 federation of trade unions, the challenges of labor unrest, the challenge of labor unrest, and the challenge of transition trade unions in Russia, China, and Vietnam. Katie Fox, who this is a lecturer in work employment people and organization at the University of Sheffield. Her research examines international solidarity among dock workers unions, and she having been a PhD student at Berkeley was really involved in political organization and activism both as a union member and as other involved in lots of different forms of activism out in the Bay Area. So what we're gonna do today is, and I'm Laleh Khalili and I teach politics here. And part of what I'm working on right now is maritime transportation, fairly large project that is being wrapped up right around now. And so it has been a pleasure of mine to have these two lovely colleagues come and speak about one aspect of obviously maritime transport. What we're gonna do today is, Tim and Katie are going to speak for a little bit. Then we're gonna open the floor to a conversation between them and you guys and them. And hopefully it'll be lovely and interactive, especially given that it seems like everybody here is friendly faces. Okay, with that I think Tim is gonna, Katie's gonna go first. Great, that'd be lovely. Katie, please. Okay, is this on? Yeah, yeah, great. And I'll just apologize, I'm getting over a cold and have a bit of a cough. So hopefully it won't be too much of a distraction. All right, so today I'm gonna be talking about my research on dock worker trade unionism in global perspective. So over the course of four years from 2012 to 2016 research for this project took me to 40 cities in 20 countries in Europe, Latin America and the United States to interview key dock worker union activists and attend meetings of the International Dock Workers Council, a global union organization. The analysis focuses on five country case studies of recent dock worker disputes in England, Portugal, Greece, Colombia and Chile. As well as including across regional comparison of dock worker trade union internationalism in Europe and Latin America. I began the study by asking how can labor best organize at the transnational level to more effectively confront the challenge of globally organized capital. However, over the course of my research, it became clear to me that in order to answer this question, I would first need to rethink some of my assumptions about how worker power is constituted and the attendant implications for worker strategy. As the data I gathered continually challenged assumptions which are widely shared among many people in the labor movement on the left more broadly and in some academic traditions. The talk I'm giving today critically appraises those initial assumptions and proposes an alternative framework for thinking about worker power and strategy, particularly in relation to logistics workers. So why study dock workers unions to understand questions of worker power, strategy and internationalism today. Logistics of which dock work is a part is an industry in its own right, providing the links in global supply chains that make globally disintegrated production and the geographical separation of production from major consumer markets possible. Within global supply chains, perhaps no single link provides greater disruptive potential than the ports. Today handle upwards of 90% of global trade. The global economy as we know it simply would not be possible without massive increases in maritime traffic. Consequently there's a great deal of interest today in the disruptive power or potential power of workers in the global logistics industry. The logic uniting interest in the sector is that logistics workers provide a keyhole into the global economy as a whole. From the perspective of many labor movement practitioners and activists on the far left, as well as many scholars organizing logistics workers may provide a sort of magic bullet for labor movement revitalization or more radical political projects as disruptions at key choke points in the global economy send ripples outward. And yeah, and Nibonisic and Jake Wilson argue in their book, Getting the Goods, Ports, Labor and the Logistics Revolution that the logistics revolution has not resulted in uncomplicatedly positive outcomes for workers as they're squeezed more and more by employers in the same just-in-time production processes that have necessitated the rise of logistics in the first place. In other words, logistics workers are not immune to the economic, social or political changes depressing the collective power of workers more generally. Bonestitch and Wilson's work then provides ample reason for skepticism about logistics worker organizing as a sort of magic bullet for labor movement revitalization. My own assumptions in this regard were challenged repeatedly as I conducted fieldwork. In some cases in the dissertation, most notably in the successful Chilean and Portuguese cases, dock workers did in fact exercise an exceptional degree of power at the point of production, sending ripples outward and winning important victories. But the reasons that they were able to exercise power successfully had as much to do with particular sets of political and social circumstances in their countries as well as their embeddedness and broader networks and sound strategic decisions as it did their position in the global economic system which after all was equivalent to the position in the economic system of dock workers in the less successful cases in the project in England, Greece and Colombia. This suggests that rather than assuming the power and reach of logistics workers a priority, it may be more useful to ask a different question. How is dock worker power constituted and under what conditions can dock workers effectively exercise this power? This is the question that I'm addressing in this talk today. So the dominant framework for understanding worker power today, particularly in sociology and geography, is the framework that was developed by Beverly Silver in her 2003 book, Forces of Labor, Worker Movements and Globalization Since 1877, 1870. This book builds on an earlier article by Eric Olinwright. Following Olinwright, Silver divides worker power into structural power, rooted in the economy and associational power, rooted in workers' collective organization in trade unions and political parties. Structural power is further divided into marketplace bargaining power and workplace bargaining power which lies at the heart of Silver's analysis. Silver conceptualizes the impact of workplace bargaining power as a series of ever-widening circles of power emanating from the shop floor. As Silver puts it, the assembly line has allowed a relatively small number of strategically placed activists to disrupt the output of an entire plant. With the increasing integration of production among plants within a corporation, a strike in a plant producing a key input part could bring all down stream plants and even an entire corporation to a standstill. Finally, with the increasing concentration and centralization of production, the disruption caused to a country's economy by a strike in a key corporation or key industry, including transportation industries linking plants to each other and to markets, also grew. This has been the case especially where workers are located in an industry on which a country overwhelmingly depends for foreign exchange. Workers and logistics are often cited as the key example of this as a result of their central middle position in the global circulation of commodities with perhaps no single group of logistics workers laboring in a more strategic location than the ports. Nevertheless, a long-term perspective on the port sector demonstrates that winning protections via state regulation as a consequence of labor struggles has been particularly critical to building the power of workers in this historically-casualized industry, despite the high degree of structural power that Silver's theory predicts dock workers should have. The deregulation of the industry, beginning in the 1970s and 1980s in the U.S. and U.K., conversely, has had a profoundly negative effect on workers' ability to exercise power on the docks. As Erik Helgusson, a dock worker leader at the port of Gothenburg in Sweden, put it, employers in the state are just as aware of dock worker strategic positions as dock worker trade unionists themselves are. As a result, dock workers are much more likely to be on the receiving end of state-led or state-sanctioned efforts to repress their power, whether through legal means typical of the global north or more overt forms of violence typical of the global south. States, therefore, play a critical role in explaining variation in strategies and outcomes among workers who otherwise occupy similar positions in the global economic system, even or perhaps especially when these workers are particularly strategically situated, like dock workers. This suggests, then, that the strongest position for workers economically can simultaneously be the weakest position for workers politically, with obvious consequences for their ability to successfully exercise power in disputes. So while the strength of Silver's framework is its ability to explain broad, sectoral level differences in worker power and