Abstract
Since the 1980s, de jure labor standards have improved in Northeast and Southeast Asia and de jure labor market flexibility has decreased. For most countries in the region, however, de facto labor standards are much worse than de jure standards, and de facto flexibility is much higher than de jure flexibility. International pressure has rarely produced meaningful change in either labor standards or labor market flexibility. Authoritarian regimes have proven the most immune to international pressures to improve labor standards and increase labor market flexibility. The most significant improvements to labor standards usually follow democratization, with international influences working in tandem with domestic pressures. International actors have had little effect on improving labor standards in semi-democracies, with the exception of Cambodia, but progress there depended on a carrot, not a stick. Demands by the international financial institutions to increase labor market flexibility have been minimal, with the notable exception of South Korea. Both democracies and authoritarian regimes have adopted laws that reduce labor market flexibility, and domestic political concerns rather than international influences were the primary driving force.
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Notes
- 1.
In September 2006, a military coup took place in Thailand. The analysis in this chapter only goes through 2006, so Thailand will be treated as a democracy.
- 2.
Lee (2006) reports unionization rate of 10.5% in the industrial sector in 2002.
- 3.
North Korea is omitted from the analysis because there are insufficient data available to assess labor rights there.
- 4.
Consultations with the ILO began in 1994; the legislature approved the new Labor Code in 1997 (Bronstein, 2004–2005).
- 5.
Since countries with strong laws and weak enforcement are penalized more than countries with weak laws and weak enforcement, countries with strong laws are more likely to experience a large decrease in their scores than those with weak laws.
- 6.
Under Section 314 of Korea’s Criminal Code, workers participating in strikes can be arrested and prosecuted on charges of “obstruction of business.”
- 7.
- 8.
Taiwan is ineligible to join since it is not a member of the United Nations.
- 9.
Since Convention No. 182 on the Worst Forms of Child Labor was promulgated in 1999, all ratifications have taken place recently.
- 10.
See Compa and Vogt (2005) for a useful overview of GSP.
- 11.
Singapore and South Korea graduated in 1989 and Malaysia in 1997 (Elliot & Freeman, 2003, p. 152).
- 12.
Information about the status of these cases can be found at www.laborrights.org/creating-a-sweatfree-world/changing-global-trade-rules/gsp (accessed on 18 October 2009).
- 13.
In 2001 the restrictions on forming federations with unions in the private sector were amended. Federations of state enterprise unions were allowed to affiliate with federations of private sector unions; individual state enterprise unions, however, were still not allowed to affiliate directly to federations of unions in the private sector.
- 14.
In 2004, two leaders of the Free Trade Union of Workers of the Kingdom of Cambodia (FTUWKC) were assassinated in broad daylight in Phnom Penh, yet the ILO’s Garment Sector Monitoring Project failed to mention this in their report (Hughes, 2007).
- 15.
The 2004 petition was the first time that a petition was filed under Section 301 on worker rights grounds.
- 16.
The USA signed an FTA with South Korea in 2007 that contains labor provisions as well, but it has yet to be ratified by Congress.
- 17.
- 18.
Most of Wal-Mart’s stores in China are unionized, whereas none of its US stores have unions. After the All-China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU) waged a grass roots campaign to establish unions in several stores, Wal-Mart agreed to top-down unionization for the rest. Most of the union committees are dominated by management (Blecher, 2008).
- 19.
The WRC is an NGO that carries out investigations of reported violations of its code of conduct by supplier factories that produce university-licensed products. It is the only monitoring organization free of corporate influence and is widely recognized as conducting the most thorough investigations of factory conditions, in particular with regard to violations of freedom of association (Esbenshade, 2004; Wells, 2007). The WRC’s factory investigations are available at: www.workersrights.org/Freports/index.asp#freports (accessed on 18 October 2009).
- 20.
This assessment is based on a reading of publicly available letters of intent and IMF staff reports from 1980 to 2006.
- 21.
On labor market flexibility, the IMF and the OECD were singing the same tune (OECD, 2000). Previously, employers could only dismiss workers for “justifiable” reasons, and the Korean courts interpreted “justifiable” narrowly. In practice, it was difficult to fire workers on personal, behavioral, or economic grounds (Lee, 2002). The reforms allowed employers to dismiss workers for “managerial reasons,” which included retrenchments, mergers, and acquisitions. Regarding outsourced labor, until 1998 the Minister of Labor tightly limited the use of labor supply services to security, janitorial, and engineering work unless the union agreed to permit the outsourcing of additional job categories (Lee, 2002). The Dispatched Workers Act of 1998 removed labor suppliers from the scope of the Employment Security Act and permitted outsourcing in 26 job categories.
- 22.
The Seoul Administrative Court recently ruled that “non-payment of performance-based bonuses to fixed-term workers was illegal if there was no fundamental difference between the work performed by the regular workers and the fixed-term workers” (Shin&Kim, 2009).
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Caraway, T.L. (2022). Labor Standards and Labor Market Flexibility in East Asia. In: Goulart, P., Ramos, R., Ferrittu, G. (eds) Global Labour in Distress, Volume II. Palgrave Readers in Economics. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-89265-4_21
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