Emmanuel Teitelbaum

Measuring Trade Union Rights through Violations Recorded in Textual Sources: An Assessment

The author uses item response theory to evaluate the increasingly prominent method of measuring labor rights developed by David Kucera. The analysis shows that most of the component items in the Kucera index relate to the same latent variable, which can be construed as “the propensity to violate labor rights.” At the same time, individual country scores highlight the method’s inability to distinguish between countries known to have excellent respect for worker rights and extremely repressive countries. The final section tests the robustness of Kucera’s finding that there is no relationship between observed labor rights violations and foreign direct investment.

WAS THE INDIAN LABOR MOVEMENT EVER CO-OPTED?

ABSTRACT Despite its central importance to Indias political and economic development, the organizational capacity of Indias working class is poorly understood. Standard social scientific accounts portray the Indian working class as weakened by continual fragmentation and wholly dominated by political parties and the state. Social scientists therefore assume that the Indian working class is economically and politically inconsequential. This essay challenges these prominent misconceptions. Drawing on original survey data, government statistics, and a discussion of Indian industrial and labor law, the author shows that the Indian labor movement has been much more unified, much more contentious in the collective bargaining arena, and much more politically influential than previously assumed. The author speculates that the key reason social scientists have misjudged the strength of organized labor in India is that their assessments have relied too heavily on “key source” interviews with business, political and trade union elites, all of whom have incentives to portray workers as divided and weak.

Mobilizing Restraint: Economic Reform and the Politics of Industrial Protest in South Asia

The study draws on evidence from South Asia to explore how union partisan ties condition industrial protest in the context of rapid economic change. It argues that unions controlled by major political parties respond to the economic challenges of the postreform period by facilitating institutionalized grievance resolution and encouraging restraint in the collective bargaining arena. By contrast, politically independent unions and those controlled by small parties are more likely to ratchet up militancy and engage in extreme or violent forms of protest. The difference between the protest behavior of major party unions and other types of unions is explained by the fact that major political parties are encompassing organizations that internalize the externalities associated with the protest of their affiliated unions. Using original survey data from four regions in South Asia, the study shows that party encompassment is a better predictor of worker protest than other features of the affiliated party or the union, including whether the party is in or out of power, the ideological orientation of the party, or the degree of union encompassment. The analysis has implications for the policy debate over whether successful economic reform is contingent upon the political exclusion or repression of organized labor.

Can a developing democracy benefit from labour repression? Evidence from Sri Lanka

Abstract While a growing body of academic literature casts doubt on the wisdom of authoritarian responses to labour in developing democracies, few empirical studies demonstrate the adverse effects of excluding organised labour from the policy arena or repressing trade unions in the industrial relations arena. This paper draws on the recent history of state–labour relations in Sri Lanka to help fill this gap. Beginning in the late 1970s, the Sri Lankan government adopted a labour-repressive export-oriented strategy of development. The author shows how the repression of private sector unions during this period destroyed the legitimacy of traditional left unions and the structure of institutionalised bargaining that was in place prior to Sri Lankas authoritarian period. This erosion of the system of institutionalised bargaining eventually led workers to shift their support to more radical, ‘new left’ unions and culminated in a wave of extreme and violent forms of protest that chased away much needed foreign direct investment. The chaotic consequences of the labour repression suggest two primary conclusions: (a) that prior democratic mobilisation may make labour repression untenable over the long term; and (b) that repression may backfire, creating bursts of highly visible and destabilising protest that undermine the developmental objectives of neoliberal reforms.

Ethnic Parties and Public Spending New Theory and Evidence From the Indian States

Social scientists largely see ethnic politics as inhibiting public goods provisioning within developing democracies. Such parties are thought to uniformly rely on distributing excludable benefits to co-ethnics, rather than on providing public goods to all. We argue that ethnic parties can vary substantially in how they mobilize support and behave in office. Much of this variation depends on the breadth of the identity they activate. Although “narrow” ethnic parties do indeed entrench patronage politics, the rise of more “encompassing” ethnic parties can actually improve levels of voter autonomy, expand the effective size of winning coalitions, and increase spending on broadly available public goods. We develop and test this argument with evidence from the Indian states, including a nationally representative survey of 20,000 Indian voters and a panel data set of 15 major states over four decades.

In the Grip of a Green Giant How the Rural Sector Tamed Organized Labor in India

Social scientists studying rural—urban struggles have primarily focused on the issue of urban bias. The issue of rural bias and its potential effects on urban dwellers has received much less attention. This article demonstrates how agrarian political mobilization of rural constituents adversely affected urban workers in India. Agrarian mobilization led to two changes in development policy that undermined the bargaining strength of organized labor. First, remunerative pricing for agricultural products biased the terms of trade in favor of agriculture, resulting in a rise in the product wage. Second, incentives for rural and small-scale industries led to increased product market competition in the manufacturing sector, generating unemployment among urban workers. Under these circumstances, unions could not frequently strike, and, when they did strike, they fought longer to win their demands. The author supports these arguments with a statistical analysis of strike frequency and duration in India from 1976 to 1997.

Colonialism and Armed Conflict in the Indian Countryside

This paper explores the relationship between British colonial rule and contemporary conflict in India. We argue that colonialism generated deep-seated grievances among tribal and low-caste communities that have ultimately resulted in armed conflict in rural areas. We identify three mechanisms that have given rise to conflict. First, the British exacerbated land inequality in rural areas by granting land ownership rights to zamindars and commandeering forest lands upon which tribal populations rely for sustenance. Second, the British state reified social inequalities in tribal and low-caste areas through their systematic categorization and ranking of caste and tribal communities. Finally, the British instituted a new bureaucratic apparatus that cemented these social inequalities through administrative practice, thereby fostering distrust of India’s legal system among low-caste and tribal groups. The hierarchical social and exploitative economic relationships that originated in the colonial period have had long-term deleterious effects on political stability in the countryside. We test this argument by looking at data on the current Naxalite conflict, which has been fueled by the grievances of tribal and low-caste groups. We analyze conflict outcomes in 595 districts from 2004-2009, specifically comparing areas that were under British rule with those that remained under the rule of native kings.

The Institutional Imperative: The Politics of Equitable Development in Southeast Asia. By Erik Martinez Kuhonta. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011. 368p.

In his book, Erik Kuhonta advances an institutional theory of equitable development. He argues that an institutionalized party helps to promote social and human development by privileging public over private interests and by promoting programmatic politics rather than clientelistic exchange. A party is fully institutionalized when it is autonomous, coherent, and organizationally complex, but is rooted in society in a way that enables it to address the needs of the poor (pp. 23–24). To test his argument, Kuhonta draws on evidence from two sets of paired comparisons. The primary comparison is of Malaysia and Thailand, and in a separate chapter, he extends the argument by comparing the Philippines and Vietnam.