Solinger 2009

Solinger, Dorothy J. States' Gains, Labor's Losses: China, France, and Mexico Choose Global Liaisons, 1980-2000. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009.


Compares China, France, Mexico response to globalization and changes in labor-state partnership

• "This book is about how an enduring legacy of revolution in these apparently dissimilar places structures state-labor relations in a time of crisis. In all of them, revolutionary-era outcomes left their mark on the roles and functions of unions, vis-á-vis their own states' moves after 1980; repercussions from workers them set the style for subsequent state welfare replies." (4)
• China started internally liberalizing in the 1980s, ans seemingly abandoned labor, but then "Though the old communist, state-labor alliance at first appeard to be wholly abandoned, public militancy reawakened the bond, if in starkly altered form (5)
• France hit some trouble in the 1980s, but 1997 total job losses affected a "stunning" 41.6% of the original labor force; the labor movement didn't do much to protest, and the state didn't do much to help
• similarly Mexican Labor movement didn't fight much, and the state subsequently didn't offer them much for their losses
• Conclusion
• Mexico, France, and China all jettisoned labor allies at the behest/to join Supranational Economic Organizations (208), a proxy for joining global economy
• How labor unions were joined to politics after the revolution was important -- Chinese unions were SUPER weak, meaning workers had a freer hand in starting their own protests! (209)
• "In short, it was the nature of the job that the states permitted--or coerced--their unions to perform that liberated the worker (in China), left them relatively passive (in France), or clamped down on them (in Mexico), once the eliminitation of formerly protective regulations meant removing workers from their positions and once the restrictiveness imposed by austerity rewrote the terms of old welfare contracts." (209-210)