Nelson Lichtenstein

China's New Labour Contract Law: is China moving towards increased power for workers?

Abstract Chinas new labour law is a significant reform that offers workers greater employment security and income protection. It is a product of both unprecedented industrial unrest as well as the Chinese governments decision to move its economy to a higher-wage, higher-technology future. The law has energised many workers, who are now using the courts and the Communist Party-controlled trade unions to press their claims. But the law has also evoked a sharp reaction from many employers, who have sought to circumvent its purposes in two ways. First, they coerce many employees to resign their posts—thereby forfeiting important seniority claims—and then rehire them as new employees. Second, many labour-intensive manufacturers have begun to shutter their factories and shift production to even lower-wage regions of China or Southeast Asia. Although long an instrument of labour control and intimidation, the All-China Federation of Trade Unions has sought to use the new labour law to win for itself a measure of institutional and ideological legitimacy.

A New World of Retail Supremacy: Supply Chains and Workers' Chains in the Age of Wal-Mart

In contrast to the mid-twentieth century era of transnational commerce, in which the US or European manufacturing multinationals played the leading role, twenty-first century globalization is increasingly structured by a set of retail-dominated supply chains, that of Wal-Mart first among them. This strategic shift in the locus of corporate power has arisen out of two conjoined phenomena: first, the logistical integration made possible and necessary by the revolution in information/transportation technology (bar codes, data storage, containerization, global communications), and second, the neoliberal transformation of the worldwide political economy, which in the US has facilitated the massive expansion of a low-wage, import dependent retail sector, while in coastal China it has generated a huge export-manufacturing boom. But the global supply chain linking Guangdong Province to Bentonville, Arkansas may well be an increasingly fragile one, because the proletarianization of tens of millions of Chinese peasants is unlikely to go smoothly, especially under conditions of authoritarian governance.

Achieving Workers' Rights in the Global Economy

Today retail-dominated supply chains, of which those commanded by executives at Walmart, Apple, Nike, Zara, and H&M are the most prominent, generate at least half of all world trade and “employ” hundreds o f millions o f workers in thousands of contract manufacturers from Shenzhen and Shanghai to Sao Paulo and San Pedro Sula. Given their enormous power to squeeze prices and wages, these North Atlantic brands and retailers today occupy the commanding heights of world capitalism. The essays collected in Achieving Workers’ Rights in the Global Economy offer an incisive analysis of this pernicious system alongside proposals for its radical reform. Its contributors, many of whom have years of experience studying or working with major companies, nongovernmental organizations, international regulatory bodies, and trade unions on more than four continents, explain why so many high-profile corporate social responsibility programs have failed, why real wages have declined in much of the garmentmanufacturing sector, and why unions and other forms of worker self-organization have had such difficulty establishing themselves in China, South Asia, and Central America. The concluding chapters call for crossborder regulation, worker self-empowerment, and brand and retailer legal responsibility for the wages, working conditions, and safety of all those who labor in their contract factories.

Class Unconsciousness: Stop Using "Middle Class" to Depict the Labor Movement

roots in the gritty Pennsylvania coal country are quite genuine, presided over a “Middle Class Task Force” during his first couple of years in office; more recently, President Obama—in an effort to identify his policies with the Progressive-era social reformism of Teddy Roosevelt—used the phrase “middle class” twenty-eight times in his highly-touted Osawatomie, Kansas speech of early December 2011.

The Return of Merchant Capitalism

To understand the economic character, transnational politics, and labor regime characteristic of contemporary globalization, it is useful to revisit the concept of “merchant capitalism,” a form of market exchange that dominated trade in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Then as now, commodities proved crucial to world commerce, merchants held the whip hand over manufacturers, while workers found their remuneration and working conditions subject to competitive pressures that often debased their status. The transnational retailers who today dominate so many global supply chains therefore play many of the same roles as did the antebellum merchants of New York and Liverpool who favored free trade and formed an alliance with those who deployed unfree labor to grow the cotton and other commodities upon which the trading system of their day was built.

