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Regional aspirations with a global perspective: Developments
in East Asian labour studies
Kim Scipes
Department of Behavioral Sciences, Purdue University Northwest, Westville, IN, USA
ABSTRACT
Workers in East Asia have shown over the past 50years that they are
capable of challenging capital, despite facing vehement opposition by
corporations, oftentimes joined by governments and their militaries, and
sometimes even armed thugs. They have built some of the most
dynamic labour organizations in the world. This article is designed to
put these developments into a global and historical perspective. It iden-
tifies today’s movements of capital as the continuation of processes
that developed to a new level in the 1700s, and which continue today.
It also discusses struggles of workers under the Kilusang Mayo Uno
(KMU-May First Movement) Labor Center of the Philippines, and shows
how valuable research conducted to date has identified a number of
lessons learned from these struggles, and how they have been commu-
nicated to workers worldwide. And it asks: What if academics were to
go to worker organizations, and ask them what are their research
needs? This article argues that scholars who support these projects
need to join together to create a critical labor studies in the region that
will enhance, expand and deepen development of our understanding of
what workers are showing us.
ARTICLE HISTORY
Received 22 November 2019
Revised 21 March 2020
Accepted 22 March 2020
KEYWORDS
KMU labor center; labor
organizations; global
struggles; labor education;
worker research; East Asia
Workers in East Asia have shown over the past 50 years that they are capable of challenging cap-
ital, despite facing vehement opposition by corporations, oftentimes joined by governments and
their militaries, and sometimes even armed thugs. They have built some of the most dynamic
labour organizations in the world. These labor organizations –whether labor centers, individual
unions, or even informal groups of workers acting independently –have developed thinking and
activities far beyond many labor organizations in other parts of the world. Their knowledges and
experiences need to be shared across the region and with workers around the world.
This article is designed to put these developments into a global and historical perspective. It
identifies today’s movements of capital as the continuation of processes that developed to a
new level in the 1700s, and which continue today. It also discusses struggles of workers under
the Kilusang Mayo Uno (KMU-May First Movement) Labor Center of the Philippines, arguably one
of the most developed and dynamic labor organizations in the world, and shows how valuable
research conducted to date has identified a number of lessons learned from these struggles, and
how they have been communicated to workers worldwide.
What if academics were to go to worker organizations, and ask them what are their research
needs? This article argues that scholars who support these projects need to join together to
CONTACT Kim Scipes kimscipes@earthlink.net Department of Behavioral Sciences, Purdue University Northwest,
1401 S. US Hwy 421, Westville, IN 463691, USA.
ß2020 Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia
EDUCATIONAL PHILOSOPHY AND THEORY
https://doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2020.1752189
create a critical labor studies in the region that will enhance, expand and deepen development
of our understanding of what workers are showing us. This needs to happen in a reflexive man-
ner so as to help workers develop their organizations further, while providing information and
analyses among workers of different countries, cultures and languages, and among the scholars
who support them.
The concept of “globalisation”has garnered extensive interest over the past 30 years, with
most of the focus being on movements of production capabilities and resulting global produc-
tion and consumption chains between the newer sites and former national locations.
1
While globalization is a much broader, deeper and longer set of processes than is usually rec-
ognized, these processes began accelerating in the early 1970s. Dicken (2015, p. 1) asserts,
“During the last three decades of the twentieth century, the globalization of the world economy
developed and intensified in ways that were qualitatively very different from those of other peri-
ods.”Nederveen Pieterse discusses some of the ramifications:
If globalization during the second half of the twentieth century coincided with the “American Century”and
the period 1980–2000 coincided with the dominance of Anglo-American capitalism and American
hegemony, twenty-first-century globalization shows markedly different dynamics. American hegemony has
weakened, the US economy is import dependent, deeply indebted, and mired in financial crises.
The new trends of twenty-first century globalization are the centers of the world economy shifting to the
global South, to the newly industrialized countries, and to the energy exporters (Nederveen Pieterse, 2015,
p. 24).
What has gone largely unremarked upon, however, is resistance to these processes by work-
ers in these countries in which capital has landed. This resistance, most notably, has been
located in various countries in East Asia: workers and their organizations have been reaching out
for over the past 35 years to build regional organizations within the context of a global con-
sciousness. Understanding this development is based on the disaggregation of the concept of
‘globalization’into ‘globalization from above’and ‘globalization from below’(an argument elabo-
rated in Scipes, 2016b), with this resistance taking place within the context of a developing glo-
bal economic and social justice movement from below. A counter globalizing momentum is
noted by various scholars (among others, see Moghadam, 2020; Nederveen Pieterse, 2015, pp.
