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Social movements have become increasingly important in the regulation of working conditions in a context where the intensification of global economic integration, the consolidation of power in multinational enterprises, increased financialization and marketization, and recurrent economic crisis have undermined the capacity of trade unions to co-determine working conditions in transnational businesses. With unions and industrial modes of worker participation being under severe pressure, social movements and civil society organizations receive increasing attention as new actors in industrial relations.

In the analytical framework, I argued that China’s internal and external strengths are relevant to transnational labor-rights activism, as the political regime might prevent domestic organizations from going transnational or because, as a global power, China uses its external strength to impact the transnational institutional environment in which activism takes place. In addition, I also put forward that domestic factors are important to understand the outcomes of transnational labor-rights activism, at the level of working conditions inside Chinese supplying factories (market pathway) and the empowerment of domestic organizations (capacity-building pathway). In this chapter, I open the black box of “China’s internal and external strength” affecting labor-rights activism. These factors include the evolution of a large rural-migrant workforce with the introduction of capitalism in China; the iterative process of labor protest and reforms of the labor law; sources of the implementation deficit of the Chinese labor law and attempts to overcome them; the development of the Chinese system of industrial relations, Chinese fragmented yet resilient version of authoritarianism, as well as the changing domestic state–society relationship. Developments of these factors help to explain why the Chinese state tends to resist certain forms of transnational activism while being responsive to others.

Chapter 3 presents an analysis of the various forms of labor-rights activism in the International Labor Organization (ILO). It distinguishes between three forms of labor activism: “activism from above” refers to how Western unions use the institutionalized ILO complaint channel; “activism from aside” points to the ILO as an arena for information exchange and discussions between international unions and the Chinese state-sponsored union, All-China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU); and “activism from below” comprises efforts of the local ILO office in Beijing to improve conditions and rights of workers in China. The analysis shows how these three forms of activism led to an increasing and yet selective congruence between the demands of labor advocates, the ILO agenda, and China’s labor politics, while crucial differences persist in the understanding of freedom of association. The chapter also illustrates how activism within the ILO pathway is affected by developments in other international arenas, such as the labor clause debate within the World Trade Organization (WTO), and by domestic labor law reforms within China.

Chapter 5 investigates labor activism that emerged and developed within the market pathway. This pathway is characterized by dynamic economic and industrial opportunities and a set of emerging transnational institutions, including multistakeholder initiatives and labor certification schemes. Two types of opportunities have become particularly important for China-related activism in this path. First, the participation of labor activists in multistakeholder initiatives, which aim at regulating and monitoring working conditions and labor rights in Chinese production facilities of global supply chains. Second, transnational campaigns targeting international business and other associations. While all these forms of labor activism focus on improvements at the factory level as the ultimate target, they attempt to achieve these by addressing different proximate targets, such as large multinational companies, multistakeholder initiatives, and transnational business associations.

The international organizational, bilateral, and market pathways represent institutional environments of transnational activism. However, in none of these pathways, can labor activists effectively address working conditions in emerging and developing countries without relying on the capacity of local actors to mobilize on the ground. The fourth and final pathway presented in Chap. 6 deals with the relevance of local civil society building. The chapter provides support for the argument that transnational activist networks unfold both enabling and constraining effects on domestic organizations intervening in labor relations in Chinese supply chains. The analysis reveals the central role of Hong Kong-based activists in linking Western and Chinese actors and highlights the recent proliferation of a fragile civil society and a multiplicity of labor-support organizations in economically advanced zones in Guangdong province, Southern China. Four organizational cases are chosen to illustrate the range of strategizing between worker and business orientation. It shows that in particular the market pathway intersects with the civil society pathway—sometimes in unexpected ways (e.g. as through the need for worker participation in auditing procedures). This chapter brings out the synergies between the different pathways and provides an analysis of the range of repertoires of labor-support organizations in China, ranging from legal awareness raising and mediation to new modes of worker organizing.

Economic globalization has undermined worker’s rights and traditional forms of worker’s power, but workers and trade unions have responded with new and innovative ways of “labor transnationalism”. This study aimed at formulating a more comprehensive picture of the largely unmapped terrain of institutional interactions and transnational activism in the field of labor. Overall, I conclude that multilevel labor-rights activism contributes to a process of selective convergence between Chinese labor politics and practices and international standards. Selective convergence means that, over time, Chinese labor law and factory practices increased its congruence with international core labor standards, while considerable discrepancies, in particular, in the understanding of freedom-of-association rights, continue to remain. This enabled labor activists to exert some influence on better working conditions, while in many cases their demands for better working conditions via worker empowernment got channeled into managerial dominated problem solution.

Chapter 4 explores how labor activists target China through the European Union’s (EU) external trade policy. I distinguish between two forms of activism: activism targeting the EU with the aim to establish more access points for unions and non-government organizations (NGOs), and labor activism addressing EU–China trade negotiations more particularly with the goal of introducing a labor clause in bilateral agreements. The results show that activists have been increasingly mobilizing along this pathway. However, while labor activism along the bilateral pathway has established more access points for civil society actors to EU trade policy and helped to generate more networking between European and Chinese civil society organizations and unions, there has been no progress on labor clauses thus far, which is also related to the only slowly progressing negotiations between China and the EU. It also shows that there is empirically much more cross-over between labor activism targeting private and public actors than usually assumed in the literature.

The book embarks to enrich our understanding of transnational activism within a multilayered governance architecture targeting an internally and externally powerful, non-democratic state. How do transnational labor activist mobilize within the contemporary global governance architecture in order to affect working conditions in China? In order to empirically explore this question, I develop an analytical framework based upon insights from research on social movements and transnational activism, international political economy, international relations, institutional theory, and labor relations which helps to gain a deeper understanding of the development and outcome of transnational activism across a variety of contexts and scales. I propose to analyze the different ways through which labor activist mobilize to study the combined effects of what I call transnational pathways of influence. I distinguish between four main pathways of influence. Transnational labor rights advocates can try to mobilize within or target international organizations (the international-organizational pathway), other states or regions (the bilateral pathway), transnational companies and private regulatory arrangements (the market pathway), or they can support the development of domestic civil society organizations (the civil society pathway). The framework developed in this chapter clarifies how activisms gets shaped by and also shapes the current global governance architecture with its multiple overlapping legal arrangements, each layer having a specific relationship to the domestic context. Hence, the framework helps to situate transnational labor-rights activism and its outcomes within macro-level changes in the global political–economic system and changes in domestic structure of the state targeted.