ABSTRACT
The decentralisation of collective bargaining has been a significant trend in Western labour markets during the 1980s and 1990s, and it has challenged conventional trade union strategies and practices in many ways. In the same period we have witnessed a decentralisation of trade union organisations in East Asian market economies. The decentralisation of whole industrial relations systems, i.e. bargaining and organisational decentralisation among and between employers and trade unions, is a more unique phenomenon and very little studied. The Malaysian auto industry provides an organisational field where the trend towards double decentralisation emerged during the 1980s and continued in the 1990s, without becoming a completely decentralised system.
