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Welfare programs in emerging economies are, in most cases, highly selective. This article illustrates this point by exploring Cambodia's emergency cash assistance scheme coverage for workers affected by the COVID‐19 pandemic. Drawing on policy analysis and interviews with government officials, industry representatives, and garment and tourism unions, it analyzes the level of benefit and efficacy of the initiative for different groups of workers. Based on this analysis, we find that garment factory and tourism workers received better support than workers in other sectors as a consequence of industry lobbying and strategic decision‐making on the part of the government designed to mitigate the impact of the pandemic on those sectors. Our analysis also reveals, however, that the relatively informal nature of even formal‐sector workplaces in Cambodia meant that the scheme's impact was highly varied even among these targeted groups of workers. We conclude with a discussion of the findings' broader implications. Related Articles: Asongu, Simplice, and Nicholas M. Odhiambo. 2023. "The Effect of Inequality on Poverty and Severity of Poverty in Sub‐Saharan Africa: The Role of Financial Development Institutions." Politics & Policy 51(5): 898–918. https://doi.org/10.1111/polp.12558. Lachapelle, Erick, Thomas Bergeron, Richard Nadeau, Jean‐François Daoust, Ruth Dassonneville, and Éric Bélanger. 2021. "Citizens' Willingness to Support New Taxes for COVID‐19 Measures and the Role of Trust." Politics & Policy 49(3): 534–65. https://doi.org/10.1111/polp.12404. Onyango, Gedion, and Japheth Otieno Ondiek. 2022. "Open Innovation during the COVID‐19 Pandemic Policy Responses in South Africa and Kenya." Politics & Policy 50(5): 1008–31. https://doi.org/10.1111/polp.12490. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do we understand the efforts of governments across the political spectrum to undermine trade unions in ways that do not involve overt repression? This article introduces a special issue that examines this question through the lens of authoritarian innovations, a political science concept that draws analytical attention to practices that purport to embody democratic principles but actually undermine democratic participation. As applied to the labour and industrial relations field, the concept of authoritarian innovations refers to new governance practices that appear to advance labour rights but, in fact, weaken or subvert workers' genuine, democratic and collective participation in the workplace, in labour institutions, and in the broader polity. As this article argues, this concept allows us to move beyond broad-brush assessments of the labour governance practices associated with different kinds of political regimes to a recognition that democratic and authoritarian states alike may act in ways that appear democratic but are, in reality, quite the opposite. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concept of authoritarian innovations provides a means of interpreting labour governance practices that claim to uphold democratic values and international labour standards while restricting labour participation and genuine voice in the workplace. Two underexplored dimensions of this literature are (a) how authoritarian practices are utilised by power elites in 'hybrid' state formations and (b) under what conditions they may be discarded in favour of a return to direct forms of coercion and violence. In this article, we examine these questions with reference to Myanmar, where there was a decade of experimentation with democracy before a reversion to military-dominated authoritarian rule in February 2021. In the first half of that decade, space opened under a military-led government for decidedly more democratic labour relations, although labour governance reforms were designed and operationalised in ways that constrained the strength and reach of trade unions. In the second half, a democratically elected civilian-led government presided over the contraction of the space available to organised labour. By tracking the alignment of meso-level authoritarian practices against the changing macro-level character of Myanmar's political landscape, this article contributes to theoretical debates within the emerging literature on authoritarian innovations in labour governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Digital information and communications technologies like social media are critical for trade union renewal. Yet, although many unions now use social media, there remain ongoing debates as to what effective digital activism looks like. This question is even more pressing for the Global Unions, as international labour movement organizations without grassroots members. Drawing on social movement and networked communication theories, this article interrogates Global Unions’ social media practices through a mixed‐method analysis of 19,009 Facebook posts created between 2017 and 2022. Based on this analysis, we find that Global Unions that adopt crowd‐focused communication styles and post on broader social issues have more success in engaging with online crowds than those that emphasize workplace or organizational issues and adopt top‐down communication styles. At the same time, our findings challenge assumptions in the literature that crowd‐led, connective communication styles associated with engagement are necessarily the most effective in today's digital society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do civil society organizations (CSOs) use state‐backed supranational institutions to call multinational enterprises (MNEs) to account? There are few studies of precisely how CSOs—union and other—use institutional power in global value chain (GVC) governance or the impact of institutional change on actor behaviour. To address this gap, we assess the impact of changes in the OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises on CSO engagement with MNEs, comparing complaints lodged by CSOs before and after the Guidelines were revised in June 2011 to accommodate the rise in global prominence of the human rights and business frame. In our analysis, we focus on how constitutive and institutional power plays out