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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 Single European Market (SEM) represents the final stage in the process of economic integration of trade in goods and services and the free movement of individuals in the European Community (EC). The discussion of the benefits of the SEM has been concentrated primarily on the extent to which the elimination of non‐tariff barriers will lead to greater economic efficiency. The progress in the creation of a single labour market within the EC is reviewed and the relationship between labour mobility and migration in order to assess the impact of the free movement of labour. It is argued that internal migration will generally fall due to the free mobility of capital. Where labour embodies significant human capital however, migration is expected to rise in response to the removal of barriers.

On 1 April 1978, the Israeli peace movement burst into world consciousness when an estimated 25,000 Israelis demonstrated in Tel Aviv to urge the administration of Prime Minister Menachem Begin to continue peace negotiations with Egypt. A grassroots group called Peace Now is credited with organizing and leading that demonstration. Today, the “peace camp” refers to left‐wing political parties and organizations that hold dovish positions on the Arab‐Israeli conflict and the Palestinian issue. While some figures in the Labor Party view themselves as the peace movement's natural leader, political parties further to the left like the Citizens Rights Movement (CRM) and Mapam are more dovish. In the last 10 years, many grassroots peace organizations have, like Peace Now, formed outside the political party system, with the goal of influencing public opinion and eventually having an impact on policy makers. Peace Now is still the largest, most visible and influential of those organizations.

This study examines the transformation of labour non-governmental organisations (NGOs) operating in Mainland China since the enactment of the 2017 Overseas NGO Management Law, which aims to regulate foreign concerns functioning outside the direct control of the state. It focuses on the extent to which these organisations have responded to the rapidly changing political and social environment by altering their goals and strategies in support of migrant workers. It also considers the relevance of Western social movement theories (SMTs) to China's grassroots labour movement in the 2020s. 

The research is based on case studies of ten labour NGOs operating in Beijing, Tianjin and Yunnan. It draws upon fifteen semi-structured interviews with the founders, leaders and activists affiliated with those organisations, as well as records and documented information of each of those organisations.

While the power and influence of labour NGOs markedly diminished, most have been able to adapt their goals and the strategies remain sustainable amidst both China's changing political and social climates and the global pandemic. It suggests that conventional SMTs can still offer valuable insights into understanding the development of labour NGOs in China, although they might not fully interpret the specific conditions and challenges faced by these organisations.

This study stands out as one of very few to offer empirical evidence on the inner workings of China's labour NGOs over the last six years. It also contributes to our understanding of social movements in a non-Western context.

The purpose of this paper is to focus on labor movement in the agricultural sector of Taiwan to clarify the relationship between agricultural policy and the agricultural adjustment problem by estimating the labor movement function.

The relationship between agricultural policy and the adjustment process of agricultural labor in Taiwan was analyzed by modeling labor movement between the agricultural sector and other sectors. Through empirical analysis of labor migration function, it is clear that the following policy factors, affect the incentive for labor migration, and obstruct off‐farm labor migration: the price support policy; the incomplete farmland conversion regulations, which increase farmers' farmland possession motive; and government agricultural expenditure, which includes direct transfers to the agricultural sector.

The study confirms that after the late 1980s the factors that obstruct agricultural adjustment much more than the price support policy are the incomplete farmland conversion regulations and increasing government agricultural payments, from the result of the simulation with the influence of the policy eliminated.

The implication of this paper is that even though Taiwan has been participating in World Trade Organization from 2002 and consented to cut the tariff on agricultural products and reduce agriculture support policies not linked to production, a delay in labor adjustment between the agricultural sector and other sectors may not necessarily be eliminated if there are other policy factors that affect the incentive for off‐farm migration by farmers.

Many studies use the labor migration function for empirical analysis, but most of them estimated the function by a simple single regression which shows that the labor movement from the agricultural sector to the other sectors increases as a result of an expanding wage gap. However, off‐farm labor movement reduces the wage gap between sectors adversely. Therefore, a reverse causal relation exists between labor movement and the wage gap between sectors. The endogeneity problem was considered as analyzing the measurement of the labor migration function.

This article aims to explore the use of new information communication technology by the Malaysian labour movement. New information communication technologies are undoubtedly globalising, but these same technologies can also be used by labour to retrieve and re‐achieve a more equitable balance between labour and capital. The low transaction costs of the new information communication technology, and the universal reach of these same technologies, provide the labour movement with a critical new tool for organising and bargaining. Malaysia provides us with a useful example of this new context.

The authors e‐interviewed Malaysian labour activists and reviewed Malaysian labour and human rights web sites to develop a framework in which the discussion of global counter‐coordination by labour could be situated. This article provides case material from Malaysian web sites to demonstrate the importance of this technology in labour advocacy within Malaysia and in its connection with the outside world. These demonstrations of connectivity support the proposition of the paper that the new information technology affords the opportunity for the development of global union practices.

The article finds that the Malaysian labour movement is aware of the power of global relay that the technology provides it with and harnesses this power in its interaction with the state.

The level of electronic activity by the labour movement may be under‐recorded in this assessment, as the resources were not available to determine the volume of electronic mailing which takes place within the Malaysian labour relations environment.

