ABSTRACT
The automotive industry including the automobile firms, motorcycle firms and their component and parts suppliers has traditionally been considered the ‘industry of industries’, that is, the key industry of industrial power and technological development that held extensive linkages to other manufacturing industries and had a wide impact on economy and society. The question is if the automotive industry can also be considered the ‘industry of labour organising’. The chapter will examine this question in relation to automotive industries in Asian market economies. More specifically, the question is if the automotive industry provided a sector-based platform for independent and powerful trade unionism in a region where labour and trade unions have otherwise been suppressed and remained relatively weak during the post-World War II Asian economic transformation (Deyo 1989, 2012; Kuruvilla et al. 2002). The proposed structural relationship between the evolution of an automotive industry and labour empowerment is not a new idea. Frederic Deyo suggested that the industrial revolution in East Asia did only breed a weak labour movement because the new working class in light export industries was demobilised structurally due to the use of temporary employment of young unskilled women. Although they did carry out industrial protest, this labour unrest was not offensive or well organised. Strikes and other outbursts were rapidly suppressed by employers and state authorities united by an anti-union policy in line with the industrial policy based on low labour cost and export competitiveness. Yet, with domestic-market oriented heavy industrialisation the East Asian workforces changed toward male employees in more regular jobs in capital intensive industries like automobile manufacturing. Thus, workers became less demobilised by structural transformation, but they still faced a labour repressive political regime that excluded, suppressed, controlled or co-opted worker organising in trade unions, political parties and social networks. However, the pessimistic view of e.g. Deyo has been criticised by Beverly Silver (2003), contending that the globalisation of capitalism unfolds in a longterm cyclical way with ups and downs for both capital and labour in the market economy at large and within specific sectors and industries. The dynamic of this cycle of industrial evolution was grounded in the power relation between capital and labour where capital tried to control and exploit labour through spatial fixes
(geographical location and relocation of production and jobs) and technicalorganisational fixes (craft-based production, ‘Fordist’ mass-assembling or ‘postFordist’ flexible, customised ‘lean’ manufacturing). Against these capital-driven accumulation strategies for increased expansion, investment and profitability in the auto industry, workers responded individually and collectively to the perceived injustices by employers. Sooner or later they formed organised, strong and militant labour movements which culminated in widespread labour unrest and rising labour wage and working conditions. With worker empowerment and resistance to exploitation, profitability would be squeezed and capital would encourage managers and employers to rationalise, automatise, outsource or offshore production, components, modules or final products and thus downsize the workforce in ‘hot and hard’ spots and expand into ‘calm and soft’ spots. Beverly Silver describes the transformation of the global automotive industry from the US-dominated Fordist system to the Japanese-lead post-Fordist, ‘lean’ production system. She notices and explains the exception of the Japanese automotive industry and its industrial relations by way of the Japanese technoorganisational fix to govern the workforce. Basically, the two manufacturing systems raise production vulnerability to selective labour actions and interruption of the flow processes in the factory. The lean manufacturing system is even more vulnerable to stoppages due to its geographical and organisational dispersal of production activities. But the legitimacy of the two systems is perceived differently by their workforces due to the divergence of employment and industrial relations, thus conditioning widespread dissatisfaction in North American ‘lean-and-mean’ factories and collaboration and work motivation in the core workforce of the Japanese ‘lean-and-dual’ factories. The claim of the chapter is that, contingent on the structural significance of the industry and the institutional space of collective labour action, the automotive workers in East Asian market economies have formed relatively strong labour organisations domestically in a sea of weak and/or declining union movements, but with large differences in auto workers’ power position across countries depending on the structural and political demobilisation of auto workers. Moreover, we contend that the auto industrial relations between labour and management have changed toward ‘responsible’ enterprise unionism Japanese style due to Japanese industrial dominance in the region, except in ‘economic nationalist’ countries where local corporations have led the industry and market. The chapter is structured in the following way: The next section presents and discusses the methodology applied selecting the automotive industries and workforces in South Korea, Thailand, Malaysia and the Philippines as the field of analysis. The third section analyses the organisational power of auto workers in these four countries. In the fourth and fifth sections we take on the similarities and divergences of auto workers’ structural and institutional powers. In the sixth section, we try to explain the patterns and changes of auto worker organising at first in a static, comparative perspective and then we enlarge the analysis to the dynamic-relational perspective of the regional and global auto industry to see if
international production chains and global labour networking improve our understanding and explanation of the momentum of auto workers’ organisational power before and after 2005. The seventh section concludes the chapter.
