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This article examines how management-labor relations and labor legislation have evolved in China since Deng Xiaoping's “Open Door” reforms were introduced in 1979 and how they have changed over the two decades since then. We reconsider the role of Chinese trade unions, enterprises and the state agencies involved, as they move from an employment system that was once called the “iron rice bowl” to a new one based on market forces. This change raises serious dilemmas and issues: are there contradictions between preserving workers' rights and at the same time, enhancing productivity? Does such a transition constitute the onset of “collective bargaining” and a labor-market in the Western sense? How are such shifts likely to be affected by China's entry into the WTO in late 2001? These and other related questions are analysed in the article.

This paper attempts to sketch a longitudinal profile on the evolution of a working class in Hong Kong context in light of the thesis of embourgeoisement. The increasing economic affluence in the 1980s and early 1990s appeared to have bred an optimism in society that the members of the working class were converging in life-style and consumption behaviour with the middle class in a process of embourgeoisement. However, the thesis of embourgeoisement comes under question again around the turn of the millennium in the advent of globalisation and the successive waves of recession that afflict Hong Kong. The vicissitudes of capitalistic competition, leading to business restructuring, corporate down-sizing and other austerity prescriptions of labour cost-saving, popularise the practices of flexi-hiring, atypical employment, outsourcing, labour shedding and retrenchment. The upshot of these austerity exercises has been the re-casualisation of the labour market and the emasculation of the employment and income security of a growing fringe of peripheral workers vulnerable to industrial deprivation and exploitation. As a consequence we now see a new industrial proletariat or urban sub-class emerging in post-industrial Hong Kong. Its “embrace” as a hybrid working class transcends a spectrum of blue-collar and service occupations. Because of the diversity in its composition, the prospects for a solidaristic working class to emerge are again remote. And the role of the trade unions in providing an effective leverage for uplifting and protecting their position is limited, as illustrated by the “impasse” now still looming over the proposed enactments to prescribe a minimum wage level and standard work hours.

Since the economic reforms initiated by Deng Xiaoping since 1978, China has been gradually introducing greater flexibility into its factormarkets. Previously, under the pre-reform employment system, for example, workers were assigned to enterprises by state labour bureaus. Now, a nascent labour market is evolving (Ng, 1995; Warner, 1995; Ng and Warner, 1998). China’s industrial relations were once only weakly comparable to those in other countries, such as in Western economies or those in Asia. Today, its labour-management relations and management of human resources are increasingly subject to outside influences (see Warner, 2000, in press).

The ‘New Working Class’ theory, popularised in French sociology during the 1960s and 1970s, envisages the advent of a politically inspired class movement that rekindles the vision of a new social order as the technicians rise to become its vanguard. According to writers like Mallet and Touraine, these technical ‘white-collars’ tend to take over from the traditional manual groups in posing as the ‘standard-bearers’ of class-based industrial radicalism and solidarity. This paper proposes to trace the recent vein of discussions on the class implications of occupational and technological transformation from such a neo-Marxian perspective. It also attempts to apply these arguments to interpret the characteristics of a new occupation in Hong Kong – the technicians working in the electronics and related industries, with reference to an empirical study carried out in the early 1980s.

Historical development and economic and social setting institutional framework freedom of association and workers' and empoloyers' organizations collective bargaining and industrial conflict workplace industrial relations working conditions and wages women and young workers, subcontract labour and homeworkers and "social wages" foreign investment and some current industrial relations issues. Appendices: wage negotiation in Hong Kong international labour conventions on which a declaration has been made for Hong Kong by the government of the United Kingdom.

'Perception' presupposes an element of 'relativity' since people develop their attitudes, aspirations and grievances within the frame of reference that evolves from their interactions with others. By implication, 'relative deprivation' describes the perception of injustices with reference to others because of the disparities 'between the desired situation and that of the person desiring it'. To the deprived person, feelings of deprivation emanate from 'a comparison with the imagined situation of some other person or group'. This other person or group hence constitutes his 'reference group', which can be the group with which a person compares himself; or it can also be used 'to mean either the group from which he derives his standard of comparison or the group from which the comparison is extended and to which he feels that he belongs'.l Relative deprivation as perceived in the work situation depends, inter alia, on the subjects' ordering of expectations from work. The 'social action' perceptive argues that these attitudes are afTected not only by the objective facts of'market' and 'work' conditions but also by the subjects' frame of reference which is in turn anchored in their experiences of, and assumptions about, the wider society. Often these attitudes are occupationally divergent and vary between manual and non-manual employees.