The Enactment of Three New Labour Laws in China: Unintended Consequences and the Emergence of ‘New’ Actors in Employment Relations

Abstract

In the last two decades economic globalization and changing ideologies on the role of the state have led to different responses from governments in respect of their regulatory role in employment relations (for example, Martínez Lucio and Stuart 2004; Bamber et al. 2010). In western economies, this has often taken the form of de-regulation or ‘re-regulation’, as MacKenzie and Martínez Lucio (2005, p. 500) argued. There is also an inclination to move away from a hard, i.e. regulatory, approach towards a softer, that is, a voluntary, approach to managing employment relations through the adoption of innovative schemes such as social partnership (for example, Martínez Lucio and Stuart 2004).KeywordsTrade UnionEmployment RelationEmployment AgencyLabour DisputeInformal EmploymentThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.