24–25; Scipes, 2012; Shiva, 2005; Starr, 2005), and East Asian worker organizations have recog-
nized that regional cross-border organization is necessary, but not sufficient.
The global economy: moving from the nation-state to the world to Asia
Although most of us have been taught about our respective nation state-based economies, the
reality is that there has been global trade going on for centuries. Arguably, however, it was the
development of the cotton industry, serving as the basis for industrialization, that took things to
a new level. Swen Beckert (2015) discusses his book, Empire of Cotton:
This book …embraces a global perspective to show how Europeans united the power of capital and the
power of the state to forge, often violently, a global production complex, and then used the capital, skills,
networks, and institutions of cotton to embark upon the upswing in technology and wealth that defines the
modern world (Beckert, 2015, p. xv).
In other words, while the focus has traditionally been limited to production in particular
nation-states, the reality has been that the industrial system has long been a global one, linking
and integrating ‘labor, raw materials, markets, and capital in large swaths of the world’(Beckert,
2015, p. xiv).
While Beckert (2015, p. xiv) argues this globalization of industry has been going on since
1780, it was only in the 1960s that people outside of management of such industries and per-
haps a few academics began to understand these processes.
2
It has only been since the late
2 K. SCIPES
1970s-early 1980s that a growing number of working people in the so-called ‘developed’coun-
tries have become aware of this globalization of production, as jobs in large numbers have been
shifted to the ‘Global South,’the so-called ‘developing’countries. As Immanuel Ness points out,
this shift has been extraordinary: ‘… while industrial production contracted in the Global North
from 1980-2007, industry in the South has expanded, and global production as a whole has
grown from 1.9 billion to 3.1 billion workers …’ by the year 2011 (Ness, 2016, p. 9, 14).
Economic and political developments in Asia
Much of this economic growth has taken place in China, as well as other countries in East Asia:
Cambodia, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan Thailand
and Vietnam.
Peter Dicken presents data to support this: he shows the increasing importance of trade for
national economies in Asia, measured by exports and imports as a percentage of Gross Domestic
Product or GDP. In 1960, trade was 20.1 percent of GDP across East Asia and the Pacific; by
2011, this reached 70.0 percent of GDP (Dicken, 2015, p. 18). Dicken (2015, p. 21) also shows
that growth of FDI (Foreign Direct Investment) has outpaced the growth in trade. He presents
data on ‘inward FDI as a share of GDP (%)’on a number of Asian countries,
3
comparing the
amount of inward FDI in 1990 to that in 2012:
Inward FDI (Foreign Direct Investment):
Dicken later concludes:
Without a doubt, the biggest single global shift reshaping the contours of the global economic map is the
resurgence of East Asia to a position of global significance commensurate with its importance before ‘the
West’overtook it in the nineteenth century. But this has not been a sudden event. …the resurgence of
East Asia since the 1960s was manifested, initially, in the rise of Japan, whose spectacular growth across a
whole range of manufacturing sectors transformed competitive relationships in the global economy. The
relative decline of the Japanese economy in the 1990s was, however, counterbalanced by the spectacular
(re)emergence of China. At the same time, the original four ‘tiger’economies [Hong Kong, Singapore, South
Korea and Taiwan-KS] continued to consolidate their strengths. The result is an undoubted shift in the center
of gravity of the world economy, a shift that seems now to be on solid foundations and not a mere passing
phrase (emphasis in original) (Dicken, 2015, p. 36).
Two comments about why this has happened: First, clearly this development started with
and/or benefited from the US’Cold War against ‘communism.’This was an effort to preclude
peasants and workers from reaching the point of armed revolution or, if they engaged in such,
that it be limited as much as possible (approximate dates: China in the 1920s-1949; Cambodia in
1960s to 1979; Korea in late 1940s-1953; Malaya in late 1940s-late 1950s; Philippines from late
1940s-1955, and from 1969-to date; Vietnam from the 1930s-1975), which threatened US and
other imperial countries’exclusion from these markets. The US spent massive amounts of money
Country 1990 2012
Japan 0.3 3.5
China 5.1 10.3
Hong Kong. China 262.3 552.8
Indonesia 6.9 23.4
Korea 1.9 12.7
Malaysia 21.7 43.6
Philippines 6.7 12.4
Singapore 78.5 252.3
Taiwan 5.9 12.5
Thailand 9.3 40.7
Vietnam 3.8 51.6
Source: Dicken (2015, p. 21).