strategy as a result of the different locations workers hold within the economy, I argue that her framework falls short in fully accounting for cross-national differences in power and strategy among workers who share a common position in the economic system in their respective countries. In other words, her theory can't account for why dock workers in different parts of the world seemingly actually have very different degrees of power. This framework, the alternative framework I propose brings the state back in, while not neglecting the role of the economy in constituting worker power. This framework is better able to account for cross-national variation without sacrificing the ability to explain cross-sectoral variation. The framework I propose for understanding worker power and strategy as constituted through both economy and the state draws from the work of Antonio Gramsci and Nicos Polansis. Polansis argued that states are formed not merely in the realm of the economy but through political, excuse me, that classes are formed not purely in the realm of the economy but through political and social determinations as well. I argue that what is true for class formation is also true for the constitution of class power. Because class struggle always plays out vis-a-vis both employers and the state, as well as in civil society, worker power is always constituted economically, politically, and socially. Purely economic understandings are inherently ahistorical and unable to fully account for power differentials, particularly among workers located in the same position in the economic system in different parts of the world. The theoretical innovation of the study then is its analysis of the workplace as a political arena, using analytical tools more generally employed to understand states or polities. Because worker power is not solely constituted by the economy, it follows that there is no one-size-fits-all model for successful labor struggle by workers in the same industry in different parts of the world. In order to be successful, worker strategy must instead be responsive to the particular condensure of state, economy, and society that constitutes worker power in specific times and places. The argument on strategy then draws from Gramsci, who argued the need for divergent socialist strategy in the East and West because of the different relationship between state and society in each location. He proposed that it was only by understanding these national differences that revolutionaries could undertake a quote, concrete analysis of the relations of force in order to reveal the points of least resistance at which the force of will can be most fruitfully applied. These insights are relevant for understanding worker strategy, both cross-nationally and cross-regionally, given the continued differentiation of political economy at the national level in the global capitalist system. Such a framework provides a stronger foundation, not only for analyzing appropriate strategy for given national context, but also crucially provides a stronger foundation for workers to assess the possibilities for building trade union organizations across borders. Given the centrality of the state in constituting dock worker structural power, any understanding of their power in the global context will necessarily require an understanding of the ways in which states are differentiated and related to one another in the global system. Despite the limitations of the term imperialism, broadly construed to signify both the economic and political domination of peripheral states by regional and global hegemons through the vast array of forces at the hegemonic state's disposal must form a central part of the analysis. The position of states within the global political economy, as well as the relations between them, shape both the ability of workers in a given country to make use of their position in the economic system, as well as shaping the terrain upon which workers within different states may form relations with one another across borders. In this study then, I consider a core region Europe and a peripheral region, Latin America. Fundamentally at the regional level, I argue that Latin America provides a sharp contrast to Europe in terms of the ability of dock workers to make use of their power at the point of production. In Europe, the dock workers unions in general are on the defensive. Overt violence against trade unions, either sponsored or sanctioned by the state, is rare. And the legacy of earlier and more robust periods of working class organization and struggle remain embedded in industrial relations systems that compare favorably to those available to workers in most of the rest of the world. As a consequence, though European dock workers struggle against capital on a less propitious playing field than in the past, this playing field nevertheless allows them substantially greater room to maneuver than that available to workers in much of the global South, including Latin America. Because social and political factors in the broader society continue to allow them to exercise substantial power at the point of production. This has proved advantageous not only for dock worker trade union struggles at the national level, but also for the growth of trade union internationalism within Europe. These differences with Latin America and the global South more generally are ultimately attributable to the ongoing legacy of Northern imperialism. To conclude, I'll now return to the question posed earlier of the conditions under which dock worker unions are able to successfully exercise their power. I found that dock worker unions met with success under two conditions. The first condition was that they and their international allies be able to engage in industrial action at the point of production without being crushed by state sanctioned violence and legal oppression. This condition is largely met by most dock worker unions in the global North with far fewer unions in the global South meeting this condition. The highly constrained context faced by dock workers in the Colombian case in my study where workers were unable to effectively exercise power at the point of production as a result of state sanctioned violence and the absence of labor law enforcement more closely approximates the conditions faced by dock workers and workers more generally in most of the world than the conditions of workers in Europe. Global unionism must learn to better contend with this reality. Second, dock workers met with success when conditions in the broader society allowed them to form alliances with other organized groups and make credible claims that their struggles were in the interest of a broader public. In other words, I found that it was often the flink of non-strategic workers that protected the fortress of strategic dock workers during conflicts rather than the other way around. Strategically located workers such as dock workers who become politically and socially isolated lose power over time. In fact, both the trade unions in the successful cases in my study in Chile and Portugal, though relying primarily on the exercise of power at the point of production, made extensive use of domestic alliances to bolster their claims in the broader society and polity and research participants viewed these alliances as critical to their success. Once the sociopolitical determinants of workers' structural power are met, an additional set of conditions concerning the exercise of worker agency determine success or failure in given cases. While sociopolitical conditions determine the ability of workers to exercise power at the point of production as well as the availability of potential external alliances, ultimately exercising power in these ways, whether on the shop floor or outside of the workplace, depended on the strategic decisions of union activists themselves. In this regard, I found that union democracy defined here as the ability of rank and file workers to exercise a central role in strategic decision making appeared as a necessary precondition for shop floor militancy and the construction of fruitful external alliances and the successful Chilean and Portuguese cases. Bureaucratized trade union organizations, conversely, were less likely to meet with success as competing organizations, I see we have some UCU members in the room. Bureaucratized trade union organizations, conversely, were less likely to meet with success as competing organizational objectives took precedence over shop floor issues, hindering the development of an effective shop floor strategy. Overall, the cases suggest that successful global unionism requires organizational flexibility and responsiveness to the wide array of national context in which workers struggle rather than a one size fits all model. In practice, this means not assuming workers structural power a priori on the basis of their economic position, but instead remaining attentive to the constraints and possibilities of a given national context for worker organizing. For doc workers specifically, this requires recognizing that while their greatest power ultimately stems from their ability to stop the flow of commodities in the global economy, this form of power will not always be available to them in practice as a result of national, social and political factors. And whether or not it is available, extra workplace alliances and sound strategic decisions during disputes remain determinative of success. