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China has, apparently, more trade union members than the rest of the world put together, but the unions are subservient to the Party-state. The theme of the paper is the gap between rhetoric and reality. Issues analysed include union structure, membership, representation, and the interaction between unions and the Party-state. We suggest that Chinese unions inhabit an Alice in Wonderland dream world and that they are virtually impotent when it comes to representing workers. Because the Party-state recognises that such frailty may lead to instability it has passed new laws promoting collective contracts and established new tripartite institutions to mediate and arbitrate disputes. While such laws are welcome they are largely hollow: collective contracts are very different from collective bargaining and the incidence of cases dealt with by the tripartite institutions is tiny. Much supporting evidence is presented drawing on detailed case studies undertaken in Hainan Province (the largest and one of the oldest special economic zones) in 2004 and 2005. The need for more effective representation is appreciated by some All China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU) officials, but it seems a long way off, so unions in China will continue to echo the White Queen: “The rule is, jam tomorrow and jam yesterday – but never jam today” and, alas, tomorrow never comes.

This book is a policy proposal aimed at the democratic left. It is concerned with gradual but radical reform of the socio‐economic system. An integrated policy of industrial and economic democracy, which centres around the establishment of a new sector of employee‐controlled enterprises, is presented. The proposal would retain the mix‐ed economy, but transform it into a much better “mixture”, with increased employee‐power in all sectors. While there is much of enduring value in our liberal western way of life, gross inequalities of wealth and power persist in our society.

The purpose of this paper is to illustrate that some enterprise unions in South China, as strategic labor actors, made local progress in collective bargaining, but further elaborates on why gainful bargaining would require a more systematic understanding of the prevailing industrial structure.

This paper is mainly drawn from intensive site visits and 51 in-depth interviews in 2013 and 2014, and several follow-ups up to 2018. Three cases of collective bargaining, featuring different union strategies of assertive negotiation, informal cooperation and direct confrontation, are discussed in detail.

The study illustrates that viable collective bargaining with worker-supported unions is possible in China. However, the effectiveness of bargaining does not count on this alone; the supply chain structure also imposes significant constraints, mainly by narrowing the bargaining scope of each supplier and differentiating the structural power of their unions. In these cases, institutionalized union coordination beyond individual suppliers is proposed.

These cases began as post-strike bargaining in Japanese auto supply chains and became the frontier of industrial relations in China. The impact of the supply chain in different sectors or regions requires further study.

This paper draws attention to the effect of an “invisible” but increasingly significant factor, industrial structure, on enterprise-level collective bargaining in China, unlike many previous criticisms of unwillingness or incompetence among labor actors.

The purpose of this paper is to test whether a hospitality worker's degree of individualism/collectivism influences his/her organizational citizenship behavior (OCB), comfort with empowerment, and leader‐member exchange (LMX) in the workplace.

Hypotheses were tested through the use of a sentence completion experiment conducted on American and Korean hotel workers. To increase generalizability, results were then replicated through the use of an identical sentence completion experiment conducted on American and Korean restaurant workers.

This research first confirms the notion that hospitality workers in a collective nation are more apt to possess a collective mindset in their work environments than those in an individualistic nation. Moreover, this research finds that hospitality workers in a collective nation demonstrate more OCB, possess lower comfort levels with empowerment, and possess higher levels of LMX than hospitality workers in an individualistic nation.

It would prove informative for future research to test these relationships in other contexts and settings.

These findings demonstrate the need to consider country culture when interpreting and managing OCB, employee empowerment, and LMX tendencies in hospitality settings.

Research that examines the influences of individualism/collectivism on OCB, comfort with empowerment, and LMX is scarce.

This chapter examines the underpinnings of collective resistance in a nonunion factory. I begin by acknowledging the important contribution made by Randy Hodson and others who have uncovered key material structural underpinnings of collective resistance in workplaces. Such an approach, however, leaves large unanswered questions about collective agency. I argue that a focus upon the potential links between lived culture and collective resistance can bring us closer to an understanding of collective agency. To this end, I present key findings of an ethnographic study of culture and resistance at window-blinds factory. I outline the informal collective resistance enacted by the workers in the factory and offer an analysis of the structural factors underpinning the considerable resistance at this factory. The second half of the chapter is dedicated to outlining the everyday Stayin’ Alive culture on the shopfloor and to analyzing the dotted lines that led from this culture to the collective resistance.