Labor and the New Congress: A Strategy for Winning

A labor victory in the new Congress depends on the definition of what it means to win. Labors broad agenda is passable in almost inverse relationship to that agendas capacity to strengthen the institutional and political power of trade unionism itself. This has been true for more than forty years, ever since the mid-1960s, when, during the second of the two great surges of liberal legislation in the last century (the mid-1930s is the other one) civil rights, Medicare, immigration reform, and aid to education passed with relative ease, while the repeal of 14b, which allowed Southern and Western states to pass and maintain right-to-work laws had no chance in a Congress dominated by ostensible liberals.

The American Communist Party in Its Heyday: A Case of Premature Eurocommunism?

Each generation rewrites the history of its era as a guide to a remolded future. In no field has this been more self-consciously the case than in that worked over by historians of the American left. Little more than a decade ago, for example, young scholars found the Industrial Workers of the World nearly irresistible. Perhaps there was something about Wobbly spontaneity and social iconoclasm, their very political marginality, that distantly mirrored the passions and hopes generated in the 1960s. In these days of industrial decline and conservative drift, the romantic Wob blies are not much in vogue. The possibilities open to the left seem more prosaic: halt the decline of the unions, temper the arms race, begin a reconstruction of the old liberal-labor alliance. Utopian and revolutionary visions, whether of 1917, 1932 or 1968 now seem anachronistic, even embarrassing, while foreign models of social ist reconstruction hold little interest. Neither Moscow nor Havana brings much inspiration, and only the long neglected social democratic movements of Western Europe ? whether in their Eurosocialist or Eurocommunist forms ? attract much excitement. It is out of this decades rather sober political landscape that a remarkably positive r??valuation of the Communist experience in American life has emerged. For here was a movement which at its height in the 1930s and 1940s enrolled upwards of 80,000 to 100,000 members, won the respect of a wide strata of liberals and progressives, and perhaps most importantly made its weight felt in the new industrial unions and on the broad terrain of national politics. Two new books by Harvey Levenstein and Maurice Isserman are particularly symptomatic of this retro spectively appreciative 1980s mood. Making use of extensive archival resources, including the heretofore unopened Earl Browder papers, both volumes are scho larly but not detached, and each uses the Communist past to search for answers to contemporary dilemmas. Isserman r??valu?tes the Partys experience during World

“Thick” States and “Thin” States, in a New Era of Merchant Power

Merchant capitalism has returned to the world stage. First apparent during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, merchant capitalism is a form of market exchange, primarily in commodities, in which traders, shippers, merchants, and financiers play key roles over and above the commodity producers themselves or the nascent manufacturers of their time. It was superseded during the late nineteenth century by industrial capitalism, which became associated with strong states, powerful manufacturing enterprises, and then in the twentieth century with big unions, economic regulation, and the entire political culture that characterizes social democracy. But the big-box anchored supply chains of recent decades have ushered in a new era of commodity exchange whose global reach, political agenda, and labor relations bulwark the conservative, neo-liberal turn that has shifted politics and culture to the right throughout those North Atlantic nation-states which once seemed so firmly on the road to social democracy. This chapter historicizes neo-liberal globalization by demonstrating that its material and structural roots lie in the resurgent merchant capitalism of our time.

The ILO from Geneva to the Pacific Rim

The explosive rise of East Asia and continuing importance of Central America and Mexico have shifted the centre of world export manufacturing from the North Atlantic to the Pacific Rim. This volume of original essays considers how the International Labour Organization has helped generate a set of ideas and practices, past and present, transnational and within a single nation, to advance social and economic reform in this vast region. Co-published with Palgrave Macmillan as part of the ILO Century series.

Why American Unions Need Intellectuals

Sixty years ago, in The New Men of Power, C. Wright Mills made a perceptive observation about the troubled relationship between labor leaders and radical intellectuals during an era of Cold War militarism and conservative advance. Wrote Mills: To have an American labor movement capable of carrying out the program of the left, making allies among the middle class, and moving upstream against the main drift, there must be a rank and file of vigorous workers, a brace of labor intellectuals, and a set of politically alert labor leaders. There must be the power and the intellect.