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. You probably have to press the button for the display again. Okay. Okay. Thanks, Casey. That was really interesting. And as I hope we'll see kind of, can you hear me without the mic? I've got to stop that. Yeah. Hopefully what I will do is kind of drill down a little bit more at the national, the constraints and possibilities, these words are the given national context. This is a national context that is profoundly difficult and authoritarian state in which the traditions of working class militancy have been very much been subsumed by state power, authoritarian control. So I call this really taming labor because I touch on the, or draw on rather, the structural and associational power that formed the theoretical basis for some of the introduction of Katie's talk. And I look at how that, the results that that brings in a situation where workers have significant structural power but where associational power is entirely denied, really. So, and in doing that, I speak to some of the debates around the labor movement in China or the emerging labor movement in China, the issue of trade union reform in China and the issue of power and regime stability within that country. So in simplistic terms, the paper itself, by the way, is in international labor relations review, is on the online first bit online. Now it will be out in print later this year. And really at its most basic term, the question I'm asking is, is that does the absence of freedom of association because freedom of association doesn't exist in China. So does that absence and nor does protection of the right to strike? Does this exclude the possibility of a functioning trade union? So in many ways what we've seen in China over the last decade in particular, is a significant improvement of paying conditions across, differentiated across the country in different political economies that exist in China, but we've seen a significant improvement that I will argue and have argued in various publications, is driven primarily by working class militancy. So but how does that happen? How can that happen in a country or in a context rather where freedom of association is entirely denied? And indeed just the act of four or five years ago because the time has changed the situation or the face of authoritarianism, the shade of authoritarianism in China over the last five years. Before five years ago, I could have given this talking China. I would not now because it would, the place would be full of people who you really wouldn't wanna be there. But my question is, is really about in this context and there's very different difficult context, can an enterprise level trade union function? So how do I measure that functionality or how can we measure this functionality? Well I've used three very, again very simple, very basic trade union instruments or yeah benchmarks really. One is accountability, the kind of union democracy that Katie talks about which most Chinese workers still could never dream of or they'll probably dream of it but certainly not achieve the current conditions. The other is the notion of institutionalized collective bargaining, something that we take for granted in many states around the world but in China simply does not exist but is beginning to emerge. And thirdly is material gains for workers as well. So those are the three ways in which I measure it. So the context, what is that measure that idea of functioning trade union? So the context here, so drill down a little bit more about what I meant. The All China Federation of Trade Unions in China is a party led trade union. Constitutionally it operates under the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party. In trade union law, Article 10 of China's trade union law specifically states that you cannot organize a trade union outside the ACF to you. Now because of the ACF to use constitutional and legal acceptance of leadership of the state really of the party there, when the interests of its own members clash with those of what I would refer to as the ruling class in China, then of course the ruling class takes presidents. Now this actually, although I'm looking at the Chinese context, I think that the differences as a little tangential observation here, the differences between the party led All China Federation of Trade Unions and indeed apparently independent trade unions, I don't believe is as great as is often commented on certainly in the Western Board where I've pressed. But nevertheless in China itself, this party led union is as Eli Friedman call them, is as Friedman has referred to, is as suffocating straight jacket on working class activity, on working class militancy. This organization, the ACF to you, is politically strong because of its links to the ruling class, the Chinese Communist Party but is organizationally very, very weak. So at city level, it can throw its weight around, it can discipline enterprises or capitalists when it feels necessary in order to maintain a balance of class forces to facilitate capital accumulation and regime stability. But in the workplace itself, it's generally very, very weak. In China's workers have a well known saying which is whatever the boss says goes, which means that and that includes trade union. And indeed, the trade union rep in many Chinese workplaces or the chairperson of the enterprise double branch is often the personal manager in the enterprise itself as well. So you can use a bit like here, there are how many people from Soho to here, so be a bit like, instead of Tom Armstrong being the UCU chair, or General Secretary would be Richard Black, you know, which is kind of maybe, anyway, won't go there. So about my previous point about the differences between party-led trade unions and so-called independent trade unions. But to move on quickly, the dominant context, dominant discussion around the notion of the second level of measuring functionality of an enterprise-level trade union is this notion of collective negotiation. Now in China, there is an emerging debate around, certainly up until 2016, where there was a quite a widespread calm down on those of us who were engaged in that debate, there was a debate around collective consultation and the notion of collective bargaining. Now I'm perfectly willing to accept that collective bargaining is by its nature, is not a revolutionary device. I'm not laboring on any illusions that it's collected but it's an instrument of class compromise, which we hope by our own, militancy by our own collective strength, we can force concessions out of the capitalist class. Collective consultation, as I'll explain later on, is something very different. It's a different notion entirely. Another context around the notion of structural power workers is the generalized labor shortages and high labor turnover, which I'll come back to in a methodology in a second. And then we have since about 2004 in the onset of those labor shortages, we have seen a significant rise in levels of working class militancy. Now, figures on strike days, strike days lost in China don't exist. In fact, well they do exist. This is that the police have them and they won't give them to anybody else, right? And indeed it's prohibited legally to publish any national level statistics on strikes. Nevertheless, well-known labor NGOs, well-funded labor NGOs and also academics such as Manfred Elstrom have conducted their own kind of social media-based loosely representative statistics on strikes. And I haven't included the timetable but the literature acknowledges, almost everybody acknowledges that there is a significant rise, not just in labor protests because that was something that really characterized capital accumulation in the 1990s, but also on strikes themselves. And I think there was a significant difference between the two because what we're talking about the dot workers that I studied or we studied in Yentian in South China, what they were doing was bringing a halt to that process of accumulation which labor process hitherto labor protest in China up until about 2005 didn't. And then we've seen the state worrying because of its anxieties about the extreme inequalities that the model of development that it generated was beginning to generate it. What was generating was beginning to shift certainly between I'd say from 2002 to around, I've written 2012, 2013 there but you could probably extend that to around 2014 too. A concession, a shift from repression to concession when confronted with increasing strikes, strikes were being normalized. Now the absence of, the presence of concession of course does not exclude the fear of repression and indeed the reality of repression. I'm not arguing for one second that that didn't exist in this time period. Nevertheless, if you look at the rise in average wages, if you look at the rise in minimum wages, if you look at the rise in number of strikes and if you look at the former and organizing strategies of those strikes which we'll see in a minute, you can see a definite shift with repression wasn't the only player in the game. Location, where do I, so where do I test this context? Where