EDUCATIONAL PHILOSOPHY AND THEORY 3
and/or manpower in these countries. This was done through open warfare (China, Cambodia,
Korea, and Vietnam), through operations of the US’CIA (Central Intelligence Agency) such as in
Indonesia, Laos, the Philippines and, before 1965, Vietnam), or through supporting ‘allies’wars in
the region like England (Malaysia) and France (Vietnam). Combined with these military opera-
tions was often ‘economic development’designed to preclude revolutionary developments or,
once developed, to limit and/or stop them.
Putting China to the side momentarily, this economic development was designed to establish
or re-establish capitalist economic hegemony in the various countries, and US imperial hegem-
ony in the region (see McCoy, 2017). This economic hegemony was intended to be that of US
capitalism but, over the years, capitalist competition has resulted in massive influxes into the
region from Japanese and European capital, as well as by newly developing capital from China,
Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan and Thailand.
In other words, efforts to re-establish capitalist economic hegemony in East Asia has meant
massive amounts of foreign capital entering these countries. Initially assisted through US-sup-
ported military and political operations, this often united with local capital and in some cases,
the particular nation-state (or through cronies of governmental leaders, such as in the
Philippines), leading to the development or re-development of capitalist economies across the
region. And in spite of crises such as the 1997 ‘Asian crisis’and the 2007-08 Great Recession, this
created resurgent economies with sufficient capital to develop their local capitalist economies
and invest offshore, usually within the region.
But what about China? China followed a different path. Access to its large ‘market’(i.e. popu-
lation) has long been the dream of Western capitalists, since at least the early 1800s. This was
certainly restricted for the first 30 years after the Communist Party took power over the entire
society in 1949, but in 1979, a decision was made by Chinese leaders to allow Western capital to
invest in the country on a very limited and quite controlled basis. Finding this could proceed
without threatening Communist Party control, while providing massive amounts of capital, China
opened its ‘gates,’and foreign capital flooded in, investing in the People’s Republic. For example,
as was pointed out in a 2006 article, ‘Foreign direct investment (FDI) to China increased from
$46.8 billion in 2000 to $60.3 billion in 2005 –or $100 billion including Hong Kong,’and
‘Contracted (future) FDI projections are more than double the actual level today …’ (Scipes,
2006). As a recent article reported,
Since 1993, China has become the largest developing country in the world to attract foreign direct
investment (FDI for short), and in 2002 it surpassed the United States as the world’s first foreign direct
investment host. At end of 2015, China has approved a total of 838,087 foreign investment projects, and
the amount of actual utilization of foreign capital has accumulated to 1479.401 billion dollars (Zhang &
Corrie, 2018, p. 1).
The Chinese were very astute in utilizing this capital. They used it to build their economy,
modernize their society, develop their military, and began investing and/or trading around the
world. They did all of this while enticing Western capital to shift outside of their home countries.
While not intended, the decisions of Western capital altogether to try to take advantage of
China had fateful ramifications; they led to deindustrialization of their home countries, destroying
millions of jobs and decapitating many industrial unions, leaving widespread impoverishment
and workers largely at the mercy of capital that remained.
The long and short of this is that China has developed to be the second most economically
productive country in the world, its military is now perhaps the second or third largest in the
world (and has nuclear weapons), and that it has established a ‘Chinese empire’that is in conflict
and competition with that of the US Empire (see McCoy, 2017). And these processes are affect-
ing relations in East Asia.
4 K. SCIPES
Labor in East Asia: learning from experience
While not suggesting there is a uniform process taking place, the fact is that in the last 40 years,
there has been a mass influx of foreign capital into the region, seeking to take advantage of the
cheap cost of labor and the fact that labor is often controlled by the respective governments.
