Labor Protest Research Articles

The Liverpool Dock Strike, 1995–98: a resurgence of solidarity in the age of globalisation

As the 20th anniversary of the 1995–1998 Liverpool Dockers’ Strike approaches, this case of industrial action should not be dismissed as a reminder of yet another nail in the coffin of organised labour. Rather, this event needs to be viewed more optimistically in hindsight as a symbol that working-class consciousness and systems of solidarity had not vanished entirely from Britain after the crushing collapse of domestic manufacturing and the fall of the miners in 1985. Indeed, the Liverpool dockers invented a fresh campaign of industrial action at this time, led more from the ‘bottom-up’ than most other labour protests in the past. Fuelled by a cognisant awareness of both community and workplace experience within the context of popular historical memory, this industrial action played significant roles in reconfiguring and adapting solidarity in this new era of rentier, global capitalism. It is appropriate we recall working-class militancy in a city whose own historical narrative is often described as ‘exceptional’ when one reflects upon Liverpool’s long entrenched culture of opposition.

Labour Protests in the State Sector: Back to the Nineties?

Labour Protests in the State Sector: Back to the Nineties?

Jamming market rhetoric in Wisconsin's 2011 labor protests

ABSTRACTTaking the case of the 2011 protests at the Wisconsin state capitol, this essay theorizes a model of political culture jamming. When 100,000 people swarmed downtown Madison, I argue, they jammed both Governor Scott Walker's market-based rhetoric and organized labor's typical response to such attacks. This case study, then, extends culture jamming as a way of understanding resistance to the marketization of realms that extend beyond the vaguely cultural. It demonstrates that when expanded to include embodied, political action, culture jamming offers a particularly useful lens through which activists may challenge rhetorics that promote ever-expanding markets.

Gentō

Japanese gentō (originally a translation of the English term “magic lantern”) is a still-image projection system that enlarges images on a transparent slide or film and projects them onto a large screen. Most studies argue that the magic lantern, stereopticon, or gentō thrived from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries and that their use declined in the early twentieth century with the arrival of the motion picture. This article examines the revival and redevelopment of gentō in mid-twentieth-century Japan, focusing on its use in 1950s social movements (including labor, social welfare, and political protest movements) and exploring how independent gentō works represented the landscapes, histories, and everyday lives threatened by the presence of U.S. military forces in Japan. It also examines the representation of female gender and sexuality in these gentō works, looking at the ways they depict women as both symbols of a victimized and humiliated homeland and as threats to the order of paternalistic family and society in Japan.

Networking Alone? Digital Communications and Collective Action in Vietnam

This article explores the potential for the formation of collective action in Vietnam. Referring to land and labour protests, bauxite mining, anti-China demonstrations, as well as the revision of the 1992 Constitution, the article examines the social movement repertoires diverse groups have adopted to reach their objectives. Drawing on social movement theory and communication power, this contribution shows that apart from access to the technology, citizens’ opportunities to participate in digital networks as well as access to the default communication network of the state are necessary prerequisites in order to attain public attention and possibly to achieve social change. Moreover, this article shows that existing power differentials in Vietnam are reproduced in digital space. It concludes that for different collective behaviours to result in a social movement, it is essential to “switch” and to connect the different networks. For the moment, the call to protect Vietnam's sovereignty offers common ground for collective action.

The New Surfacing Image of the Teaching Profession

Current discourses in education circles are on the professional status of the teaching profession due to teachers’ continued involvement in labour protests. This paper discusses whether teachers may still be considered as professionals or workers. There is an assumption that if formulated policies reflect on alleviating the plight and actual conditions in which teachers work, strikes can be halted resulting in quality teaching and learning in schools. A literature review was conducted to seek solutions to this impasse. It is expected that with insight into the actual teachers’ working conditions by policymakers, barriers that lead to endless labour protests may be alleviated to restore professionalism in teaching.

New and Old Forms of Social Movements: A Discussion from Brazil

This article discusses Brazilian social struggles in the last years with emphasis on the mass demonstrations that erupted in mid-2013 and the strikes and other labour protests somehow related to these events. It aims to demonstrate a connection between collective protests that apparently fit perfectly in the dominant characterisation of ‘new' social movements (horizontality, new social basis and leadership, diffuse rejection of the political order and the traditional forms of organisation, etc.) and traditional forms of struggle. It is also aimed at seeking a more totalising perspective, through a conceptual discussion in dialogue with the empirical analysis, focusing on debates about social class and forms of domination.