do I put this context into play? Where do we go? We went to the Yentian International Port Terminal. It's a huge terminal, it's grown exponentially to the, in the way the logistics sector as Casey described has internationally anyway. And we're looking at, I forget, I think we're looking at, it's gone from number nine as the most important port in the world or the most busiest port in the world to number one or two over the last 10 or 12 years. The growth was really significant. It's a high tech port. It's highly, it's high capital investment. It's a joint venture run by the Hong Kong One Power company and also a Chinese, a Chinese state owned, into a former Chinese state owned enterprise outfit. It's a keynote and it speaks to those points of structural power that Casey referred to a bit before. It's a keynote in an export of consumer goods to the markets of both of the states, Japan and indeed around the world. So if the context is rising working class militancy, if we look at this militancy in a particular port and see if we can judge that militancy, see what it can emerge in terms of organizational outcomes, then we need to look at, I would argue, as Casey did, to start with the sources of workers' power, not least structural power and associational power. Now Casey's already described and explained how silver builds on Eric Olin rights paperwork in 2000 to look at different types of marketplace bargaining power and workplace bargaining power. I'm going to talk about how the Shenzhen, that's a powerful city-level trade union in South China, nears to the port, how that used its own awareness of the potential for independent associational power to emerge to tame the forces of labor, to tame that power, to use forces of labor, to use Beverly's terminology. In doing that, what I hope is a theoretical, or loosely a theoretical contribution to the literature, that instead of taking these concepts of power as static concepts that therefore you have, and this I suppose is linked to what Casey's arguing as well, that you have to look at national conditions or the national context. I don't see these associational power and structural power forms and structural power as static concepts as a way to, what I'm trying to do is present a dialectical extension of right and silver. So in doing that, to use a classic Marxist approach really, is that the synthesis is an effective workplace trade unionism, i.e. associational power, is excluded by party-led trade unionism and a formal absence of freedom of association. But if we look at its antithesis, that powerful strikes and expression of structural power is forcing those party-led unions to experiment with effective workplace trade unions. Trade unionism, something that most of the literature would argue is not, it cannot exist in China, theorists who cannot exist in China. And out of that I'm going to argue that the forces of labor are tamed into a specific variation of associational power that leaves room for effective workplace trade unionism. Now effective in qualified terms really, just as effective trade unionism in any context is qualified by the forces of capital and the state, as Katie said. Why did I choose, why did we choose YICT? Well, for two reasons really. One is because it brought together, it allowed us to put under the microscope two key characteristics that I've already explained of China's labor relations system. One is that we're seeing an extension or expansion of growing working class power. And the other is the notion of trade union reform that the ACFTU from being a party-led beast can in fact be manipulated or forced into making some concessions to behaving a little bit like a trade union that is responsive to its members. So contributes to the debates around that. And that has been a very fierce debate in the literature and among workers themselves over the last decade in China. The timescale I use is important. It's from 2007 to 2013. Why is that important? Because this is the height of labor shortages. It was the height of that wave of working class militancy that possibly reached its first nadir in 2010 with a famous wave of strikes across the auto sector in China but also carried on well up into 2014, 2015. Also, what makes YICT a little bit different because I talked about high labor turnover being a distinguishing feature of labor relations in China is that YICT, the NTN International Container Terminal is that we had a low labor turnover and that many of the workers involved in the 2007 strike were also there and remembered and took part in the 2013 strike as well. So what we're saying is the method is based on the fact that we can bring characteristics that are there in the literature and there in other studies but also a bit of an outlier as well. Outlier is all in that there is a high labor. There is a low labor turnover here. The argument I'm going to make or make to summarize what I've said already is that the local city level trade union. Now, that is where political power is in the Chinese trade union system. It's not at the enterprise level. It's at the city level, probably sounds familiar. It's the Shenzhen Federation of Trade Unions and what led by particularly I would say class conscious and very savvy individual or deputy chair called Mr. Wang that recognized that the significant structural power possessed by the gantry and tower crane operators at the YICT in particular had the potential to generate alternative forms of associational power. I had the power to generate a union but a form of associational power that was not under the control of the ACFDU and because of the ability and I'm not making those assumptions that Katie is warned us of which I entirely agree with that we should immediately associate all dot workers, they are very powerful. They can, you know, a bit like we used to think about miners in the UK. You know, like Plachythons can beat the miners, you can beat anybody. Unfortunately, it proved to be right until the UCUs great strike the other month. But I think by locating or bringing this argument, testing this argument out in China, I think I'm going away or trying to go away from the default reaction that dot workers are always powerful and certainly it is not the case in China because, as Katie says, the role of the state and the authoritarian context in which we're looking at here. So the associational power that is inherent, that there is a possibility there, is tamed, it's restricted to economic demands. And out of this, institutionalized collective bargaining is established. Now again, we'll go into the detail in a minute, but I'm not arguing that collective bargaining is always a good, or is the kind of holy grail of trade unionism. But nevertheless, certainly in these conditions, the institutionalizing of annual collective bargaining was to generate positive gains for workers. This is based on negative collective bargaining, a right version of negative collective bargaining based on mutual concessions. And this is crucial again, again, of drawing on that Gramsci notion in which the coercion is continually, that it is not continually deployed actively to control people's actions. But nevertheless, as you will see, is always present. He's always there in the background really. So to go back to the types of collective negotiation that I talked about earlier that I mentioned earlier, in China, collective bargaining doesn't exist in law. Very rarely, is very rarely mentioned in law. Instead, you have this instrumental, this divide concept called collective consultation. This collective consultation imagines a rather abstract notion of consensual negotiations by equal partners in which there is no, in which everybody operates on an equal basis. What it tends to do in practice is it reproduces or even undermines labour law standards that have been set by the national labour law. So you can have a situation where a collective negotiation can produce an agreement because workers have no part in this process whatsoever, an agreement that produces standards that are lower than trade union laws, than labour law standards themselves. So it's no surprise that levels of collective contracts in China, 54% in 2011, are very high because generally they don't mean anything. They're completely vacuous statements. Workers aren't involved in their negotiation. They're usually done, they're very much a management tool and they've given a rubber stamp by a very weak trade union that is not interesting. Because of that rise of working class militancy, we're seeing instead, we're seeing other forms of bargaining driven by militancy that are emerging alongside collective consultation. We're seeing sector level bargaining, i.e. sectors such as the shirt making sector, usually specific to local districts. We've seen some quite interesting work around there. We've seen bargaining emerged in the Northeast, in the Dalyan special economic zone up there, where working class militancy has pushed otherwise very passive officials, including trade union officials, into some form of collective negotiation that is a little different than collective consultation. Most interestingly in Guangdong province in the South, linked to industrial upgrading and a general change in the political economy of Guangdong, we've seen a much more active and