in GVC governance, with special attention to the impact of institutional change on actor behaviour. Our analysis reveals that this state‐backed mechanism provides CSOs with a structure through which to address human rights violations in some MNEs' supply chains but also that, despite its high degree of reflexivity, ongoing design flaws limit its capacity to address the uneven distribution of power not only between CSOs and MNEs, but among CSOs themselves. In doing so, we draw attention to the need for further research on the dynamic multilevel interactions between the configuration and adjustment of supranational institutions and how these mediate CSO and MNE interactions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines unions' role in mitigating the impact of COVID-19 on hotel workers in Siem Reap, Cambodia's most popular tourist destination. The article analyses the experiences of unionised and non-unionised hotel workers before and during the pandemic, drawing on data collected from one non-unionised and three unionised hotels. Data was collected through in-depth qualitative interviews with management, workers, workplace union officials, as well as with national federation leaders and government officials. Our analysis of that data revealed that unionised hotel workers received far better support from their employers and the government than non-unionised hotel workers, and that their unions played an important role in securing these benefits. This suggests that, in the absence of union power, international reputation was not enough to protect workers during COVID-19. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Historically, the processes in place to govern the recruitment and contracting of Indonesian migrant fishers have fostered situations of labor abuse and exploitation. The Indonesian government has introduced a new regulatory framework designed to meet international expectations that it creates rules and systems for recruiting migrant fishers in its territory. This article analyzes the state of play immediately before this new regulatory framework was operationalized, generating insights into practices around recruitment and contracting, and providing a baseline for future analysis of the new framework's impact. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses the role played by brands, producer‐country governments, and unions in mitigating the impact of disruptions caused to garment supply chains by COVID‐19 in Cambodia, Indonesia, and Myanmar. Its findings challenge brand‐centric accounts, highlighting the need for more serious consideration of the dynamic, relational nature of labor governance—and, in particular, of the role of the state–labor nexus in determining producer‐country unions' ability to exercise strategic agency within global supply chains. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article describes the development of statewide system change in positive behavior support being implemented by the South Carolina Department of Disabilities and Special Needs in collaboration with the University of South Carolina. Key areas discussed include the impetus for change, the development process, plan components, capacity building, training, state regulations, waiver changes, and case-specific technical assistance. (Contains references.) (Author/DB)

Unlike national trade unions, which operate within country‐specific industrial relations systems, Global Unions have an international mandate and multi‐scalar positionality. As a consequence, their repertoires of action and the opportunity structures available to them differ from those of national unions. Drawing on qualitative interview data and fieldwork observations, we propose a typology of different strategic domains used by the Global Union Federations (GUFs), which identifies their characteristics, scale and constraints. We then discuss two cases that illustrate how complementary strategies of (a) engaging in incremental innovation and (b) combining repertoires from different strategic domains have supported the GUFs' desire to play a stronger role as global labour governance intermediaries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2013, the Cambodian People's Party faced two major threats: a near loss at the ballot box in the national election and large-scale demonstrations by garment workers dissatisfied with the minimum wage. Unsurprisingly, the government responded by cracking down on the opposition, the independent media and civil society groups. Labour leaders were persecuted and legislation passed that undermined unions' ability to organise and register. Less predictably, this crackdown was accompanied by an attempt to woo garment workers through policies that delivered tangible benefits to them as individuals. There was a marked shift in the party's focus from its traditional rural constituency to the urban working class. In this article we examine how labour acts collectively to shape politics within authoritarian regimes. We do this by interrogating labour's role at a time when the state was clearly shifting towards hegemonic authoritarianism. By re-assessing the 2013 and 2018 national elections through this lens, we demonstrate the bidirectional nature of state–labour relations even in authoritarian regimes. We conclude that, even where election results are largely predetermined, elections can provide opportunities for workers to strengthen their position by prompting shifts in not only in patronage but in policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Therapists may be confronted with clients whose sexual values and behaviors are different from their own. To understand more about therapists' sexual values and how these values may affect therapy, the current study assessed therapists' sexual values for both themselves and their clients in the areas of premarital, casual, and extramarital sex, open marriages, sexual orientation, and sex in adolescence and late adulthood. Therapists differed selectively in their sexual values depending on their gender, religious involvement, and political affiliation. Therapists appeared comfortable working with a variety of sexual issues in therapy, and it appears that training in sexual issues is helpful in clinical work.

