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As a result of open-door policies and thirty years of Reform, China has become the "world's factory" and given rise to a new working class comprised of rural migrant workers. Drawing upon a worker's narrative and our ethnographic studies in Shenzhen and Dongguan, we focus on the self-identities, anger, and collective action of the second generation of peasant-workers. The special path of (semi-) proletarianization has created the working and living experiences of the second generation of peasant-workers in the cities and yielded their trauma, anger, and a deep sense of unfairness. The change of peasant-workers' identity politics has resulted in a significant change of their disposition and action capacities. Compared with the first generation of peasant-workers, the second generation of peasant-workers are much more sensitive to suffering and injustice. The anxiety and pain experienced by the first generation gradually evolve into the anger and resentment that has conditioned the labor strikes and class actions of the second generation. In this paper, we hope to shed light on how human emotion and suffering can contribute significantly to our understanding of collective resistance or class action. Driven by their anger and their sense of fairness, workers have fought against all types of discursive and structural constraints. And as new class subjects, the second generation of the working class now objects to the unfinished process of proletarianization, the race-to-the-bottom global-production strategies, the uprooting experience of the city, and their quasi mingong identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

How can voluntary service organizations (VSOs) emerge and survive in a relatively conservative social and political environment? How can such organizations contribute to the development of civil society in contemporary China? To answer these questions, this study applies the qualitative approach and a triangulation of methods to a case study of the city of Jinan. The findings indicate that self-chosen moral resource I, socially recognized moral resource II, ascribed political capital I, and self-achieved political capital II are the key elements that have an impact on the development of civil society in China. Moral resource I is crucial to the success of VSOs in promoting civil society, whereas moral resource II, political capital I, and political capital II may help them to gain the government’s trust, thus facilitating their survival and growth in a relatively conservative social and political environment. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The emergence of China as a 'world's factory' in the new millennium was accompanied by the rise of a new working class which was composed of more than 200 million peasant-workers. As internal migrant labourers, these peasant-workers were deprived of citizenship rights to reside in the city and lacked basic labour rights and protections. In order to address the precarious working conditions of migrant workers who were employed by transnational corporations, a global Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) movement emerged, introducing a wide range of transnational corporate codes of conduct, labour standards and labour rights. This article presents a case study of a transnational CSR multi-stakeholder training programme at a Chinese workplace, in an attempt to demonstrate how capital, transnational NGOs and local labour NGOs - and including social workers - are all involved in the project to promote labour rights in China. Specific focus is placed on the role of social workers in enhancing worker participation in this project; the challenges and dilemmas that they encountered in the process, and suggestions are provided regarding the future development of a new model of occupational social work in China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Current research shows that emotional and behavioral problems (EBP) are amenable to social work support, notably through group work that promotes mutual aid. This kind of intervention has become increasingly crucial in maximizing the contribution of social work and minimizing its cost. Nevertheless, research on youth involvement in such groups remains scarce and the extant findings are mostly drawn from instances of mutual help among adults and older people. They do not give much insight into mutual aid among EBP youth, suggesting there is still a need for research on mutual aid groups among this population. In view of this need, the study reported in this paper examined factors that are conducive to the mutual aid and rehabilitation of young people with EBP in Hong Kong. Of particular concern were the relationships between EBP alleviation and the key factors of social work inputs, change-inducing group mechanisms, and mutual aid. To investigate these issues, the study employed survey data collected from 433 youth participants (aged 12-24) recruited from 60 mutual aid groups in secondary schools, community-based youth service centers, and residential homes located in different districts of Hong Kong. The results support the hypothesis that change-inducing group mechanisms and mutual aid affect EBP. Nonetheless, the results do not support the hypothesized negative relationship between social work inputs and EBP. The implications of the findings for further research and the promotion of mutual aid and rehabilitation among EBP youth are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the results of research into the lives of construction workers in China. It focuses on the daily practices and culture of violence associated with migrant construction workers involved in the labor subcontracting system. Interviews with more than 200 workers were conducted at four construction sites near Beijing, China, and in a village in Tang County, Hebei, where approximately a quarter of the working adults were construction workers. It is argued that the politics of labor resistance are a significant contributing factor to industry violence.

