Labor and Post-Fordist Industrial Restructuring in East and Southeast Asia

Abstract

By a variety of measures, East Asian trade unionism remains numerically weak and politically ineffectual despite continuing industrial deepening in the region. Although political explanations go some distance in explaining this weakness, the new competitive strategies of firms have played an increasingly important role in undercutting and preempting organized labor. This article explores the impact of new strategies of flexible production, and of their developmental timing, for emergent labor movements across the region.

Employment relations and the state in Southeast Asia

“…Scholarly emphasis on the impact of EOI and its coincidence with authoritarian state corporatism has been important in analyses of Indonesia in particular (Ford, 1999;Hadiz, 1997) but has resonances elsewhere in capitalist Southeast Asia, most notably in Singapore, but also in socialist Vietnam (Ford, 2014). Deyo (1997Deyo ( , 2012 in comparative analyses of selected East and Southeast Asian nations has also emphasised the centrality of authoritarian states in linking EOI to the subordination of labour. Importantly, also, as noted by Frenkel and Yu (2014: 387), there has been a recognition in more recent work that some Asian states have become 'less authoritarian and repressive, acknowledging the growth of interest groups and the need to facilitate negotiated compromise'.…”

Change and Transformation in Asian Industrial Relations

“…Although the structure is tripartite, thus implying equal voices among all three partners, Deyo (1981), Leggett (1993), and Wilkinson (1994) suggest that the People's Action Party (PAP) has incorporated the labor movement through a combination of strategies over the years, notably, through some degree of repression, legislation, and political incorporation. By the1970s, it became impossible to distinguish between party and labor elites (Rosa 1990).…”

“…And it is also true that the goal of maintaining labor peace was influenced strongly by political considerations in some countries. For instance, several authors (e.g., Deyo 1989) have suggested that labor suppression in East Asia was motivated not solely by the need for economic development but as a means of political control to ensure the stability of the ruling regime. 3 We argue that in Asia as in the West, as product markets became more open to foreign trade, communism weakened, and radical unions and parties declined (for various reasons); labor peace became less of a priority.…”

“…The chaebol workplace HR practices were similar to those of Japan, directed as Leggett (1997) argues at achieving a ''unified internal labor market,'' which included implicit employment guarantees, seniority-based wages, and formalized 7 There are two differing views regarding the underlying rationale of IR regulations during the Park period. Deyo (1989) argues that the primary purpose of repressive labor relations during the 1960s was to maintain political stability. Lee (1993) argues that the focus of IR legislation and institutions was altered to be consistent with Korea's export-oriented industrialization strategy and to maintain stability, cost containment, and conflict reduction.…”

La organización flexible y su influencia en la implantación de prácticas de alto rendimiento: un estudio empírico

“…Existen varias clasificaciones de la flexibilidad de los recursos humanos, confrontándose unas con otras: flexibilidad funcional y flexibilidad numérica (Atkinson 1984;Smith 1997;Hunter et al 1993), flexibilidad interna y externa (Cappelli y Neumark 2001), cultura del clan y cultura hacia el mercado (Ouchi, 1980), flexibilidad dinámica y flexibilidad estática (Colclough y Tolbert 1992;Deyo 1997), y la organización centrada en el trabajo frente a la centrada las relaciones laborales (Tsui et al 1995).…”