Authoritarian states face a fundamental tension in managing labor conflict. Too much repression can be read as a violation of workers' human rights, but too little undermines their structures of control. In this article, we shift focus from the overt repression of workers and unions to consider how states manage labor dissent through governance reform. Using Cambodia as our case, we examine the government's use of a series of "authoritarian innovations" to reassert control over labor governance mechanisms once dominated by international actors. Through an analysis of the shifting terrain of reform in the areas of labor legislation, minimum wage‐setting, and disputes resolution, we show how institutional pacification has contained labor in ways that have served to defend state legitimacy and protect accumulation. We conclude by discussing the implications of these novel tactics—which signal the state is neither static nor predictable—for our understanding of labor governance under authoritarianism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article uses the power resources approach to analyse the Global Union Federations' (GUFs) use of the specific instances mechanism associated with the OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises. While this mechanism has serious limitations, it has proved to be a useful tool when combined with public campaigns and the exercise of other power resources at multiple scales. This is so, we argue, because the fact that multi-national enterprises themselves operate across national boundaries creates an incentive to engage power resources at a supranational level, as well as within the countries where they, or their suppliers, are present. As this finding suggests, consideration of unions' power resources benefits from deeper consideration of the multi-scalar and interrelated character of union action and of the role that intermediary coordinating organizations like GUFs play in supporting the exercise of power at the supranational level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The labour market effects in Southeast Asia of the COVID-19 pandemic have attracted considerable analysis from both scholars and practitioners. However, much less attention has been paid to the pandemic's impact on legal protections for workers' and unions' rights, or to what might account for divergent outcomes in this respect in economies that share many characteristics, including a strong export orientation in labour-intensive industries and weak industrial relations institutions. Having described the public health measures taken to control the spread of COVID-19 in Indonesia, Cambodia and Vietnam, this article analyses governments' employment-related responses and their impact on workers and unions in the first year of the pandemic. Based on this analysis, we conclude that the disruption caused to these countries' economies, and societies, served to reproduce existing patterns of state–labour relations rather than overturning them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The dynamics of regulation of employment relations in the global supply chains of multinational enterprises (MNEs), including the growth of various forms of private regulation, has attracted significant scholarly attention. However, the role of international organisations in supporting supranational institutional pathways for social contestation of business practices has been neglected. This study addresses this gap by analysing cases lodged by national and global unions through the specific instances mechanism of the OECD Guidelines for MNEs. It reveals the design and operational deficiencies of this mechanism but also points to the current and future opportunities for firm‐level labour grievances and justice claims to be addressed at the supranational scale. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ways of studying illegal behaviour are important in the context of Indonesia, a country well known for its failure to deal adequately with the corruption that permeates every level of society. They are perhaps even more salient at the peripheries of the nation-state where government agencies struggle to contain the illegal practices that necessarily emerge where nation-states meet. This article reflects on our experiences conducting a decade-long study of an Indonesian borderlands that, while not initially focused on illegality, came – as a consequence of its ubiquity – to include it as a key construct. This experience led us to grapple not only with methodological questions about how to research illegality but also with assumptions about what illegality is and does. We argue that the only way to recognise and account for the quotidian nature of many kinds of illegal activity in the borderlands is to eschew an ethnography of exception in favour of an ethnography of the mundane. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Indonesia's weak labor movement transformed local wage councils from institutions of wage restraint into institutions that delivered generous wage increases. This article argues that the arrival of direct elections created an opportunity for unions to leverage elections to alter the balance of power on the wage councils. Activating that leverage required increased contentiousness and coordination among unions. As unions mobilized around wages, conflict with capital intensified and produced disruptive protests that led incumbents to side with workers. Unions also developed innovative tactics to sustain momentum in nonelection years. As unions turned the wage councils in their favor, employers fought back by shifting the scale of the conflict to the national level; the result was the recentralization of wage setting and more modest increases. In a global context of ever weakening organized labor, the Indonesian case shows how weak unions can gain power by mobilizing politically at the local level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Access