This article provides the international labour movement with a perspective of the new information communication technology, which can have practical consequences for action: meta‐coordination structures are required at the level of information exchange.

This article draws attention to the “power of global relay” as a new feature in the politics of labour. This insight requires further theorisation and should be of interest within a range of disciplines concerned with critical approaches to change and power.

The purpose of this paper is to find how the changing relationship between labour and political parties influenced the growth of reasonably independent labour unions in Taiwan.

The authors have drawn on data collected through in-depth interviews of union officials, labour activists and members of legislature from two major political parties in Taiwan.

The authors found that the breach between labour and political parties was affected by the eventualities contemplated in democratisation. Though the DPP (Minchin-tang/Democratic Progressive Party) provided the initial “shot in arm”, autonomous unions have not necessarily grown underneath DPP’s dominion. Political liberalisation of Taiwan’s industrial relations systems has gained more momentum when the DPP was in opposition than in power. Anti-incumbency pushed independent unions to sway the opposition’s backing when Kuomintang (KMT/the Chinese Nationalists) was in power and not to that extent when the KMT stepped down. The autonomous labour movement in Taiwan was initially influenced by the changing relationship between labour and ruling parties. However, the movement was subsequently shaped by the ethnic and political characteristics based on the historical divide between the mainlanders and Taiwanese and Taiwan’s changing economic landscape.

Specific limitations include the subjectivity of the inference and lack of generalisability of the findings that are based on interviews with two out of three players of industrial relations system.

Because of globalisation and global financial crisis that brought together a new generation of workforce who hold individualistic values, have lesser faith in collectivism and perform new forms of work where unionisation is no more relevant, the autonomous labour movement in Taiwan was hugely impacted.

Growth of independent unions is not being shaped by democratisation alone. If we refocus the debate about democracy’s implied relationship with the rhetoric of national identity, one can see the crucial role played by the changing economic landscape and ethnic divisions ingrained in political origins.

Is labour's decline permanent, or is it merely a temporary weakening, as Beverley Silver suggests in her recent book, as the labour movement is unmade and remade in different locations and at different times? The article aims to examine this question in South Africa, one of the newly industrialised countries of the 1960s and 1970s, now largely bypassed by new manufacturing investment destined for countries such as India and China.

The paper concentrates, through six case studies, on the growing non‐core and peripheral zones of work and examines the impact of the restructuring on labour.

The evidence presented is ambiguous. While there have been significant innovative union organising experiments, it may be that the structural weakening of labour has been too great and that the new sources of power are too limited, to permit effective reorientation.

It is concluded that significant progress will only be made if there is a concerted effort to commit resources and above all to develop new associational strategies that recognise the potential for symbolic power as an alternative to the erosion of structural power of workers and the unions that represent them. Unless such a shift is made the crisis of labour movements internationally may be better understood as a permanent crisis than the temporary one Silver suggests.

The paper identities the potential for new strategies to develop and sustain associational and symbolic power that might compensate for weakened structural power and facilitate a remaking of the labour movement under new conditions.

This paper aims to review the case for improved (supra‐national) regional social and labour policies in principle, assess the extent to which existing regional associations of governments and regional organizations are actually developing effective regional labour policies in different sub‐regions of Europe, Latin America, Africa and Asia, and finally explore the driving forces behind their development and suggest how they might be further enhanced.

The paper compares the emergence of regional policies concerning labour rights and migrant workers' rights across regions. A sample of more than 15 regional arrangements are then ranked on the basis of their commitment in these areas. Finally, correlations between these rankings and different indicators of (real) regional interdependence are looked at.

The paper shows that regional socio‐economic policies are gaining importance in different world regions, although speeds are varied and generally low. It is difficult, however, to find strong correlations with indicators of regional interdependence such as trade or migration.

The paper presents one of the first systematic accounts of the development of regional socio‐economic policies in different world regions. It shows at the same time that huge opportunities for new policy initiatives exist in this area.

Capital, through its practices and narratives of global competition, is able to play unions in different locations off against one another through the construction and exploitation of difference. Trade unions and their activists have responded through formal institutional responses and with new forms of network‐based cooperation which is, at best, limited to action supported by the interests of union actors involved at a given juncture. This article seeks to argue that these forms of organizational responses are in themselves insufficient to allow unions to overcome the prisoner's dilemma inherent in their operating at a lower geographic level than capital.

The paper brings together ideas and insights from various interventions made by the authors and is a based on a review of a large part of the literature.

To regain control over labour markets would require either more systematic and structured union organizations of a transnational scope or a more concerted attempt at new forms of networking and the construction of a convincing radical counter‐narrative to that of global capitalist competition. The paper also argues that on close inspection the internationalization of capital itself exhibits significant Achilles Heels and may actually facilitate these new labour developments.

The paper argues that trade unions need to build their international coordinating strategies through a range of democratic and participative approaches. It also claims that transnational corporations are much more exposed by globalization than many commentators admit, trade unions and worker activists can and do exploit these gaps.

The power of transnational corporations fails to create consistent regimes of regulation and social progress. These in turn create a series of evasive strategies that do not contribute to consistent international dialogue.

The article asserts that the network structure of transnational labour unionism is in itself an ineffective response to capitalist globalization and the narrative of global competition.