Three essays on industrial relations in China

Abstract

This dissertation includes three essays. I argue in the first essay that given the weak union tradition there, alternative organizational bases for workers' mobilization and solidarity in local contexts have become an important factor for improving labor standards. Using a mixed method, including 54 in-depth interviews and a unique survey of 105 firms and 1,270 workers, this article specifies two findings: 1) despite the ever-increasing top-down regulatory efforts by the state and multinational corporations (MNCs), exploitative labor relations still exist as approximately ten percent of surveyed workers reported the experiences of labor abuses; and 2) native-place networks among migrant workers are a primary source of solidarity and have been crucial to preventing labor abuses; however, an overreliance on native-place networks reduces their salaries, suggesting an inverted U-shaped relationship between solidarity and economic opportunities. The second essay traces the origin of the flexible and densely connected production networks among Taiwanese manufacturers to the 1970s when they entered the global apparel and footwear production. This type of coordinated production network was transplanted to southern China around 1990 and has since been well maintained there. In contrast, the bottom-up mobilization of domestic entrepreneurs in the same city began to explore the domestic market by establishing multi-layered franchisee networks to distribute their own branded apparel. Whose presence as a reference group has provided Taiwanese entrepreneurs constraints, incentives, and mindsets to pursue emerging opportunities in the domestic market. In reaction, Taiwanese entrepreneurs began to utilize another configuration of inter-firm organizations-the Taiwanese Business Association-to share the risk and cost of exploring the domestic market and to increase their bargaining power vis-h-vis local Chinese governments. In the final essay, content analysis of 7,000 articles published in two top Chinese-language social science journals (1985-2011) suggests a lack of a large academic field of industrial relations (IR) in China, despite its rising labor problems. In general, there are two sub-spheres of a broad IR field (Kaufman 1993): human resource management scholars have focused on white-collar employees' psychological well-being, individual performance, and team efficiency; sociologists have contributed to our understanding of manufacturing workers' economic, social, and political disadvantages. An integration of both perspectives is important for the development of an IR field in China, especially given the recent state effort to establish stand-alone academic units devoted to IR research.