This paper proposes a new theoretical framework to explain enterprise unionism and conducts the first systematic comparative study of union structure in nine Asian countries. Our framework emphasizes political dynamics and the role of the state in labor relations and argues that the initial period of the collective bargaining era constituted a critical juncture (state labor policy) that occurred in distinctive ways in different countries and that these differences played a central role in shaping the different union structures in the following decades. The nine countries are mainly divided into three groups, depending on the type of state labor policy: enforcement of enterprise unionism; centralization/laissez-faire (non-enterprise unionism); and dual unionism/gradual transition (middle-ground). Governmental data were used for the study. A clear correspondence between state labor policy and union structure in each of these groups was found. We believe that our framework significantly enhances our understanding of the Asian cases. Future research should explore the validity of the proposed framework through comparative studies of Latin American cases where enterprise unions have also been observed.

The merits and demerits of replacement worker legislation continue to be a point of contention. This chapter provides empirical evidence of the impact of replacement worker bans on the outcomes of collective bargaining for the period of 1967–2009. Compared to the existing literature, this study has the advantage of using a merger of two previously separate administrative databases – the collective agreement and work stoppage databases from the Labour Program of Human Resources and Skills Development Canada (HRSDC). Under a temporary replacement worker ban, work stoppage incidence increases in the service sector, but decreases in the nonservice sector; work stoppages last longer but the wage settlements grow more slowly in both sectors. A permanent replacement worker ban increases the work stoppage incidence in the service sector and lowers the wage growth rate in the nonservice sector.

EU social policy is perhaps the most controversial aspect of European integration yet, despite all the political clashes on the matter, concepts like “social Europe” or “social dimension” remain ill‐defined and imprecise terms. Intends to outline and clarify in detail the debate about whether or not the European Union should have competence with regard to labour market affairs. A key message is that social policy has been controversial because it has become embroiled in the debate about the future political direction of the EU. In particular, three contrasting political models –symbiotic integration, integrative federalism and neo‐liberalism – have been put forward as organizing principles for the EU and each has a coherent view of what form social policy should take at the European level. It is the clash between these three models that has caused EU social policy to be so contestable and intractable.

The definition and essence of a trade union is to provide a voice for the worker, enabling a balancing of the power gap between employer and employee. How does that shift in the gig economy when the worker lacks even the most basic elements of protection through employment law? This chapter interrogates the proposition that the trade union movement has until recently neglected to engage with the issues that these workers are facing and so has denied its own roots. One result of this has been the emergence of alternative forms of organising for collective voice. This shifts the boundaries between organisers of collective voice and representation with varying results. This chapter discusses the impact on trade unionism of the gig economy and critiques its approach and pace. It identifies the conflict engendered within the trade union of advocating for members only, as well as the shifting sectors in the broader economy and trade union responses to that. The importance of trade unionism moving forward is assessed through a series of interviews and secondary research using the lenses of social movement theory at macro-level, social network theory at meso-level and social identity theory at micro-level. These theories allow an interdisciplinary analysis of trade unions responses to assess the causes of responses of trade unionists to this emergent gigging workforce and its challenges. It identifies that there is a more recent intention and potential for trade unions to engage with giggers but that an innovative and international movement for voice is required.

This paper aims to analyse two ways in which Chinese workers attempt to resist unjust treatment: exit through quitting and voice via collective action. This is in the context of rapid economic growth, rising economic inequality (Lu and Gao, 2011; Qin et al., 2009; Reed, 2012) and escalating industrial conflict (Pringle, 2011).

A model is developed and hypotheses formulated in the light of qualitative data analysis that included archival data, workplace observation and interviews with employees and managers at a large factory. A mediated chain model was tested based on a survey of 234 semi-skilled and skilled manual workers and 353 service employees employed in the same city in Western China.

Organisational identification and organisational cynicism were found to mediate the relationship between interactional justice and the two outcomes, intention to quit and collective opposition.

The authors’ interpretation of these relationships challenge previous research by showing that social identification is a more powerful explanation than social exchange in accounting for variations in these two outcomes. Implications are drawn for human resource theory and practice.