agency-based closure bargaining. So when capital relocates, workers will then protest, will say that we want our share of compensation in accordance with the state's laws. And this tends to involve a lot more, usually a direct strike, usually involved in negotiation, is part of the strike and often the involvement of non-state actors such as labor NGOs. I call this closure bargaining because it tends to come in stages where capital is relocating. So capital has or the state has not a lot to lose. It will generally allow this to go ahead, not always, but generally. And then we have annual collective bargaining. This, I would argue, is a significant breakthrough in an expression of both structural and the association of power in China because it's an institutionalization of a certain amount of bargaining based on the threat, it's based on strikes or the threat of strikes. So as I said, the drivers of this are working class militancy, concerns over, state concerns over growing inequality from the development model. The rise and subsequent fall, I'm afraid to say of non-state actors such as labor NGOs, and also concerns generally that we've seen particularly under the last five years under Xi Jinping of party legitimacy and regime stability in general. So that's driven the kind of experimentation we've seen around as a result of that militancy. So on the waterfront itself, the first strike that we looked at was way back in 2007. I couldn't get to the scene, unfortunately, because it was too sensitive for a non-Chinese to be there, but we have research teams down there. And what we saw then was a wave of strikes across ports in China, across that in Guangdong province that culminated in this powerful and immediately effective strike of 280 crane operators at YICT, the NTN container terminal, that made this extraordinary pay rise of demand of 5,000 yen, which at the time, and these were workers, these crane operators, they weren't the kind of high, in both in the media and in some academia, Chinese workers are generally presented as passive, as inability to fight super exploitation, that they will take low wages, except for example, those kind of very passive representations. These, I would argue that that representation is entirely false, but these guys were not part of that representation. They were paid at least six, paid three or four times, or three times the minimum wage for the area. And also, although they were migrant workers, many of them had sunk routes in the area and they based their 5,000 yen wage increase demand on the rate that the port had grown over the last eight or nine, 10 years. And he also demanded, they wanted electric trade union representatives that were paid for directly out of their own wages. At the time, there was no trade union, not even an official trade union at the company, and also at the dock and they also wanted a paid lunch break. The effect of this strike was almost immediate. Within three or four hours, I think there were 15 ships built up in the local bay and within 24 hours, well over 100. It terrified the bejesus out of both the company and also the local ruling class as well, particularly, and its agency in the trade union, which was the Shenzhen Federation of Trade Union, who immediately rushed down to the scene. It was very angry, it was chaotic. And at this time, we're going to see because of the threat that this scene had, the threat to, as I said in the early side, the threat to both party legitimacy and regime stability, that this kind of action provided on the top of the general build-up in working-class militancy is that the union moved from its traditional role of either mediating or encouraging workers to go back to work to immediately get people back to work. Instead, they focus on some of the key demands of the workers as well. The 3% wage increase doesn't match the 5,000 U.N., but that was a tactical demand anyway. 3% of the 7,000 U.N. a month that the doctors were earning was a significant wage increase. They also won a 500 pound per month height subsidy return to work, height subsidy that they'd been arguing, lunch hours were paid. There would be no, ground with two to no scapegoating and the word, there was no scapegoating of activists. And also that the union, so that one of the key demands is that unions had their own reps and they paid for those reps. So that was a way to try and bypass the monopolistic nature of the all China Federation of Trade Unions. The Shenzhen Federation of Trade Unions said, that is not allowed, you can't do that, that's against the law, we will not accept that. But nevertheless, and this is where the taming began, they did organize a set of responses to the demands so that workers reps were elected. And we'll look at that process in a minute. So how did that happen? So this taming, taming of the potential association of power that was beginning to emerge around the docks in Guangdong province at the time, not just at Yantian, was 12 full-time officials were seconded to the Yantian port. So that is, this is a union that is stretched for resources, the Shenzhen Federation of Trade Unions is stretched for resources. Then the 12 full-time officials down there was a huge, I think is a, there are only 2,000 people working there. So it's a testament to how worried they were. There was an extensive consultation where these union officials and other activists actually talked to workers, actually asking how they felt about the strike, how they felt about the workers' conditions, what were their key complaints, what were their key demands moving on from the strike itself. There was an election of a really interesting guy who I called WSIQ for his own safety, and also five full-time union officials paid for by the enterprise. These elections were indirect, and they were direct elections like the ECU has. They were by shop until you would elect a representative in a certain shop on the port, if you were a plane operator, a certain part of the area of the port or location of the port would elect a rep and they would then directly a trade union committee. Tim, excuse me, stay behind the things otherwise it won't be recorded on. Oh, okay, yeah. And also bargaining teams were elected separately. This was quite an interesting innovation in that the problem with trade union committees, as we all know, as a member of the trade union committee, I probably guilty of this, there was a separation between rank and file and workers. The bargaining teams themselves, for the annual bargaining of the Shenzhen Federation and trade unions force the dock owners to concede to were elected separately. And this actually gave WZIQ more room to maneuver in how he approached the annual collective bargaining, the annual negotiations. And he was able to demonstrate, and it sounds pretty lame here now, but the idea of a trade union rep in China saying, we won't be too hard in words, but we'll show our power in practice to an employee in the context of authority in China is really quite new. It is a testament to, I think, both the extent of structural power that the dock workers had and the fear that they had inspired with their strike group. It wasn't a static thing either. As negotiations, as these annual negotiations carried on from 2008 onwards, they generated eight to 10% annual pay increases, but there again, which were fairly significant, but there again, they were also, those pay increases were negated to a certain extent by other state policies, such as local state policies, such as the introduction of housing providence schemes or housing repair schemes, basically, and a nine grade productivity system at the port that the port operators insisted on employing. It's significant pay increases out of annual collective bargaining, but nevertheless, there was a, it wasn't a static, it had moved beyond that kind of static notion of every year we do this. There were threats of strikes each year. There were changes in the makeup of the bargaining team, and it was a very fluid situation. So fluid to the fact that the union that, I haven't included it in the paper, but we also interviewed, managed to get an interview with the managing director of the NTN, and he made it very clear, reflecting the words of the union rep here as well, that they were very frightened of future strike action, and their main aim during the negotiations was to avoid a repeat of another strike. It didn't work because, I think, because of state strategies around housing providence and the company's productivity pay scheme, another strike broke out just before annual collective bargaining in 2013. And again, this was not just crane operators, time it spread very quickly to the rest of the port. It had demanded a 2,000 yuan pay increase, and it showed really the limits of this new trade union, the limits of its functionality. But I would argue the mere fact that workers were able to, despite the fact that their power was being tamed by this union, that they still felt they were able to draw on that power to, structural power to, to try and stop capital and put their demands, is really, you know, is a sign of a functioning labour relation system, which is certainly not revolutionary, but is very important in the context of China. And indeed, it achieved a second strike, achieved an extraordinary 30% pay