Often ‘guided’by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, countries have sought
Western investment and these institutions have helped facilitate such investment. At the same
time, successful local (or ‘national’) capitalists have sought ‘partnerships’with foreign investors
seeking local connections. The consequence of this has been massive influxes of foreign capital
coming into the countries of East Asia, joining with local capital, to create even more larger
‘pools’of capital seeking to make profitable investments, both locally and throughout
the region.
One of the key effects of this has been the massive creation of production facilities across the
region. Basically, major regions of these East Asian countries have industrialized, sometime
spreading their impact just in their particular region inside a country, but sometimes impacting
the entire country itself.
Asian workers, initially recruited from rural areas, have become proletarianized over time.
Whether one wants to call it ‘class consciousness’or something else, the fact is that over the
past 40 years, growing numbers of Asian workers have shed their individualism and embraced
some form of worker collectivism to fight their employers and/or respective states. Sometimes,
this has been limited to uniting across the factory floor to fight management; sometimes, this
has extended across various production locations in a region;
4
and sometimes, this has resulted
in nation-wide organization that has challenged specific governments and/or the global eco-
nomic/political/military/cultural networks in which their country is enmeshed.
The key form of organization created has been the labor center: this is an organization that
connects and enhances the solidarity and power of multiple national federations and individual
unions. In some countries –such as Australia, England, Germany, and the US –there is only one
labor center; in international labor terminology, the AFL-CIO in the United States is a labor cen-
ter. However, in other countries –such as Canada, France, Mexico, the Philippines, South Africa,
South Korea and Sweden, there are multiple labor centers.
The fact is that workers in a number of Asian countries have created relatively new labor cen-
ters, such as the KMU (Kilusang Mayo Uno or May First Movement) Labor Center of the
Philippines, or the KCTU, the (South) Korean Confederation of Trade Unions. These labor centers
and their member unions have played key roles in overthrowing dictatorships in their respective
countries. And both of these labor centers, the KCTU and the KMU, are also members of a
Southern-focused, global labor network called SIGTUR, the Southern Initiative on Globalization
and Trade Union Rights. SIGTUR includes labor centers and unions from South Africa, India,
Australia, the Philippines, South Korea, Argentina and Brazil, and has relations with individual
unions and NGOs in Bangladesh, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam, as well as elsewhere
(see Dobrusin, 2014; Lambert & Webster, 2001;O’Brien, 2019; and see the review of O’Brien at
Scipes, 2019).
This author has been researching the KMU since 1986, having completed nine research trips
over the years in my efforts to understand this labor center.
5
From my experiences as a global
labour scholar and as someone who has done extensive research in the field, I believe the KMU
is one of the most dynamic and developed labor centers in the world, if not the most developed
and dynamic (see Scipes, 1996, 2018c). I have examined how the KMU seeks to consciously build
international labor solidarity (Scipes, 2000,2015). I have specifically tried to learn from the KMU,
to suggest what others could learn from it (see Scipes, 2014a), as well as having used the experi-
ences of the KMU to develop the concept of ‘social movement unionism’(Scipes, 2014b), as well
as have used KMU to help theorize global labor solidarity (see Scipes, 2016c). Through my latest
field research, I have checked to see if the KMU still is based on the conceptualization of social
EDUCATIONAL PHILOSOPHY AND THEORY 5
movement unionism, or has it changed (spoiler alert: it hasn’t changed –see Scipes, 2018c). And
I have examined its then-current activities to build opposition against the Duterte regime
(Scipes, 2018b).
6
In short, I argue that there is a lot to learn from the experiences of KMU.
I also think there is a lot to be learned from every progressive labor center and union in each
East Asian countries. Studies on Korean workers –including Chun (2003), Gray (2007), Hart-
Landsberg (1993), Koo (2001) and Ogle (1990)–support this as well.
Learning from workers across the region: research and communication
As stated above, there has been extensive organizing and mobilizing by workers across the
region. Some of it has been more extensive than others, but my guess is that every effort to
build unions and especially labor centers has something to contribute from its experiences and
efforts so as to help deepen the understanding of all of those projects. This is where the prob-
lem lies: who is going to do this work; who is going to do the initial research, compile research
findings, organize these findings, and then disseminate these findings in ways meaningful and
understandable to labor organizations across Asia and the world? And who can translate this
work into the various languages found across the region?
