Suchergebnisse

Many scholars have analysed bargaining between supervisory bureaucracies and Chinese large and medium-sized factories. Walder identified a web of informal, semi-bureaucratic relationships that structures negotiations over revenues, payments and subsidies. Granick and Tidrick pointed out that divided bureaucratic control increases the parties to bargaining, while conflicting interests present opportunities to play supervisors off against each other. Huang found collusive behaviour that occurs when local government agencies and firms rob the state treasury by increasing central subsidies and reducing central exactions in exchange for fees that go directly to local coffers. Numerous authors have noted that the focus of bargaining has shifted from material to financial transfers and have used (or questioned using) Kornai's "soft budget constraint" to explain the persistence of bargaining since the onset of reform.

Using a survey the authors initiated in fifty-four footwear factories in China, this article investigates the extent to which Chinese workers today are subjected to coercive workplace discipline. The authors compare the management practices of state-owned and collective factories, private factories owned by mainland Chinese, and those owned by investors from Hong Kong and Taiwan. The survey selects five indicators of a disciplinary labor regime: corporal punishment, compulsory overtime, discipline vis-à-vis bodily functions (such as toilet-going restrictions), imposition of monetary penalties, and bonding of labor through mandatory deposits. (Crit Asian Stud/DÜI)

Many scholars have analysed bargaining between supervisory bureaucracies and Chinese large and medium-sized factories. Walder identified a web of informal, semi-bureaucratic relationships that structures negotiations over revenues, payments and subsidies. Granick and Tidrick pointed out that divided bureaucratic control increases the parties to bargaining, while conflicting interests present opportunities to play supervisors off against each other. Huang found collusive behaviour that occurs when local government agencies and firms rob the state treasury by increasing central subsidies and reducing central exactions in exchange for fees that go directly to local coffers. Numerous authors have noted that the focus of bargaining has shifted from material to financial transfers and have used (or questioned using) Kornai's "soft budget constraint" to explain the persistence of bargaining since the onset of reform.

Based on interviews and a questionnaire answered by 25 factory directors in November 1988 in the PRC, this paper investigates director-level and enterprise-level factors that affect the bargaining power of Chinese factories. It shows that directors of larger, higher-ranking factories feel they are more successful in preserving autonomy and gaining exemptions and concessions from their supervisory agencies on salary and bonus pools and distribution, tax rates, and cadre personnel decisions. (DÜI-Sen)

Based on fieldwork in a city in central China, this study shows that, with an aggressive implementation of privatization schemes, labour struggles have emerged in which moral economy demands are increasingly permeated by "class consciousness." Privatization activates workers' "class consciousness," an idea that has become embedded in their minds through several decades' immersion in socialist (and anti-capitalist) ideology. For them, anti-privatization is politically defensible. It provides them with motivation, opportunity and an action-frame for class-conscious mobilization in Chinese factories. However, while workers' current efforts to base their demand on socialist rhetoric might be strategic, it seems to have trapped labour struggle in a direction that is unlikely to produce any significant positive outcomes for them, as the transition to the market is irreversible.

This article takes a historical perspective about the possibility of democratic grassroots trade union representation in Chinese factories. It documents previous trade union elections at supplier factories of multinational corporations (MNCs), from the first election organised by Reebok in 2001 at a supplier factory in Shenzhen to a recent election instigated by workers. For a decade and a half, a number of high-profile union elections were variously organised by non-governmental organisations (NGOs) on behalf of MNCs, or by the Chinese trade union, or by workers. The article examines the political and social contexts in which these elections took place, the problems encountered by the newly elected trade union branches, their successes and failures, and how these elections prompted China's trade union federation to hold similar elections at domestically owned Chinese factories. It concludes with an analysis of the current labour scene in China and the prospects of genuine collective bargaining. (China/GIGA)