ABSTRACT
Although employment relations (defined as labour relations and human resources management (HRM)) institutions and practices generally tend to be stable over long periods of time, that cannot be said to be the case in the three largest economies of East Asia, i.e. China, Japan and South Korea (hereafter Korea), during the last two decades (see chapters 5, 7 and 8). In this contribution, we briefly review the most significant development in East Asian employment relations, i.e. the growth of a variety of non-standard employment arrangements which we subsume under the term ‘informality’ in all three countries. We see this growth as symptomatic of the ‘externalisation’ of employment relations beyond the enterprise, a development that imposes major challenges for traditional trade unionism and for employment policy. We argue that the efforts of governments aimed at ‘re-regulating’ employment relations to curb such ‘informalisation’ are evidence of an emerging ‘labour protection logic’ in these countries, although we remain sceptical about the effectiveness of attempts at re-regulation.