While workers have risked their very lives in numerous places to build organizations, and
many have taken huge risks to resist, the reality is that most workers do not think about com-
municating this to others. They do not understand how important their efforts are, and how
others need to learn from their experiences, both to motivate them to keep on struggling or to
understand mistakes that were made so they are not made again. At the same time, most work-
ers do not have the time, the training nor the opportunity to do academic-level research and
analysis. That’s not to blame them, but it is to recognize that few have been trained to the level
of most graduate students.
This suggests possible academic-worker organization links. What if academics were to go to
worker organizations, and ask them what are their research needs? What would help them
develop their organizations, help their efforts to advance their struggles? What are their ques-
tions about organizing, educating, developing and communicating that other worker organiza-
tions might be able to answer? How can they get that information into their own language, so
they can disseminate it to their own worker-leaders and members?
My guess –and admittedly, it’s only a guess –is that worker leaders would be eager to learn
of the experiences of other labor organizations across the region. What has worked in organizing
individual workplaces, especially in ‘industries’different than their own? How do you organize
regional organizations, or cross-regions? How do you develop female leadership? How do you
build international labor solidarity?
Now one of the advantages that has been gained in East Asia is that there are already estab-
lished links across the region, although as far as I know, there’s not one common one for every
labor organization. I think of the Australian-Asian Workers’Links network, or the Asia Labor
Monitor network out of Hong Kong. And, of course, there is SIGTUR. The first two networks have
existed for over 30 years each, generally on shoe-string budgets; SIGTUR is somewhat younger,
but seems to have institutionalized itself among various labor centers and unions.
7
So, there are established links with workers’organizations across the region; good information
can be disseminated widely. While each of these networks need to be strengthened and further
developed, the fact is that there are significant experiences that can be learned from and from
which can be built.
The weakness, looking from afar, is that there is only a limited amount of information that is
generally spread. Most of it seems to be at a descriptive level, telling about this struggle or that,
6 K. SCIPES
but little of an analytical nature, which tries to understand why tactics and strategies work, what
might have worked better, or how could failure be prevented in the future, etc.
Here’s the place where East Asia’s (in particular) higher learning institutions might make an
important contribution: what if each university and college either established a labor studies cen-
ter or further developed what they have so as to systematically share information with unions
and labor centers across the region? For example, ‘faculty and students from 20 universities in
China, Taiwan and Hong Kong have formed a University Group’to study corporate abuses of
workers in China in the Taiwanese multinational Foxconn (Pun et al., 2016). Ideally, a multi-
national consortium of university labor studies’programs across the region could be similarly
developed to serve progressive labor centers, federations and unions.
Even if they could not establish a network of labor studies centers, what if academics reached
out to the various labor organizations and offered their services? Not to tell workers what to do/
not do, but to gather and create information that might be of use, perhaps a collection of mate-
rials that worker leaders might be able to pick and choose from? Obviously this could be com-
municated face-to-face, but it could also be up-loaded to web sites for wider dissemination.
Academics with established links to labor organizations could then facilitate research by selected
students who are trustworthy and who have relevant skills, with that research specifically
intended for the worker organization.
One example: experiences with the KMU
Perhaps this author’s relationship with the KMU Labor Center of the Philippines might be worth
considering. The KMU’s understanding of the importance of building global labor solidarity has
made this possible.
My first trip to the Philippines was in January-early February of 1986–interestingly, although it
wasn’t known at the time, just days before the collapse of the Marcos Dictatorship. I had met a
Filipina named Wenilou ‘Weng’Pradel by chance at a conference in England in late 1983. Pradel
had been brought there to share information about how she and a co-worker had led 26,000
workers, mostly young women, out on strike in the Bataan Export Processing Zone (BEPZ) in the
first general strike in any EPZ in the world in June 1982. She and I talked and she told me about
this labor movement, the KMU, being built in her country; I was intrigued, to say the least. I
decided to work to raise money and to go out to see if what she told me was true; hence, my
trip in early 1986. While I won’t go into all the details of my visit (see Chapter 9 in Scipes 2020),
and while I traveled extensively across Manila, the KMU encouraged me to travel to visit the
sugar workers in Negros Occidental Province as well as garment workers in the Bataan EPZ. I
traveled with union ‘guides,’who took me to workplaces, homes and even the provincial hos-
pital to see babies starving from malnutrition in Negros. At BEPZ, women workers smuggled me
into the Zone, where I spent a night in a cardboard shack on a picket line, talking with workers.