to an affordable and reliable electricity supply is vital not only for economic development but also for citizens' quality of life. Indonesia has made significant progress towards near-universal electrification, but this achievement masks vast disparities in household access to electricity. Problems with affordability and reliability of supply are experienced even in Indonesia's major cities but are far worse in remote areas and on the country's many hundreds of inhabited small islands, which are not connected to a major grid. Drawing on Indonesian government data and a survey of householders (N = 360), this article measures variations in the quantity and quality of electricity supply in different areas in Tanjung Pinang, the capital of Riau Islands province (Kepri). As this article demonstrates, interruptions in supply have a serious impact on residents' capacity to power a modern life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Non-governmental organisations' (NGOs) dominance of the Indonesian labour movement has been undermined by changes in the regulation of labour since the fall of Suharto. This article examines the effects of these changes on the form and discourse of labour representation in contemporary Indonesia. It is argued that while NGOs' renewed acceptance of unionism as the primary form of labour organisation demonstrates the strength of the `trade union' as a criterion of significance, their (partial) execution of `trade union functions' during the late New Order period demands that we re-examine the ways in which we perceive and measure organised labour activism.

Under what conditions do trade unions in divided labour movements cooperate? Does cooperation in one domain increase the likelihood of cooperation in the other? Do institutions facilitate or discourage cooperation? We explore these questions through an examination of collective action across federation and confederation lines in post-Suharto Indonesia. Using a comparison of union cooperation in the policy and electoral domains, we demonstrate that tripartite wage-setting institutions have played a central role in facilitating collective action in the policy domain, encouraging unions to look beyond shop-level issues to policy issues identified by their respective national organizations as affecting workers. The relative absence of collective action across organizational divides in the electoral domain, meanwhile, can be explained by the institutional context, which creates higher barriers to unions working together. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Indonesia's transition since 1998 from authoritarian developmentalism to democracy has had a fundamental effect on employment relations. Although the basic structure of the economy has not changed, the twin processes of democratisation and decentralisation have seen the return of a degree of political space not available in Indonesia since the 1950s. This transformation was underpinned by a shift in the balance between the primary logics of the state that has seen an enhanced emphasis on legitimation. It has reshaped expectations of workplace-level employment relations practice in the country's small formal sector and of trade unions' engagement with policy-making and electoral politics. This article traces the processes through which this transformation occurred and analyses both its successes and the ongoing challenges to more robust implementation of the country's industrial relations framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article engages critically with the comparative employment relations literature, assessing its capacity to explain and analyse the relationship between state objectives – accumulation, pacification, legitimation – and employment relations. Having engaged with approaches that have influenced the discipline in recent decades, it draws on insights from capitalist Southeast Asia to identify determining factors not accounted for in comparative employment relations models developed from and applied to the Global North. These include the relatively high degree of fluidity in forms of governance characteristic of contexts where there is a dynamic interplay between democratic and authoritarian rule, which challenges the assumption that employment relations are underpinned by a relatively strong, stable and autonomous state. Equally significant is the impact of inter-state and international interests and influences, only some of which are economic, on the balance between different state objectives as they pertain to employment relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a new nation, Timor-Leste offers a unique case where formal industrial relations mechanisms have been developed as part of a broader project of state formation. In other words, the transformation of employment relations in the formal sector has taken place as part of regime establishment rather than regime change, as has been the case in other post-authoritarian contexts in Southeast Asia. As this first account of industrial relations in Timor-Leste demonstrates, the state has been concerned first and foremost with encouraging sustainable forms of accumulation, and the employment opportunities that accompany them, rather than with regulating labour relations. Although it has responded to pressure from international organisations to establish what could have been best-practice industrial relations institutions in the country’s tiny formal sector, these efforts have foundered as a consequence of a failure to secure employer buy-in and weak enforcement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Privatisation is often contentious yet in Myanmar it has not so much been its merits or drawbacks that have attracted attention as questions around implementation. In Myanmar, the implementation of privatisation has broad significance for the political economy. A first phase of privatisation was focused on small and medium-sized enterprises and did not have a significant economic impact. A second phase, commenced in 2008, consolidated the interests of a business elite with personal connections to the military regime. The impact of this second phase of privatisation was such that some elements of this elite strengthened to the extent that they no longer relied entirely on patronage, creating opportunities for diversification in their strategies of wealth creation and defence. For this reason, it is argued, the wealthiest strata of Myanmar’s business elite is now best conceived as not simply consisting of cronies but rather as a nascent form of oligarchy. In theoretical terms, this suggests that greater attention to the qualitative difference between cronyism and oligarchy is warranted, as is close study of processes – like privatisation and political reform – that enable or require a wider range of strategies of wealth defence. