The Politics of Labor in a Global Age

The Politics of Labor in a Global Age is one of the first works to analyse and compare recent shifts in patterns of industrial relations across late-industrializing and post-socialist economies. The volume features original and timely essays on labor relations at national, local, and workplace levels, as economic and politicla actors cope with the similar challenges associated with economic adjustment measures and the impact of 'globalization'. The authors reveal that while globalization has threatened the position of organized labor and prompted business and state elites to accommodate greater labor market flexibility, the legacies of past institutions remain evident in destinctive trends in labor politics within and across late-industrializing and post-socialist settings. The comparisons suggest that globalization is best understood not as a source of covergence but as a set of common pressures that are mediated by specific historical inheritances, that spur varied responses on the part of industrial relations actors, and that facilitate quite diverse institutional outcomes.

Readership: Scholars and students of Political Economy, Economics, Post-Socialist Economics, Industrial Relations, and Globalization

Christopher Candland, Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science, Wellesley College, Wellesley, MA, and Rudra Sil, Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science, University of Pennsylvania, PA

"... an interesting set of papers ... manages to maintain a strong degree of unity throughout ... Politically and empirically, this is a very useful book." - Work, employment and society

Introduction
1: Christopher Candland and Rudra Sil: The politics of labor in late-industrializing and post-socialist economies: new challenges in a global age
Part I. Labor in late-industrializing economies
2: M. Victoria Murillo: Partisan loyalty and union competition: macroeconomic adjustment and industrial restructuring in Mexico
3: Christopher Candland: The cost of incorporation: labor institutions, industrial restructuring, and new trade union strategies in India and Pakistan
4: Scott Martin: Network ties and labor flexibility in Brazil and Mexico: a tale of two automobile factories
5: Eileen M. Doherty: Globalization, social partnership and industrial relations in Ireland
6: Charles Weathers: Globalization and the paradigm shift in Japanese industrial relations
Part II. Labor in post-socialist economies
7: Xiaobo Lu: Transition, globalization, and changing industrial relations in China
8: Rudra Sil: Privatization, Labor Politics, and the Firm in Post-Soviet Russia: Non-Market Norms, Market Institutions and the Soviet Legacy
9: Jeffrey Kopstein: Globalization in one country: East Germany between moral economy and political economy
10: Mitchell A. Orenstein and Lisa E. Hale: Corporatist renaissance in postcommunist Central Europe?
Conclusion
Rudra Sil and Christopher Candland: Institutional legacies and the transformation of labor: late-industrializing and post-socialist economies in comparative-historical perspective