Labour relations and labour unrest in China

Abstract

With more than 800 million 1 workers, China provides the world's largest workforce. It is also well-known for having developed one of the most exploitative labour regimes in modern history (Chan, 2001). Therefore, it is not surprising that in recent years there have been numerous signs of growing resistance in the 'workshop of the world': several strike waves have drawn public and academic attention; collective actions are said to have become bolder and more aggressive-they tend to be more frequent, to involve more people and to endure longer (Cooke, 2008). Hence, China is sometimes even referred to as the centre of 'world labor unrest' (Silver, 2003), with an emerging 'new working class' (Chan and Pun, 2009) asking for their rights and fighting injustice. Accordingly, over the last 10 years a fairly intensive debate on labour relations and labour unrest in China has emerged. The three books which are being reviewed here fit neatly into this discourse. All of them use empirical evidence (mostly qualitative) to shed light on topics which thus far have been under-represented in Chinese labour studies.

How triple-role conflicts of Chinese enterprise trade unions impact employees' satisfaction: rights expectation as moderator

“…In recent years, the scale of labour disputes is continually increasing in China (Chawla et al , 2018; Cooke et al , 2019; Lyddon et al , 2015; Pflueger and Enssner, 2017). The total number of workers involved in labour disputes was 8.63 million between 2009 and 2017 (NBS website, 2019).…”