Unite or Fall: Labor Protests in Ukraine in the Face of the Crises

Ukraine is facing changes of a significant scale. Caused by external and internal factors and processes, these changes will influence the socio-economic and political reality of the majority of Ukrainians. The character and degree of the changes are yet to be defined in the political struggle inside the country. Do workers, as the biggest social class, have the potential to press for their interests in the face of a spiraling crisis? In this article we tried to answer this question by analyzing labor protests in the country. Our research of empirical material of the Ukrainian Protest and Coercion database shows that labor actors have significant bargaining power on local issues but lack coordinated and relatively large-scale mobilization, hence, can hardly influence state-level politics. Being scattered and defensive, lacking solidarity among themselves and without support from allies, workers have few chances to succeed in promoting their agenda. Some possible logical and empirically supported solutions to increase labor bargaining power in this context are also suggested in the article.

Das neue „Epizentrum weltweiter Arbeiterunruhe“? Klassenzusammensetzung und Arbeitskämpfe in China seit den 1980er Jahren

The New “Epicenter of World Labour Unrest”? Class Compositionand Workers’ Struggles in China since the 1980s.AbstractAgainst the backdrop of a significant rise in workers’ struggles in the People’s Republic of China since the beginning of “reform and opening up” in 1978, this article discusses processes of working class formation and the potential for the emergence of a new labour movement in China. It takes Beverly Silver’s proposition that China is currently becoming the epicentre of class struggle within the capitalist world system as its starting point. Silver’s world-historical and macro-sociological analysis is confronted with findings from ethnographic research undertaken by Chinese labour scholars as well as data collected by the author via qualitative interviews with a variety of labour activists and academics on the specific forms and contents of workers’ struggles in China. Through an overview and contextualisation of labour unrest over the last thirty-plus years, it is firstly shown that the recomposition of the Chinese working class is characterised by specific periods of labour protest with distinct qualitative characteristics. Secondly, it is argued that since the mid-2000s one can see new patterns of strikes, originating in the second generation of migrant workers, which point towards an increasing generalisation of class action. Finally, the article discusses factors that inhibit more stable forms of working class organisation.Keywords: China, socio-economic transformation, labour movement, Beverly Silver, workers’ struggles, class composition, migrant workers-----Schlagwörter: China, sozio-ökonomische Transformation, ArbeiterInnenbewegung, Beverly Silver, Arbeitskämpfe, Klassenzusammensetzung, WanderarbeiterInnen-----Bibliographie: Fuchs, Daniel: Das neue „Epizentrum weltweiter Arbeiterunruhe“? Klassenzusammensetzung und Arbeitskämpfe in China seit den 1980er Jahren, PERIPHERIE, 2-2015, S. 303-326. https://doi.org/10.3224/peripherie.v35i138-139.24301

The Impact of the 2008 Labor Contract Law on Labor Disputes in China

China's Labor Contract Law came into force on January 1, 2008. One of several important legislative acts aimed at improving the processing of labor grievances through mediation, arbitration, and litigation, and averting collective labor protest, it provides that all employed persons must work under written individual employment contracts. We evaluate the legislation's impact nationally and by province for the years before and after the law's adoption. Observing that the law's effect varied substantially across provinces, we estimate the effects of the law, controlling for time, development level, export intensity, and migrant labor share, on the volume of disputes by province using a cross-sectional time series design. We also examine the law's impact on the incidence of collective disputes and the grounds for disputes. We find that the law significantly increased the volume of labor disputes, raising questions about the relative costliness of the government's strategy for managing employment relations.

