Introduction

Employment relations in emerging economies have witnessed significant changes in the last decade as a result of two contradictory pressures. First, the opening of markets, heightened competition, neo-liberal reforms, and privatization have all placed strong downward pressures on labour standards. These developments have seen an increased prominence in informal and insecure working, the declining role and capacity of governments to enforce labour standards, and ever more ruthless cost-cutting through competitive outsourcing practices. Second, these pressures have been somewhat mitigated by the growing adoption of international labour standards, and the role of international bodies such as the ILO. The role of multinational corporations (MNCs) has been ambivalent in this process: many have ruthlessly pursued agendas of cost-cutting and union busting, but others have actively sought to diffuse best practices from their country of origin. Meanwhile, caught between formidable resistances from the private employers to union recognition and the need to defend workers’ rights and interests against a context of declining employment security and labour conditions, the adequacy of the trade unions in representing the workers has been questioned. These tensions also exist in developed economies to various extents. This growing inadequacy of the traditional institutional actors (e.g. the state and national unions) in defending workers’ rights has created both the space and the need for “new” actors to fill the gap. Examples of these actors include: NGOs, employment agencies, HR consultancy firms, counsellors, chaplains, health advisors/trainers, citizens’ advice bureaus, global union federations, employment arbitrators, grassroots activists and social movements, and so forth. Some of the actors are not necessarily new but are playing a stronger or taking on new role in (re)shaping employment relations at the workplace level. In some contexts, these actors interact and permeate each other’s sites and spatial boundaries in acknowledgement of and to complement each other’s resource/capacity constraints (Cooke, 2011). On the one hand, the capacity of governments to act autonomously has been hollowed out through the activities of international financial institutions (IFIs), and increasingly fickle transnational institutional investors, most notoriously the “bond vigilantes.” At a local level, the costs of exit are very much less for highly mobile investors than for employees and adjoining communities. In other words, it is somewhat easier for specific categories of investor to reallocate their capital than for most employees to change jobs or for communities to create new employers. Within such processes, local government may be increasingly disempowered through budget cutbacks. On the other hand, locally specific complementarities are not portable, providing long term rewards for more patient – and responsible – transnational investors that have sunk capital in specific national settings. And, the activities of the IFIs may be constrained or ameliorated through the role of other transnational bodies and associations. Moreover, there remains the possibility for local counter-movements, especially if established political actors are visibly co-opted by financial elites. Whilst operating largely outside the workplaces or cross-organizational boundaries, these actors and their interactions play an important role in shaping employment relations at the workplace level. The emerging role of the new actors, in an individual and/or institutional capacity, has been documented in a number of studies (e.g. Abbott, 2006; Heery and Frege, 2006; Michelson, Jamieson and Burgess, 2008) in response to Bellemare’s (2000) call for widening the scope of analysis of institutional actors in employment relations. However, these studies have focused primarily on developed countries. By contrast, studies on employment relations in emerging economies continue to focus largely on conventional actors, often at the macro level. This Symposium, containing four papers, aims to fill this gap by examining the emergence of new institutional actors at various levels and …