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article analyses the effectiveness of trade unions' electoral engagement in the union-dense electoral localities of Bekasi and Tangerang in Indonesia's 2009 legislative elections. Our analysis reveals that legacies of authoritarianism, electoral rules, and union fragmentation pushed unions to pursue an ineffective electoral strategy of running union cadres on various party tickets. In Bekasi, local leaders within the Federation of Indonesian Metalworkers Unions (FSPMI) chose not to mobilize resources to support union candidates because the union's national leadership had failed to convince them of the soundness of its strategy. In Tangerang, local leaders embraced the National Workers Union's (SPN) national electoral strategy, but had inadequate membership data to conduct electoral mapping and did not provide candidates with financial and leadership support. Neither union, meanwhile, gave much consideration to the problem of translating membership to votes: survey data reveal that most members could not name union candidates, and many of those who could did not vote for them. The article argues that, despite its flaws, trade unions' strategy of engagement in the electoral arena constitutes an important step forward in the consolidation of Indonesia's democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent decades, trade unions have been challenged to develop new forms of representation, action and institutional engagement in response to the increasingly transnational character of production and service delivery. This has necessarily required a shift in focus beyond national boundaries, and thus beyond the traditional scale of industrial relations systems. Among the most important actors in these attempts to globalize industrial relations have been the global union federations (GUFs), which represent national sectoral federations in key industries. Over several decades, the GUFs have sought to engage with multinational corporations through various strategies including policy campaigns and the negotiation of Global Framework Agreements (GFAs) and have provided support for workers and their unions in different national settings, including emerging labour movements in the Global South. This article reviews the growing literature on transnational industrial relations, focusing on the historical development of the GUFs, their core repertoires of action and their impact on industrial relations practice both internationally and within national boundaries. In doing so, it identifies and assesses not only the opportunities for GUF interventions in international industrial relations, but also the many obstacles – including resource constraints and dependence on unions at other scales – that limit their reach and ability to achieve these strategic goals. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Around the world, advanced industrial societies are facing a demographic time bomb that has enormous implications for the workforce in general, but for workforce planning and industrial relations in the health sector and related industries in particular. Japan, which has traditionally resisted structured forms of labour migration, has responded by establishing labour migration schemes for nurses and other care workers from selected South and Southeast Asian countries. This article examines the responses of different industrial relations actors to the first of these schemes. It begins by describing the opening up of hospitals and residential care facilities to temporary labour migrants from the Philippines and Indonesia, before turning to a discussion of the roles played by trade unions and employers and an evaluation of the outcomes of the programme to date. The article demonstrates the potential pitfalls of trade-driven labour migration schemes and their implications for the sector and the migrant workers concerned. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Since the mid-2000s, the Global Union Federations have played a pivotal role in the reshaping of Malaysian trade unions’ attitudes towards temporary migrant workers, providing the conceptual tools and material resources – and, in many cases, the motivation – required to reach out to this most non-traditional of non-traditional constituencies. This article documents the different approaches taken by a number of Global Union Federations as they seek to apply lessons learnt from the experience of their European affiliates in the Malaysian context. It argues that while Global Union Federation agendas are largely determined by donor and head office priorities, those agendas are mediated, and sometimes transformed, as they are rolled out through the Global Union Federations’ regional offices and to local affiliates in ‘target countries’ like Malaysia. This finding not only has consequences for temporary migrant workers in particular destinations, but also for our understanding of the structures of the international labour movement and the practices of trade union aid. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]