I returned to Manila and participated in rallies and demonstrations –all while Marcos was
in power.
I returned in 1988, participating in the KMU’s‘International Solidarity Affair.’This was–and
continues to be–a 10-day program intended to get workers and labor leaders from around the
globe to visit the Philippines to experience the realities of Filipino workers. I traveled with an
Australian labor leader, Philip Statham, and we visited Davao City in Mindanao, where vigilante
organizations (death squads) were active and publicly visible (see Scipes, 2000; Chapter 12 in
Scipes, 2020). In addition, I traveled extensively around the country, including back to Negros
and Bataan, but also the mines of northern Luzon around Baguio.
Intending to write an article/articles about the KMU, I had many in-depth conversations with
labor leaders in Mindanao, and in the other areas in which I traveled. People were interested in
sharing their experiences with me, and I took in all I could. Eventually, I realized I’d been given
EDUCATIONAL PHILOSOPHY AND THEORY 7
such information that I needed to write a book (see Scipes, 1996). In these and four more add-
itional trips –all between 1986–1994 –I traveled extensively throughout the country. People
were quite open to sharing their experiences. And while that probably was at least in part
because I was an industrial trade unionist myself
8
–and was very interested in listening and
learning –part of it was they were delighted someone felt their experiences worth recording;
people were proud of their accomplishments and did their best to make me understand.
One of the things I felt was important to do was to share my writings with KMU. Everything
that I published was sent to the national headquarters. When I started working on my book, I
sent them every completed chapter. The purpose was two-fold: one to make sure that what I
was writing was accurate, and so as to engender trust that I wasn’t telling them one thing and
then writing something different in my academic and popular writings. This had the advantage
of getting word out about KMU, but it also helped ensure that they were willing to welcome me
back whenever I wanted to return, and that they would enable me to operate within their
organizational networks. This was especially important for subsequent visits, such as when I
returned again in 2015 for the International Solidarity Affair (Scipes, 2015), and then visiting
Mindanao, Negros and the Southern Tagalog region just south of Manila (see Scipes, 2018c),
adding to the KMU research after several years of working on the foreign policy of the AFL-CIO
(see Scipes, 2010a,2010b,2012,2016a). There were further visits in 2016 and 2018 (for the latter,
see Scipes, 2018b).
While I have sent all of my writings to the International Department of the KMU, I’m not sure
how widely they’ve been disseminated within their country or their networks internationally. Of
course, it is their decision about what to do with these scribbles. But the important thing is that
they’ve had a researcher/writer very interested in their experiences who has subsequently shared
what’s been learned from them around the world: my articles have been published in England,
India, the Philippines, South Africa, The Netherlands and the United States, both in hard copy
and on internet sites, and my book has reached even farther. There are two weaknesses in my
research: I have never lived in the Philippines so I don’t know any of the languages other than
English, and I don’t know the culture to any real extent. I have long hoped that my work would
inspire Filipino academics to do research on the KMU, to really ‘flesh out’my work, but to date,
that has yet to happen.
Academic research in the future
So this gets us to the relevant point in the discussion. Good research done by people who are
well-trained, understand the language and culture, and especially who have lived in the respect-
ive countries for years, can add immeasurably to our knowledge. And further, should they know
English –an imposed and colonial language, but as close as a global lingua franca as we have –
they can then communicate this not only to the workers’organizations they study but to a
larger labor audience, both across the region as well as globally.
Research and communicating it globally then also allows scholars to make comparisons across
national borders. For example, because I have also read extensively and conducted research in
South Africa (see Scipes, 2001, Chapter 11 of Scipes, 2020), I have been able to compare the
‘social movement unionism’of the KMU and COSATU (Congress of South African Trade Unions)
of South Africa (see Scipes, 2001, also Chapter 11 in Scipes, 2020). But I’ve also been able to edit
two collections of articles (see Scipes, 2014,2016) that has allowed me to publish articles by
other scholars who are thinking about labor transnationally, if not globally (for some recent work
by others, see Nowak, 2019;O’Brien, 2019, Schuhrke, 2019).
At the end of the day, those who teach in East Asian universities and colleges can make long-
time contributions to the development of labor organizations across the region by seeking out,
developing, and supporting research projects that advance the knowledge of these labor
8 K. SCIPES
organizations, and communicating findings around the world. This involves building close ties
with leaders of these labor organizations and showing what good research can provide. It is a
task which I hope will be undertaken.
