Triadic Interaction and Collective Bargaining of Autoworkers in South China

A study of autoworkers in Guangzhou, China found that Chinese workers successfully negotiated wages through collective bargaining. The emergence of collective bargaining comes from the triadic interaction among three conflicting agents: workers, local state and employers. The intention of the local state to shift labor-intensive industries towards more value-added industries and the tendency of the local police to avoid the use of violence have contributed to a less hostile labor environment and more political opportunities for the workers. To improve their own position and control labor unrest, regional unions form a vertical coalition with workers while autoworkers invoke their workplace bargaining power by engaging in strikes. At the same time, workers develop low risk strike strategies to reduce potential state suppression and employ anti-Japanese rhetoric to reduce pressure from management. We conclude with a discussion on whether the collective bargaining practices of autoworkers in Guangzhou can be replicated in other spaces or industries.

Matching as a Stochastic Process

Results of multi-party bargaining are usually described by concepts from cooperative game theory, in particular by the core. In one-on-one matching, core allocations are stable in the sense that no pair of unmatched or otherwise matched players can improve their incomes by forming a match. Because of incomplete information and bounded rationality, it is difficult to adopt a core allocation immediately. Theoretical investigations cope with the problem of whether core allocations can be adopted in a stochastic process with repeated re-matching. In this paper, we investigate sequences of matching with data from an experimental 2×2 labor market with wage negotiations. This market has seven possible matching structures (states) and is additionally characterized by the negotiated wages and profits. First, we describe the stochastic process of transitions from one state to another including the average transition times. Second, we identify different influences on the process parameters as, for example, the difference of incomes in a match. Third, allocations in the core should be completely durable or at least more durable than comparable out-of-core allocations, but they are not. Final bargaining results (induced by a time limit) appear as snapshots of a stochastic process without absorbing states and with only weak systematic influences.