Documents Pringle, Tim 5 results

"Despite government concern with occupational health and safety (OHS) in China and the promulgation of new laws and regulations in 2002, a lack of rigor and lax implementation are major impediments to mprovements in workplace safety. The article highlights important elements from the new Work Safety law and the Law on the Prevention and Cure of Occupational Diseases, then analyzes key issues arising from bureaucratic excesses, the impact of government restructuring, continuing confusions and contradictions in government responsibility for OHS, and ongoing questions about the official duties and responsibilities of employing units, workers, and the trade union"

" This article examines the case of the Yantian International Container Terminal (YICT) to consider under what conditions unions can provide effective workplace representation in China. The authors draw on semi-structured interviews to analyze how and why the union was effective, despite rigid prohibitions against organizing outside of the Party-led All-China Federation of Trade Unions. The authors argue that the YICT union developed a system of annual collective bargaining that tamed the power of militant dockworkers and helped prevent strikes. This outcome required an effective enterprise-level trade union that was nevertheless able to influence and manage members' somewhat ambiguous acceptance of its role. Ultimately, workers' interests were partially represented and their acquisition of associational power—in the form of trade unions—increased."

" Attempts to analyse authoritarianism in China tend towards a static focus on the state that is homogeneous across time. We argue for a more nuanced approach that captures the dynamism and contours of state–civil society relations, and state–labour relations, in particular, in authoritarian states. Taking state–labour relations as a bellweather, we conceptualize ‘shades of authoritarianism' as a framework for better understanding the complexities and evolution of state–society relations in authoritarian states. We illustrate this through the case of China, distinguishing different shades of authoritarianism in the Hu‐Wen era (2002–2012) and in the current regime of Xi Jinping."