rise, achieved a plus of 5,000 yuan back to work bonus. So, and again, I'm not talking about super exploited workers. I mean, it's shit work working in the cranes. It's very hard, it's a very difficult job, but it's not the same as working 14, 15 hours a day on an assembly line, as you see in the zones in China and other special economic zones, it's better paid. So in some ways, this is, you know, it's not a wild comparison to say that our strike in the UCU, that can you imagine that they paid us to go back to work after the pension strike? It's, you know, we're talking about very different sectors, but similar amounts of, a count rate, a similar amounts of, a count rate, I think. It also came with the settlement, also came with a warning from the Shenzhen Federation of Trade Union, which really showed the limits of this taming, where they would move, that the move from repression to concession in that narrative that had become very powerful, that had become very dominant in China for a brief period, that these guys had reached its limit, and the Shenzhen Federation of Trade Unions was very clear in saying to the strikers that if this carries on, if this level of militancy carries on, then we are no longer in control of events, i.e. there was a threat of repression, that the armor of coercion would be deployed. So, I would argue that this scenario, that these events, these two strikes and the annual collective bargaining that happened in between them, really are important for our understanding, both of changing labor relations in China, and understanding the notion and the situation, the nature of militancy in the country. First I would argue that unlike my friend and comrade Eli Friedman, Eli has argued in his book on insurgency in China, or labor insurgency in China, that a functioning trade union is not possible in China because of the fact that trade union, because the state or the union will always adopt the low-hanging fruit that militant workers have themselves creating. What we found, and that's what Eli found in his own research, what we found was a different scenario, and I think this scenario is very important for understanding the notions of structural power and associational power in China. Earlier work in China had also noted that many strikes will be followed by the exit of activists, the exit of either to labor NGOs or the exit of strike organizers or them being sat. This again, this didn't happen at the NTN and that many of the strikes was in 2007, was still there in 2013. So, again, not to romanticize about the kind of historical narratives of dot workers' cohesiveness and solidarity, etc. Nevertheless, this was an important departure from existing strike patterns and forms of organizing. Further, even though many workers there and the workers we interviewed were very aware of what the Shenzhen Federation of Trade Unions was doing to tame their own enterprise-level union, and as you can see from this quote, they were aware what they were doing. There was a kind of grudging acceptance that it was better than nothing. And I think that's a key, it sounds like a very minor point, but I think it's a key point. Is something like this, which we can see the limitations of, i.e. of this kind of very qualified expression of working-class associational power, is it better than nothing? So, one guy we argued said, yes, our solidarity has improved significantly from January to October when collective bargaining begins, almost all workers discuss trade union and collective confrontation without any prompting, i.e. collective bargaining. He's still using that term. In the past, we only grumbled to each other, we've all changed a lot. And I think the second aspect that this research certainly makes, I think, a basis to think about is really, is a relationship between structural and associational power, and that these are dynamic and not static categories, that there is a tension there, and that this tension was manifested by the appearance of annual collective bargaining, both its limitations and the positive nature, and those wage rises that it achieved. But we see that the armor and coercion is never far away, it's present, but generally was not deployed, but there was a threat of it being deployed, certainly in the second strike as well, that managing concessions to maintain production are achievable, even in a very difficult organizing environment, such as we found at Yentian. And the main reason that the Shenzhen Federation of Trade Unions adopted this kind of innovative approach was, goes back to really, it's not really a departure from why it exists anyway, which is to guarantee regime stability and to serve the interests of the party. It's not really a departure from that, but it's an adaptation of that very strict, straight jacket, as Eli calls it, and others are calling it of worker or official worker organizing in China. I think two is that workers, well, we've talked about that, that this association of power is tamed, and is it better than nothing, which takes us back to the union reform debate. And I would just say on that, that interestingly, can this model be reproduced? Well, it hasn't been reproduced to date, but there are signs that by recent crane operator strikes in the city of Tengshui and other ports in China, that there is a narrative there, there is a memory there in which tower crane operators have demanded better representation, have demanded higher wages, and are drawing on the same kind of demands, but also a memory of what was happening at Yentian. So it's probably not directly reproducible because the political economy of China has changed very much since then, but nevertheless, I think it's still an important way of which we wanna build the power of port workers and the workers generally, or support Chinese workers doing that, it's an important example, not least because it departs from the dominant view that you can't have effective representation in China, but is it better than nothing? And also, it is a manifestation of working class power, which I think is important to all of us. So thank you for listening. Thank you both for taking so many notes, but I have a couple of questions for both of you. Katie, I have a question, specifically about European context, but it's also important other context where there's more and more talk of automation. What is the response to automation and what possibilities exist? Because it's often used as a way to, in fact, move people off the docks to move the workers. The second question I've got is, you mentioned the conditions of possibility for success and there's no violent reaction. There are alliances in the society and then union democracy. I'm thinking about London Gateway and the way that it managed to secure, well, that Unite finally managed to secure and the only way it was able to do so was through legal kind of means rather than, I mean, they had to take the, they had to take DPW or DP world to court in order to be able to get the right to collective bargaining. Although there had been lots of global struggles and solidarity, a refusal to unload and things like that. So I'm curious about to what extent do you take account of these legal means of struggles? So those are my two questions for you and then I have two questions for you, Tim. One, why did they not use coercion? I mean, what stopped them or expulsion? Because you mentioned that some of those workers were migrants, I'm assuming, from rural areas to there and the circumstances under which you're describing this is very similar to the Arabian Peninsula to the Gulf. And so I'm curious about why expulsion or deportability is not deployed. The second question is, what are the conditions under which a kind of a farce of a union or a carapace that is supposed to be statement actually transforms, is it push up from down below? Is it grassroots mobilization? Is it worker militancy that transforms this kind of a state union into a real one or not? Because in the context of Bahrain, Kuwait and Aden, the British introduced trade unions precisely to act as this kind of a taming monster. And then in the end, at least for a period, those trade unions exceeded the expectations that they would be kind of liaisons and nice little conduits for managerial power. They ended up being actually forces for both workplace and political mobilization. So what accounts for, under what conditions can such a thing emerge? Great, thanks for the questions. So the first question was on the issue of automation and the ports, which is definitely a hot topic these days. Personally, I think the attention being paid to it is a bit overblown relative to what is actually happening on the ground, as I'm sure you know, there are the vast majority of ports around the world do not have automated or semi-automated terminals. It's a very new thing in a few places. Nevertheless, for dock workers in their unions, they certainly, particularly in places like Europe and the United States, they certainly perceive it as a major threat. And it is always a threat that employers kind of hold out as something on the horizon if they don't get the concessions that they want in bargaining. But I think that that's the extent of it in most places at this point. But I think for me, the way I tend to think of automation is I think