In this study, we argue that the specific process of the proletarianization of Chinese migrant workers contributes to the recent rise of labour protests. Most of the collective actions involve workers' conflict with management at the point of production, while simultaneously entailing labour organizing in dormitories and communities. The type of living space, including workers' dormitories and migrant communities, facilitates collective actions organized not only on bases of locality, ethnicity, gender and peer alliance in a single workplace, but also on attempts to nurture workers' solidarity in a broader sense of a labour oppositional force moving beyond exclusive networks and ties, sometimes even involving cross-factory strike tactics. These collective actions are mostly interest-based, accompanied by a strong anti-foreign capital sentiment and a discourse of workers' rights. By providing detailed cases of workers' strikes in 2004 and 2007, we suggest that the making of a new working class is increasingly conscious of and participating in interest-based or class-oriented labour protests. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Among young people with emotional and behavioral problems, mutual aid is likely to be of valuable assistance in their rehabilitation, and be deserving of social work support. The benefits of mutual aid stem from the possibility that it prolongs the effect of the contribution of social work services. Given the potential benefits of mutual aid, it is imperative to clarify ways for social work services to maximize these benefits. This paper reviews the existing literature on mutual aid among young people with emotional and behavioral problems. In so doing, we seek to develop a theoretical framework that encompasses key factors conducive to the mutual aid and rehabilitation of this population. These factors include the type of aid, specificity of aid, and balanced coordination in social work input to young people's mutual aid. In particular, balanced coordination requires the social worker not to make excessive intervention in the mutual aid group and thus encourages an optimal use of resources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the ways in which service participation and hardiness interact to affect youth development in such areas as academic success, work achievement, mental health, behavioral adjustment and overall accomplishment. The basic premise is that these two factors may have main effects and an interaction effect on the outcomes. To test this, the present study employed survey data collected from 405 low-income young people recruited from 13 secondary schools and 18 community-based youth-service centers in Hong Kong. The results support the hypothesis that service participation and hardiness work jointly in affecting outcomes, although the individual effects differ across variables. On the other hand, no support is found for the possibility that hardiness might moderate the effect of service participation on the outcomes. Implications of the findings for further research and service provision are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that neoliberalization in the form of privatization has increased rapidly in the post-1997 crisis period in Hong Kong as the government struggles to rebuild and reinvigorate the pro-corporate business environment. We use case studies to illustrate the globalization of the neoliberal project as a process of "creative destruction," as suggested by Brenner and Theodore. in which existing institutions have to be destroyed in order to create new institutions for the neoliberal imaginaries. However, neither destruction nor creation occurs without resistance from below. The privatization of public housing assets has forced grassroots organization to rethink the existing role of the state in protecting the masses against rich oligopolies in Hong Kong. the new focus on anti-neoliberal politics against both the state and capital simultaneously—especially after the privatization of the Link REIT—has created a space for a cross-class social movement in recent years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examines the corporate ethical codes movement in China through case studies of two factories that had to respond to the corporate social responsibility programs. Process of implementation of corporate codes at the company level; Implication of code practices for labor rights; Mechanisms for labor complaints.

Neo-liberal economic globalization and acceleration in information and communication technologies have strengthened the competitiveness of transnational corporations by making it easier for them to stretch their global commodity chains to developing countries. Such control from a distance threatens national states' capacity to regulate TNCs and their impact upon environment, labour and human rights in developing countries. This has prompted anti-TNC sentiments and campaigns that challenge brand-named TNCs on labour exploitation in the south. These changes have triggered discussions on setting labour standards in the international arena. With the WTO distancing itself from the 'social clause', this has prompted the TNCs, NGOs and other stakeholders to self-regulate by introducing codes of conduct. Concentrating on the clothing industry, this paper examines the emergence of company and multi-stakeholder codes of conduct that require the involvement of subcontractors and NGOs in developing countries. The moving of ethical codes to developing countries condenses and reproduces, under the twin pressures of competitiveness and social auditing, the paradoxes of ethical transnational production in the internal organizations of local firms. These paradoxes are demonstrated from a case study of a workplace in China. The paper ends by outlining three paradoxes and commenting on the development of a managerialist 'audit culture' in workplace practices as commodification of ethical code. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]