Reforming Asian Labor Systems: Economic Tensions and Worker Dissent

In Reforming Asian Labor Systems, Frederic C. Deyo examines the implications of post-1980s market-oriented economic reform for labor systems in China, South Korea, the Philippines, and Thailand. Adopting a critical institutionalist perspective, he explores the impact of elite economic interests and strategies, labor politics, institutional path dependencies, and changing economic circumstances on regimes of labor and social regulation in these four countries. Of particular importance are reform-driven socioeconomic and political tensions that, especially following the regional financial crisis of the late 1990s, have encouraged increased efforts to integrate social and developmental agendas with those of market reform. Through his analysis of the social economy of East and Southeast Asia, Deyo suggests that several Asian countries may now be positioned to repeat what they achieved in earlier decades: a prominent role in defining new international models of development and market reform that adapt to the pressures and constraints of the evolving world economy.

Table of Contents:
IntroductionPart I. Labor Systems, Economic Development, and Market Reform1. Labor Systems: Social Processes and Regulatory Orders 2. Explaining Regulatory Change 3. Reforming Labor Systems: Neoliberalism, Reregulation, and Social CompensationPart II. Deregulating Asian Labor Systems4. Export-Oriented Industrialization and State-Enterprise Reform: Restructuring Employment 5. External Liberalization of Trade and Investment 6. The Deregulatory Face of Labor ReformPart III. The Tensions of Reform7. Compromising Economic and Social Agendas 8. Political Tensions of Reform: Labor Opposition and Public DisorderPart IV. Addressing the Tensions of Reform9. The Reregulatory Face of Labor Reform: Institutionalization, Social Compensation, and Developmental Augmentation 10. Disciplining Labor and Rebuilding the Labor Process 11. Small Enterprises, Supplier Networks, and Industrial Parks: Creating High-Skill Developmental Labor Systems 12. Contesting Reform: The Influence of Labor PoliticsConclusionReferencesIndex

About the Author :
Frederic C. Deyo is Professor of Sociology at SUNY Binghamton. He is the editor of The Political Economy of the New Asian Industrialism, also from Cornell, and the author of Dependent Development and Industrial Order and Beneath the Miracle: Labor Subordination in the New Asian Industrialism.

Review :
The conclusion of this book that 'Asian labour (is) playing a somewhat more forceful role in national policymaking than is usually acknowledged' (p. 233) is a useful contribution to the public record. It is a good counterweight to some of the crude argument that Asian industrialisation is just 'sweated labor' where coercion and low wages undercut the supposed fair wages and democracy of North American and Oceanic manufacturing. - Howard Guille (Asian Studies Review)