of it in more broadly in terms of what are the strategies available to capital in the port sector, right? So one strategy that gets very little attention is the strategy relocation. So we often think about ports as immobile, that that's why dock workers have a lot of power. That's not the case at all. Port infrastructure is constantly on the move and the UK is actually a very good example of that. So 100 years ago or even 50 years ago, London was a port city, right? Nobody here, I would imagine thinks of London as a port city, but it was a port city. And historically, dock workers were one of the most militant and well-organized groups of workers in London. And we're kind of at the center of the trade union movement in London. So why don't we have docks here anymore? Well, part of it has to do with the fact that the ships got bigger and were further up the Thames, but really it was primarily an employer strategy to take the infrastructure of capital out of the hands of these militant, well-organized workers in places like London. So to move downstream to Tilbury out to Felix Stowe. Now over time, those ports became organized as well, but that strategy of relocation, either building new ports or gradually shifting infrastructure to other ports or cargo to other ports is a major tool in capital's arsenal in the sector. Technology over the long term, I mean right now, yeah, we're seeing the threat of automation if not much in practice, but beginning about 50 years ago, obviously we saw containerization, major, major change in the sector that drastically reduced the workforce in many places. But the point that I wanna argue is that what I have seen in my research is that still by far the most important tool in capital's arsenal in the port sector around the world is the state, essentially. State, repression, all of the means that capital has its disposal to either directly or indirectly use the state to discipline the workforce, I would argue is far and away the most significant of these strategies of capital. As to the second question on DP World. So DP World, as you know, was one of the cases in the project. So my take on what happened at DP World, this is actually in the dissertation, this is the kind of key case of where union democracy mattered because essentially the dock workers in the UK are members of Unite the Union, which the largest union in the UK, it's a big multi-sectoral union, and they sort of concentrate organizing resources at the national level. So they have a national organizing department that runs organizing campaigns in all of the Unite sectors. And so the strategies they use were taken from SEIU, a service sector union in the United States, and the strategies that were developed for the service sector in the United States tend to focus on putting external pressure on companies. So targeting investors, key decision makers, and the reason for that is that in the service sector it's often very difficult for workers to exercise power at the point of production because they have this sort of weak structural power, right? Now my argument is that Unite essentially applied that same strategy that has in many cases been used to great effect in the service sector to this poor organizing campaign, and it didn't work because maritime employers, they don't care about their kind of external reputation, reputational damage, it's not gonna hurt their bottom line. What hurts their bottom line is workers' ability to slow down or stop the ships. And so they looked at this Unite campaign where groups of activists would go flyer outside DP World's corporate offices, and they said, you know, why are we gonna come to the table with you? So I argue that what was supposed to be a sort of demonstration of strength in that case was actually a demonstration of weakness. And it's interesting, the issue of the lawsuit, I have a kind of, I guess I have a slightly different take on that. They eventually Unite was actually able to negotiate an access agreement with DP World as the result, because Spanish dock workers at the port of Alucidas threatened to stop the first ship that was loaded at DP World. They got this access agreement, but they hadn't, this sort of national organizing department of Unite hadn't built a union committee on the shop floor prior to that point. So they kind of came in and were easily painted as outsiders by the company because they hadn't built relationships with the workers. They were there for six months and they weren't able to meet the 10% threshold to go into bargaining, which is a very low threshold to meet, right? So it was only when workers, dock workers in the port, many of whom had come from the port of Tilbury, which is quite a strong union port. They had had previous experience as trade union activists and happened to be working at DP World. It wasn't until they started getting involved and kind of organizing their colleagues at the shop floor that things really took off. So I'm not really sure what to say about the role of the lawsuit, but that's kind of my take overall in the DP World organizing. Right? Yeah. Yeah. Okay, so just to refresh the questions. Thank you, Lalee. One is the first question is that why didn't the state use coercion? Why didn't it use force? It's a very common occurrence in China that response to labor mills and C is to deploy force. I think the first thing to look at really, and again this echoes Katie's point on how important the state is, is that the state was increasingly concerned about inequalities that were emerging, both geographic, sectoral level, at a class level, at a gender level, all levels that were emerging in Chinese society as a result of 25 years, 30 years of basically moderated neoliberal reforms. And one of the ways that the state adapted, that deployed to reduce those, to attempt to reduce that, one of many ways, one of many levers that it used was to allow, to tolerate rather, a certain degree of labor militancy. And my research shows quite clearly, not in this paper but in other papers, that there were clear benchmarks of how far you could go as workers. If you block, if you strike in the factory and keep it to the factory, all the ports in the state, the armed forces of collusion will leave you alone. They won't intervene. If you march around the factory estate and make links with other factories, the police will arrive, that they probably still, well I'm generalizing it, but they generally won't intervene. If you march out of the factory district, or the port district, or increasingly the city center with a Walmart organizing in China, then and start blocking roads, the state will push you around. The forces of collusion will push you around, they'll take out your leaders, and they will use significant threats to get you off those roads. If you block a railway, you're in prison, simple as that. They'll come in very, very hard. So there are different levels, and it's quite clear to, certainly some of those experienced labor NGO organizers and organizations I was talking about earlier, mentioned earlier on, that they're particularly up until about 20, between the years of 2007 to 2014, the time period of this research, that the state was moving from repression to concession, which didn't exclude repression, and one of the levers that used to reduce the inequality that it was very worried about was to tolerate degrees of unrest. Another reason why they didn't intervene is that tower and gantry crane operators, although it's not a highly skilled job, it is a skilled job. It's not something that you can learn a day. It's not like being a lecturer. You can learn that in a day. But it's a joke, guys, it's a joke. But this is a job that you do need. It's not easy to bring in new workers, and also there was a certain amount of, as I've said, not one's romanticized. There was low turnover, so there was a cohesiveness about the workforce at Yentian. Thirdly, as well, that Yentian emerged out, as I said earlier, of a wave of dot-workers disputes around not just in Guangdong in mainland China, but very interestingly in Hong Kong as well. In 2012, there was an unprecedented, not unprecedented, if we go back to 1926, I think, but there was a very powerful and very important strike by Hong Kong dot-workers across four or five outsourced firms that supplied workers to the dots, crane operators, gantry and crane, tower crane operators. It was a fascinating strike. It achieved massive public support, which is unusual in Hong Kong. It went on for three weeks. There were occupations and tent cities by the ports itself. There were millions of Hong Kong dollars raised in support of this strike. It won, fuck all, more or less. I know that sounds very, very, very negative, but out of that strike, it's very interesting, out of that strike where there is freedom association in Hong Kong, mainly because for the same reasons that British introduced it elsewhere, the Hong Kong dot-workers union did build, it did attract members up to 700, I think, after the strike. That's now down to crisis levels. In fact, I'm interviewing some of the activists in that union next week in Hong Kong. And no collective bargaining agreement was reached and it was pretty much a very shoddy compromise, shall we say, if not an outright defeat. Very different outcome to what was happening