China's Migrant Workers' Legal Rights Awareness on the Rise

INTERNATIONAL union rights Page 6 Volume 22 Issue 4 2015 Guangdong’s industrial cities are undergoing deindustrialisation, leaving workers stranded with unpaid wages and years of entitlements Protests over social insurance and housing funds In April 2014, another new type of demand erupted —protests over unpaid or underpaid social insurance and housing fund contributions by employers. More than 40,000 workers went on strike at a huge factory complex in Guangdong Province owned by the Yue Yuen company. This is the world’s largest footwear manufacturer, which makes running shoes for most of the big brands. It was the largest strike action recorded in Guangdong in the last three decades since China opened its door to foreign investors. The strike lasted for seventeen days, after a worker discovered that the company had not been contributing enough toward her retirement. The Chinese law is quite generous to employees: employers’ contribution to a retirement fund should range from 12 percent to 18 percent of the employees’ total wage depending on the locality. The local government , the official trade union and the police joined forces to suppress the strikers. The police brought police dogs into the factory and dormitories to force workers back to the assembly lines A year after the Yue Yuen strike, 5000 workers at another shoe factory demanded a different type of management contribution worth 5 percent of salary – toward a housing fund mandated by law. Together these two types of accumulated debts owed to thousands of workers run into many millions of dollars, and have serious implications for a company’s finances. For many years the workers have not paid much attention to these two funds, but as the workers age (until a dozen years ago almost all of them were in their 20s), they increasingly are concerned about being short-changed. Deindustrialisation The strikes in Guangdong have been exacerbated by the troubled economy of Guangdong’s industrial cities, which are undergoing deindustrialisation , with empty factory and commercial buildings marring some cities. The soaring cost of living in this southern province necessitates a minimum wage higher than in the rest of China, and foreign companies that rely on cheap labour have been relocating to less expensive inland provinces or have moved their factory operations overseas to South and Southeast Asia. Vietnam, for instance has overtaken China as the number one exporter of garments to the US market. As investors in Guangdong move their factory production elsewhere, some simply refuse to honour their obligations, leaving workers stranded with unpaid wages and years of entitlements. The workers’ only solution is to take to street action before the companies leave. M ass protests of all types have been increasing in China. Labour protests take up about a third, and the number of these protest actions has been rising sharply, but they have all been isolated plant-level incidents. Most of these are staged by workers from China’s countryside or small towns who have migrated to cities in search of work. They make up about 60 percent of China’s non-agricultural workforce, providing almost all the workers in the export industries that fill our shops with goods. Guangdong Province, just north of Hong Kong, has the largest number of migrant factory workers and has witnessed the largest number of protests. Protests over bread and butter issues During the past two decades, these protests have been sporadic and comparatively peaceful—until recently. The vast majority of their demands have been over management violations of China’s labour laws—unpaid wages, under-paid wages, or poor and unsafe work conditions. Workers usually first try to reason with management; and when stone-walled, they send representative to local government authorities to seek help. Only when they are still ignored do they take to the streets, blocking highways, because traffic disruption is one sure strategy to force the authorities to pay attention. Often the police get mobilised, and scuffles and arrests follow. Compared to workers in other Asian countries such as Cambodia, Indonesia and Bangladesh, Chinese workers have been comparatively compliant . They have not targeted the government for an increase in the legal minimum wage. They have not asked to eliminate China’s household registration...

Who Speaks for Workers? Japan and the 1919 ILO Debates Over Rights and Global Labor Standards

AbstractContrary to conventional wisdom, some of the most contentious disputes over international labor standards and worker rights occurred not between Western nations and the “rest” but within single nations. To explore the deep fissures in Japanese society over the rights of women and workers, I offer the first scholarly account of Japan's only woman representative to the ILO's inaugural 1919 Washington conference, elite social feminist Tanaka Taka, grandniece of renowned Japanese capitalist Shibusawa Eiichi. I recount her efforts in Japan and in Washington to secure free speech and economic rights for Japan's workers, men and women, and detail the hostilities she encountered from employers and organized labor. In addition, I reconstruct the parallel tale of factory supervisor Masumoto Uhei whose appointment as Japan's labor delegate led to widespread labor protests and a power struggle between trade unions and the state in Japan. The debate over who would speak for Japan's workers at the ILO and whether Japan would accept the labor standards being proposed by Western nations captured worldwide attention. It changed ideas in the East and the West about what Japan's workers deserved and desired and had lasting consequences for global politics and social policy.

Labour Demands, Regime Concessions: Moroccan Unions and the Arab Uprising

This article investigates how public employee unions mobilised to take advantage of Morocco's Arab uprising. Leveraging their positions as operators of public institutions, these unionists exploited the unrest to strategically advance their interests. Two points emerge from this account of state—labour relations in Morocco. First, a spike in labour contestation began in early 2010, presaging the unrest that rocked Moroccan cities in 2011. Second, the unions secured their demands through traditional tactics of labour mobilisation—joining street protests, exaggerating material demands, and threatening negotiation walkouts. This strategy, however, became more efficacious during the Arab uprising. Fearing urban riots that had historically grown from labour protests since the 1980s, regime elites conceded to union demands, many of which they had previously rejected in the 2000s.

The politics of labour legislation in southern China: How foreign chambers of commerce and government agencies influence collective bargaining laws

AbstractIn 2010, labour protests spread across China, sparked by the Honda workers' strike. Hoping to pacify the aggrieved workers, the Shenzhen and Guangdong governments resumed discussion of the suspended draft Shenzhen Collective Consultation Ordinance and the Guangdong Regulations on the Democratic Management of Enterprises. However, following strong opposition from foreign chambers of commerce, discussion was once again suspended. The authors show that two factors determine how foreign chambers of commerce and government agencies influence labour legislation in southern China: the position in global production chains of the firms they represent, and the relevant industrial relations model.

