour market-related) programmes. Regression analyses essentially provide evidence for such a relationship. Overall, unions have been powerful in promoting their members’ social policy preferences via left parties in government but their power is recently vanishing.     

The Prevalence and Effects of Occupational Licensing

Our study provides the first national analysis of the labour market implications of workers who are licensed by any agency of the government in the USA. Using a specially designed Gallup survey of a nationally representative sample of Americans, we provide an analysis of the influence of this form of occupational regulation. We find that 29 per cent of the workforce is required to hold a licence, which is a higher percentage than that found in other studies that rely on state‐level occupational licensing data or single states. Workers who have higher levels of education are more likely to work in jobs that require a licence. Union workers and government employees are more likely to have a licence requirement than are non‐union or private sector employees. Our multivariate estimates suggest that licensing has about the same quantitative impact on wages as do unions — that is about 15 per cent — and that being both licensed and in a union can increase wages by more than 24 per cent. However, unlike unions which reduce variance in wages, licensing does not significantly reduce wage dispersion for individuals in licensed jobs.     

The Political Representation of the Labour Interest in Britain

This article analyses the condition of the labour alliance of the Labour Party and its affiliated unions in the light of a recent typology of union–party links, and of Lewis Minkin's seminal study of the British union–party link. We conclude that, while the link appeared to have stabilized before the general election in 2001, it has become much more volatile since, although the new group of more left‐wing leaders of major unions remains determined to reassert the union position inside the party rather than radically change the union–Labour relationship.     

Workers of the Internet unite? Online freelancer organisation among remote gig economy workers in six Asian and African countries

This article presents findings regarding collective organisation among online freelancers in middle‐income countries. Drawing on research in Southeast Asia and Sub‐Saharan Africa, we find that the specific nature of the online freelancing labour process gives rise to a distinctive form of organisation, in which social media groups play a central role in structuring communication and unions are absent. Previous research is limited to either conventional freelancers or ‘microworkers’ who do relatively low‐skilled tasks via online labour platforms. This study uses 107 interviews and a survey of 658 freelancers who obtain work via a variety of online platforms to highlight that Internet‐based communities play a vital role in their work experiences. Internet‐based communities enable workers to support each other and share information. This, in turn, increases their security and protection. However, these communities are fragmented by nationality, occupation and platform.     

Beyond the Union‐Centred Approach: A Critical Evaluation of Recent Trade Union Elections in China

Many Western scholars have regarded union democracy and elections as affairs that are internal to trade unions and unconnected with outside forces. Going beyond the mainstream union‐centred approach, this study critically assesses one significant type of union election that has been emerging in China since 2010 and that has been driven by different forces from previous elections. Previous workplace union elections had been ‘top‐down’ — initiated by the party‐state or its apparatuses, or else transnational corporation‐induced — but this newer type of election has been driven by workers' strikes. This study illustrates how the dynamics among the quadripartite actors — party‐state, higher‐level trade unions, capital and labour — have shaped these strike‐driven elections. Contrary to the claim that these elections have been ‘direct’ and ‘democratic’, our case studies show that they have been indirect and quasi‐democratic in nature.     

Labour Market Governance and the Creation of Outsiders

Using case‐study data, the article examines the contention that protective labour market policies and trade union action are responsible for growing divisions between labour market ‘insiders and outsiders’. Case studies are reported on developments in collective bargaining in the hospitals and engineering sectors from seven western and central European countries. The article finds that managerial strategies, and interactions between management and unions, have to be considered to give a full account of the growth of precarious employment.