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Beyond Regimes
China and India Compared
Prasenjit Duara
Harvard University Press, 2018

For many years, China and India have been powerfully shaped by both transnational and subnational circulatory forces. This edited volume explores these local and global influences as they play out in the contemporary era. The analysis focuses on four intersecting topics: labor relations; legal reform and rights protest; public goods provision; and transnational migration and investment. The eight substantive chapters and introduction share a common perspective in arguing that distinctions in regime type (“democracy” versus “dictatorship”) alone offer little insight into critical differences and similarities between these Asian giants in terms of either policies or performance. A wide variety of subnational and transnational actors, from municipal governments to international organizations, and from local NGO activists to a far-flung diaspora, have been—and will continue to be—decisive.

The authors approach China and India through a strategy of “convergent comparison,” in which they investigate temporal and spatial parallels at various critical junctures, at various levels of the political system, and both inside and outside the territorial confines of the nation-state. The intensified globalization of recent decades only heightens the need to view state initiatives against such a wider canvas.

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front cover of Colonialism, Institutional Change, and Shifts in Global Labour Relations
Colonialism, Institutional Change, and Shifts in Global Labour Relations
Edited by Karin Hofmeester and Pim de Zwart
Amsterdam University Press, 2017
This book offers a view of shifts in labour relations in various parts of the world over a breathtaking span, from 1500 to 2000, with a particular emphasis on colonial institutions. How did growing demand for colonial commodities affect labour in the Global South? How did colonial interference with land and labour markets affect developments in labour relations? And what were the effects of the introduction of colonial currencies? The contributors to this volume answer those questions and more, combining global perspectives with impressively detailed case studies.
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front cover of Globalisation and Industrial Relations
Globalisation and Industrial Relations
The Pharmaceutical Industry in Germany and the United Kingdom
Luitpold Rampeltshammer
Campus Verlag, 2008
Although many books have been written about the economic impact of globalization on Europe, none has focused exclusively on the pharmaceutical industry. To fill this gap in scholarship, Globalization and Industrial Relations offers a full account of how open markets have affected drug companies, their employees, and consumers alike. 
Using the examples of Germany and the United Kingdom as case studies, this volume uses a careful theoretical background and broad empirical analysis to evaluate the current state of industrial relations in the pharmaceutical industry. Globalisation and Industrial Relations addresses how companies in the pharmaceutical industry deal with the challenges from globalization in respect to collective bargaining and workplace representation. A complete analysis of industrial relations in the drug manufacturing industry in a changing world, this volume also forecasts different trajectories for the systems of industrial relations in Germany and the United Kingdom.
 
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front cover of A New Deal for China’s Workers?
A New Deal for China’s Workers?
Cynthia Estlund
Harvard University Press, 2017

China’s labor landscape is changing, and it is transforming the global economy in ways that we cannot afford to ignore. Once-silent workers have found their voice, organizing momentous protests, such as the 2010 Honda strikes, and demanding a better deal. China’s leaders have responded not only with repression but with reforms. Are China’s workers on the verge of a breakthrough in industrial relations and labor law reminiscent of the American New Deal?

In A New Deal for China’s Workers? Cynthia Estlund views this changing landscape through the comparative lens of America’s twentieth-century experience with industrial unrest. China’s leaders hope to replicate the widely shared prosperity, political legitimacy, and stability that flowed from America’s New Deal, but they are irrevocably opposed to the independent trade unions and mass mobilization that were central to bringing it about. Estlund argues that the specter of an independent labor movement, seen as an existential threat to China’s one-party regime, is both driving and constraining every facet of its response to restless workers.

China’s leaders draw on an increasingly sophisticated toolkit in their effort to contain worker activism. The result is a surprising mix of repression and concession, confrontation and cooptation, flaws and functionality, rigidity and pragmatism. If China’s laborers achieve a New Deal, it will be a New Deal with Chinese characteristics, very unlike what workers in the West achieved in the last century. Estlund’s sharp observations and crisp comparative analysis make China’s labor unrest and reform legible to Western readers.

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front cover of Works Councils
Works Councils
Consultation, Representation, and Cooperation in Industrial Relations
Edited by Joel Rogers and Wolfgang Streeck
University of Chicago Press, 1995
As the influence of labor unions declines in many industrialized nations, particularly the United States, the influence of workers has decreased. Because of the need for greater involvement of workers in changing production systems, as well as frustration with existing structures of workplace regulation, the search has begun for new ways of providing a voice for workers outside the traditional collective bargaining relationship.

Works councils—institutionalized bodies for representative communication between an employer and employees in a single workplace—are rare in the Anglo-American world, but are well-established in other industrialized countries. The contributors to this volume survey the history, structure, and functions of works councils in the Netherlands, Germany, France, Spain, Sweden, Italy, Poland, Canada, and the United States. Special attention is paid to the relations between works councils and unions and collective bargaining, works councils and management, and the role and interest of governments in works councils. On the basis of extensive comparative data from other Western countries, the book demonstrates powerfully that well-designed works councils may be more effective than labor unions at solving management-labor problems.
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