Conclusion
In this paper, I have argued three things: (1) that there is a bottom-up, global economic and
social justice movement that is developing to challenge top-down “globalization from above”
processes; (2) that labor organizations in East Asia have been developing with at least a regional
consciousness, but that for the most advanced, this has been within the global consciousness;
and (3) that labor scholars, especially those across Asia, need to develop efforts, projects, and
ultimately institutions where Asian workers develop and share their experiences and understand-
ings across the world. These issues have been developed herein.
Throughout, I have argued on the basis of work that has been shared by the KMU Labor
Center of the Philippines and, in addition to learning from the KMU itself, that there are things
that can be learned from this author’s research and communication with the KMU. These practi-
ces, obviously, are not the end all and be all of labor research, but share what has been accom-
plished to date with the hope they will inspire others to go beyond established efforts.
Notes
1. The literature on “globalization”is voluminous, and continues to grow–and is much “broader”than just
economics. Space limitations prohibits this author from discussing in any detail. For important recent books,
see Dicken 2015 on capital movements; see Nederveen Pieterse (2015), for cultural and political responses; see
McCoy (2017), for an empire-based analysis; and see Moghadam (2020), for a feminist-based analysis of global
social movements. For a labor-focused understanding of globalization, see Scipes (2016b).
2. One major exception to this was those who read the works of Karl Marx (1867/1967) and V.I. Lenin (1916/
1987), along with a few other critical thinkers. Unfortunately, this was a relatively small number of people.
3. Dicken (2015, p. 21) provides data on a number of countries from around the world; I only included the Asian
countries for this paper.
4. For example, there is an ever-growing literature on workers in China, much of which has focused on the Pearl
River Delta and the Yangzi River Delta, including Bieler and Lee (2017a,2017b); Chan (2014); Freidman (2014),
Kwan (2007), Lambert and Webster (2017), Pringle (2011), Pun (2005), Pun et al. (2016), Zhang (2014); and see
Ness (2016, pp. 107–147).
5. For a list of the 24 articles published on the KMU and/or the Philippines by this author, see https://www.pnw.
edu/faculty/kim-scipes-ph-d/publications/ and look under the section on the Philippines. Many of these listings
have links to the original articles. This research on KMU is the centerpiece to a forthcoming book, which is in
press (Scipes, 2020).
6. My work in the Philippines has been informed by works by Filipino and Philippine scholars and activists of a
range of politics and political positions. Some of the more important have been Bello (2009), Curato (2017),
Davao Today (2014), Dejillas (1994), EILER (1988), Guerrero (1970/1996), McCoy (2009), Quimpo (2008),
Rocamora (1994), and Tujan (2007), but there are many others, including those listed in Scipes (1996). Yet the
heart of my research has been based on extensive interviewing of KMU members, supporters and opponents
in the field.
7. These are in addition to global networks such as Labour Start (www.labourstart.org), from London, or the web
site www.countercurrents.org in India. While Labour Start specifically focuses on labor around the world,
Countercurrents.org carries a wide range of information and articles linking different movements, primarily in
South Asia but increasingly around the world.
8. When I began my research on the KMU in 1986, I was working as a unionized printing press worker in the San
Francisco Bay Area. In 1984, through the British-based journal International Labour Reports, for which we both
volunteered, I met Dr. Peter Waterman. Years later, and based on my self-initiated research on KMU, Waterman
invited me to go to grad school and do a Masters of Arts in Development Studies at the Institute of Social
Studies in The Hague, where he was on staff, which I did in 1990-91 (see Waterman, 1998). Although I am still
a trade unionist (National Writers Union), I left the printing trades in 1988, ultimately entering academia, where
I’ve since worked.
EDUCATIONAL PHILOSOPHY AND THEORY 9
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes on contributor
Kim Scipes, Ph.D., is a Professor of Sociology at Purdue University Northwest in Westville, Indiana, USA. He has
been working to build global labor solidarity since 1983, having published three books and over 230 articles and
book reviews in the US and 10 other countries, and with another book currently in press. A list of Dr. Scipes’publi-
cations, many with links to original articles, can be accessed at https://www.pnw.edu/faculty/kim-scipes-ph-d/
publications/.
ORCID
Kim Scipes http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9712-3995
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