Anthracite Labor Wars: Tenancy, Italians, and Organized Crime in the Northern Coalfield of Northeastern Pennsylvania, 1897–1959

Anthracite Labor Wars: Tenancy, Italians, and Organized Crime in the Northern Coalfield of Northeastern Pennsylvania, 1897–1959

In the Driver's Seat: Chicago's Bus Drivers and Labor Insurgency in the Era of Black Power

During the summer of 1968, hundreds of black bus drivers initiated two wildcat strikes in Chicago. These actions crippled the city's bus routes and left hundreds of thousands of people without service. The strike was unusual because the drivers demanded more of their union than of the company. These Chicago Transit Authority employees protested the antidemocratic structure of the Amalgamated Transport Union, which they believed favored white employees and retirees despite a majority black workforce. As the strike made headlines and worried Mayor Richard J. Daley (and his plans for the Democratic convention), drivers formed alliances with community groups. Fusing the cause of economic justice with that of the Black Power movement, these drivers and their allies formed the Concerned Transit Workers (CTW) as a vehicle for their demands. In this article Erik Gellman addresses the following questions: How did Black Power advocates address economic injustice at work? And how does this case study change previous understandings of black and labor protests during the late 1960s? Historians have only begun to account for the late 1960s stream of black activism by focusing on affirmative action's history from the local level, and Chicago is a vital case study for this approach because it has come to symbolize how whites in the urban North stymied southern civil rights activists when they tried to apply their nonviolent activism above the Mason-Dixon line. Many of these activists saw transit as a key urban space and sought to reverse deindustrialization and persistent job discrimination through black working-class nationalism, which provides a more complex and more contested vision of working-class Black Power as a potential remedy to the growing urban crisis in modern American cities.

LABOR ACTIVISM AND THE STATE IN THE OTTOMAN TOBACCO INDUSTRY

AbstractIn the late 19th and early 20th century, tobacco exports from the Ottoman Empire rapidly increased. Thousands of workers began to earn their livelihoods in warehouses, sorting and baling tobacco leaves according to their qualities. Ottoman towns where tobacco warehouses were concentrated soon became the sites of frequent labor protests. This article analyzes strikes that broke out in two such towns, İskeçe (Xanthi) and Kavala, in 1904 and 1905. It underlines the active role of the Ottoman government in the settlement of these strikes. It also shows that mobilized tobacco workers devised effective protest tactics and often secured a say in key decisions, such as when and under what conditions the warehouses operated. However, in both towns, labor activism was characterized by fragmentation as well as unity. The workers who took to the streets did not equally share the burdens and benefits of their collective actions. That inequality, the article argues, was rooted in gendered power relations, intercommunal rivalries, and other social tensions among the workers.

From Asian to Global Financial Crisis: Recovery Amidst Expanding Labour Precarity

This article outlines the labour impacts and social consequences of the 1997–98 Asian financial crisis and 2008–09 global financial crisis on Southeast Asia. Both had adverse consequences on output, employment, income and poverty in the region, although the impact of the global financial crisis was much less severe compared to the Asian financial crisis. Economies recovered quickly from both crises. However, labour markets continue to be characterised by informal, vulnerable and precarious employment. The crises and the ensuing efforts of employers to resort to increased flexibility in labour hiring in both crisis and recovery periods fanned labour protests despite the diminutive size of the trade union movement and the underdeveloped system of industrial relations in most countries. In turn, these protests have triggered national and regional debates on rules for labour contracting, minimum wage adjustments and social protection. These debates have remained unresolved even as the region is gearing up for fuller economic integration in 2015 labelled as the ASEAN Economic Community.

Political Process and Widespread Protests in China: the 2010 labor protest

Existing studies of collective actions in China pay most attention to frequent but localized protests, but such protests are less likely to deeply drive China's political and social prospect. By contrast, widespread protests are more likely to affect the Chinese Communist Party's authority and policies once they emerge. The goal of this article is thus to probe the conditions under which a widespread protest can happen in China today. This article proposes four necessary conditions grounded in the political process model and tests them by explaining the successful outbreak of the 2010 labor protest. Identifying these conditions helps us understand and predict the political and social development of China.

The Changing Nature of Labor Unrest in China

A qualitative shift is underway in the nature of labor protest in China. Contrary to prior literature that characterized strikes as being largely defensive in nature, the authors suggest that since 2008, Chinese workers have been striking offensively for more money, better working conditions, and more respect from employers. They explain these developments using a “political process” model that suggests economic and political opportunities are sending “cognitive cues” to workers that they have increased leverage, leading them to be more assertive in their demands. Such cues include a growing labor shortage, new labor laws, and new media openness. Their argument is supported by a unique data set of strikes that the authors collected, two case studies of strikes in aerospace factories, and interviews with a variety of employment relations stakeholders.