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This article aims to study an issue of "double absence" embedded in the rapidly changing construction industry and to explore how it induces serious collective action among construction workers in post-socialist China. (**) The political economy of the construction industry has shaped a specific labour use system - a labour subcontracting system. The system generates a specific capital-labour relationship in which the legal labour identity and labour relationship are highly subsumed by an "absent" employer. It creates a double absence in legal terms: an "absent" boss and an "absent" labour relationship. This double absence has led to a perpetual process of wage arrears and struggles by construction workers to pursue delayed wages in various ways, usually involving legal action or non-legal collective action. The findings of this study are drawn from case studies conducted between 2008 and 2009 in seven Chinese cities. The labour struggle - the fight for delayed payment - was understood not as a form of legal labour activism, but as incipient class action in a specific context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a result of its open-door policies and 30 years of reform, China has become the "world's factory" and given rise to a new working class of rural migrant workers. This process has underlain a path of (semi-)proletarianization of Chinese peasant-workers: now the second generation is experiencing dagong, working for a boss, in industrialized towns and cities. What is the process of proletarianization of peasant-workers in China today? In what way does the path of proletarianization shape the new Chinese working class? Drawing on workers' narratives and our ethnographic studies in Shenzhen and Dongguan between 2005 and 2008, this study focuses on the subjective experiences of the second generation of dagongmei/zai, female migrant workers/male migrant workers, who have developed new forms of power and resistance unknown to the previous generation of workers. Did the pain and trauma experienced by the first generation of dagong subjects gradually evolve into the anger and resentment that has conditioned the labor strikes and class actions of the second generation? In short, what continuity and change can we observe in the life struggles of this new working class? Is the second generation of dagong subjects compelled to take action as a result of long- endured pain and anger? Self, anger, and collective action among the new working class propel the narrative described in this article. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since its birth in 1966, the opt-out procedure in American class action has witnessed many revisions, which mainly reflect a pursuit of such values as an informed choice and the legitimacy of procedure and do not necessarily impose a threat to the "appropriate reconciliation". When dealing with the issue of the right of claim for a small amount held by a majority of people in a mass dispute, the application of the second opt-out procedure helps turn the relationship between the "silent majority" of the group and the group as a whole from exclusive to inclusive, which brings us significant implications. Furthermore, the second opt-out opportunity reminds us of the necessity to make sure that the litigants involved in the class action should be given sufficient information when exercising their rights to make a procedural choice in order to prevent the legal procedure from being reduced to an empty form and of the necessity to solve mass disputes through reconciliations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]