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What happens when local unions begin to advocate for the rights of temporary migrant workers, asks Michele Ford in her sweeping study of seven Asian countries? Until recently unions in Hong Kong, Japan, Malaysia, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, and Thailand were uniformly hostile towards foreign workers, but Ford deftly shows how times and attitudes have begun to change. Now, she argues, NGOs and the Global Union Federations are encouraging local unions to represent and advocate for these peripheral workers, and in some cases succeeding. From Migrant to Worker builds our understanding of the role the international labor movement and local unions have had in developing a movement for migrant workers' labor rights. Ford examines the relationship between different kinds of labor movement actors and the constraints imposed on those actors by resource flows, contingency, and local context. Her conclusions show that in countries-Hong Kong, Malaysia, and Thailand-where resource flows and local factors give the Global Union Federations more influence local unions have become much more engaged with migrant workers. But in countries-Japan and Taiwan, for example-where they have little effect there has been little progress. While much has changed, Ford forces us to see that labor migration in Asia is still fraught with complications and hardships, and that local unions are not always able or willing to act.

In contrast to much of the research that treats the official All China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU) as a monolithic organization, the author argues that there is considerable variation within ACFTU in terms of local union organizing strategies. Using extensive field research and interviews with regional union officials, grassroots union cadres, shop floor workers, and employers and managers in China during the period 2005-2007, the author contributes to an understanding of contemporary trade union strategies in China. Moreover, his analysis of regional union strategies suggests three patterns of union organizing: the traditional ACFTU pattern, the union association pattern, and the regional, industry-based bargaining pattern, each with vastly different consequences for the future of trade unions and collective bargaining in China.

This study argues that well organized labor movements and increasing labor mobilization played a crucial role in the democratic transitions in Indonesia in 1998 and the Philippines in 1986. In contrast, the presence of less active and less organized labor unions in Malaysia, Myanmar, and Singapore appears to be an important reason for the durability of authoritarianism in those countries.

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.

This paper examines three case studies to show how labor unions and community organizations, residents, and local governments in Korea built and developed regional networks. Korean labor unions have become aware that they cannot operate in isolation from their communities and have had to involve community organizations in their fights. Each case shows a labor movement's efforts to avoid isolation and broaden union identities and boundaries. These attempts are occurring in many regions, and it is likely that the future will bring greater attention to the building of strategically oriented relationships between labor unions and communities.

This study explores the commonality and variation of non-regular workers’ struggles in Korea by drawing upon 30 major dispute cases which have taken place since 2000. The common features of those struggles are characterized as defensive claim-making, employer’s determined union-busting, protracted struggle outside workplace, transgressive protest repertoire, reliance on external solidarity, third actors’ mediation, dispute recurrence and union’s organizational instability, and protest against large firms. At the same time, the non-regular workers’ struggle shows a great deal of variation in outcomes (i.e. bargaining gains and union membership) and key attributes (i.e. repertoire, duration, timing) of those struggles. The different outcomes of the struggles are closely correlated with the attitude of regular workers unions as well as the extent of external solidarity toward non-regular workers’ struggles, with some contingencies (i.e. public meaning of the struggle, the content and timing of related legal decision by the government or the court, the industry union’s involvement, and claimants’ self-sacrificing protest) creating outliers from this patterned relationship. The outcome of non-regular workers’ struggles is also correlated with their repertoire and duration in a polarizing form like the spirals of moderatization (better outcome – low-risk repertoire – shorter duration) and extremization (worse outcome – high-risk repertoire – longer duration).

This special issue of Development and Society examines the historical development and current state of coalitions between labor unions and civil society organizations (CSOs) in South Korea (hereafter Korea), Taiwan, and Japan. It focuses on the possibilities and limits of union-CSO coalitions as ways to (re-)establish the labor movements as a counterweight to state, business, and market domination of civil society. Although the three East Asian countries have different trajectories of political and economic development in the postwar period (for example, Korea and Taiwan experienced authoritarian state rule; Japan did not), their labor movements and civil societies share characteristics. They each have decentralized union organizations and civil societies whose spheres of activity tend to be constrained by the state, political parties, and business corporations. The special issue consists of five articles on union-CSO coalitions in Korea, Japan, and Taiwan. Three articles are about historical evolution of such coalitions in each country, while two articles are on notable contemporary cases of the coalition observed in Korea and Taiwan. It is a meaningful attempt to examine union-CSO coalitions among these nonWestern countries, particularly from the comparative and historical perspective, in that the existing English literature has given little attention to the relationship between labor unions and civil society organizations outside countries in the West.

This paper seeks to identify the spatialized dimensions of labour control in sites of rapid and recent industrialization in Southeast Asia. Using a comparative analysis of locations in Penang (Malaysia), Batam (Indonesia) and Cavite/Laguna (the Philippines), it is argued that the construction and control of space has been used to enhance control over the working body, and, in particular, to contain labour organization, unionization and collective bargaining. Three broader arguments are made. First, that labour geographies need to be cognizant of the spatialized politics of labour beyond a narrow focus on the trade union movement. Second, that space is a potent tool in labour control and must be explicitly considered alongside the identity-based control strategies and institutional structures that have usually informed studies of labour regimes in newly industrializing contexts. Finally, a comparative perspective on local labour markets, and control regimes in particular, shows that the ways in which space is constructed and controlled differs between contexts, implying that universal judgements on the relevance or importance of particular arenas or spaces for labour politics should be reserved.

This article examines the historical development of the relationships between labor unions and civil society organizations (CSOs) in postwar Japan from the 1950s to the 2000s. The paper focuses on union-CSO relationships in three periods: the “post-authoritarian” period (the 1950s), the period of controversies over industrial pollution (from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s), and the period of union decline and neoliberalism (the 1990s and the 2000s). In the first period, the labor movement led coalitions as a “vanguard.” In the second period, the relationship between labor unions and CSOs became distant or tense. In the third period, to regain their social presence, labor unions formed coalitions with non-profit organizations (NPOs), and relationships between unions and CSOs were relatively equal. The third period also saw the development of more militant union-CSO coalitions to oppose labor market deregulation.

This paper analyzes craft-based unions founded after democratization in Taiwan, focusing in particular on how they cooperate with other civil society organizations (CSOs) and how coalitions develop to cope with the market risks faced by skilled workers. This paper asks whether these coalitions present any peculiarities or unusual dynamics beyond those designated by the state such as labor insurance. The study finds that these “new” occupational unions function as collective organizations of skilled workers, attempting to manipulate market relations by cooperating with other CSOs. Two strategies are identified in this paper: the Union of Community Servicewomen pursues a strategy of “market closure”; the Documentary Media Worker Union tries to establish coalitions with other CSOs by resorting to shared interests.