in China where annual collective bargaining was institutionalized, or in mainland China where it was institutionalized. So I think that one of the reasons that the Chinese authorities didn't use coercion is maybe, is because it was part of a wave of strikes and also coercion, and this goes into political science really, but coercion in an authoritarian state can have very different implications to say a semi-authoritarian state such as Hong Kong or a post-colonial state, I think anyway. On the issue of what does it take to transform a party-led organization like the All China Federation of Trade Unions? Well, the stock Marxist reply is, of course, the action of the working class, the liberation of the working class, the absolute working class, great, we all agree with that, I assume. And indeed, it is pressure, I would argue, and have argued many times, that it is that class struggle from below that will generate, I don't say, a transformation of that party-led trade union, but will force it to act, a bit like trade union bureaucrats in this country in many ways. They tend to be far happier behind a desk, but if we organize and force them to action, they will take action. But in China as well, because of the state's narrative around stability and around legitimacy, the more unrest that takes place, the more class struggle there is, then the union will come under pressure from its masters in the party from above. We'll say, why aren't you doing more to curb this unrest? Why are we faced with these ongoing strikes? So the union is trapped in the middle, and it's facing from pressure from below and pressure from above. And even on the Xi Jinping, as a deserved reputation for being a very different shade of authoritarian ruler than the previous regime that came before him, nevertheless has demanded that the ACFU come up with blueprints for reform. So I think that what does it take to transform a party-led union? At the end of the day, it will be the emergence, I think, of independent or non-party affiliated trade unions out of that working class struggle. I think that is the key issue, which bourgeois institutions like the ILO like to phrase around the notion of freedom, very important notion of freedom of association. But at the same time, I think even then, if we look at the experience of Russia and if we look at the appearance of other Indonesia, Poland, the emergence of independent trade unions or alternative trade unions in the Russian context does not mean that those old traditional party-led Stalinists, if you like, trade union models go away. They don't go away at all. So I think that the reform of these party beasts is important, is important to their overall class struggle. Definitely. That's definitely actually applicable to Egypt, this, for example. Yeah, Egypt's another great example here. Great, thank you. Any questions? Yes, please. Back to, with respect to, you know, the one belt, one road, it had Gabada port in Pakistan and a similar port in Djibouti. So you mentioned the Hong Kong workers strike. I mean, and from Katie's point, is there a possibility of trade unions within the region, for example? I mean, we went to a very interesting talk on China's political economy a couple of days ago. And this question is about imperialism and what we understand by China's expansion. The first question, just so that we can record this, was for Katie to talk about the exclusiveness of dockers and the workers' role in that. Sir, Katie, please. I'm not sure I entirely understood the question. Could you say a bit more what you mean by exclusiveness? Yeah, so I think that dock workers, in some ways, their position is unique, but I don't take a sort of really old school Marxist view about the sort of centrality of workers at the commanding heights of the economy and heavy industry. That's not my, that wouldn't be the way that I would think about strategic workers. I think certainly workers in these key nodal points and networks of circulation, like dock workers, like other transportation workers, those are strategic workers. Workers in heavy manufacturing, yes, they're strategic workers, but I think, bringing in, for example, Marxist feminist theory and social reproduction theory, education workers are strategic workers, healthcare workers are strategic workers. So I do think that one of the problems that I find again and again with studying this sector is there's a real tendency, particularly when Marxist left, to really romanticize dock workers, minors, factory workers, and I think that can be quite problematic. I think that really thinking about what it means to develop effective working class strategy today, will necessitate kind of going beyond that. And in terms of the kind of second part of the question that you asked about the labor conditions of dock workers, they really vary tremendously, both within ports and across ports. So it's interesting that in Tim's case, the kind of the group of workers that sort of started off organizing were the crane operators who are, I think it's fair to say always, in ports among the most powerful group of workers. They're highly skilled, they have scarce skills, so becoming a crane operator involves a lot of training and you're operating incredibly valuable equipment from the perspective of capital. And that runs in a spectrum all the way to visualize day laborers who can be totally unskilled in the sense of having particular training to do the job. And certainly when you look at the kind of global north, global south divide, the proportion of workers in that second category in the global south is much higher. So when I visited the Porta Buena Ventura in Columbia, workers literally were sort of sleeping in the streets outside of the terminals, hoping to get day work, working completely without any kind of protective equipment, wearing flip flops, working at height. And if you go to visit the Port of Felix Doe here in the UK, I mean the kind of picture you'd get couldn't be more different. So basically huge range, yeah. Cheers, thanks for that, I have to say, very complicated question really. I think, so I'm gonna divide it into two and then make a brief salad attempt to bring it together which I don't know if I'll fail at. So you mentioned One Belt One Road and the internationalization of Chinese capital and the Chinese economy. Yes, there's all we know is happening. And there is an interesting and very lively debate around that over whether the expansion of Chinese capital beyond its borders into other developing countries in the South countries is a rerun of Western imperialism, or Western-style imperialism. Well, of course, that's nonsense. Well, I would argue that it's absolute nonsense that it is not the case in China. And even those commentators who've tried to argue that China is exporting its own very authoritarian notion of labor relations, say to copper mines in Zambia, to soil plantations in Brazil, the good research on the ground has found that is not the case. Doesn't mean that there's no exploitation. Doesn't mean that the Chinese capital is somehow less, more benign, of course not. Chinese capital behaves as it does not because it's Chinese, but because it's capital. And I've had some very tense, some very interesting arguments with African trade unionists over that issue where there is a very racialized notion in certainly in the Gambia, in Ghana and Zambia and Ethiopia around Chinese capital there, which I think is problematic. Nevertheless, I think it's a really important and interesting debate, particularly as One Belt, One Road expands. For those of you who don't know, it's a top-down state expansion to develop infrastructure and trade deals along which Chinese capital can spread and find new markets. Out of that internationalization, are there opportunities for our side, for workers to link up, to make those connections? And you raised what was a hot topic certainly in labor and trade union circles in Hong Kong in 2012 and in 2013, the Hong Kong Dot Worker Strike and the Yentian Strike, which was only about 40, 50 miles apart. Anyway, albeit separated by a year's time. No, is a simple answer. I think that the possibilities of that are contained not just by our constrained, rather they're not impossible, but they're not just constrained by the national context that Katie's emphasized is so important. But I think they're also constrained by the historically very weak position that global union federation, GUFs in the international trade union movement finds itself in. Which isn't to say there aren't nodes of strength, nodes of expressions of structural and associational power, there aren't great victories. But nevertheless, if we look at the bigger picture, despite Beverly Silver's optimism, we're in a pretty dim place at the moment. So it's a constraint, so that kind of linking up or that kind of solidarity going beyond borders is constrained not just by expression for authoritarianism, but also by the weakness, by 35, 40 years of neoliberal attacks on the very notion of associational working class power. So I think not that I can't change if we look at, and to put some empirical meat on that kind of abstract notion there, is that if you look at, say, framework agreements, I don't know, Ikea is very keen on framework agreements. And these are collective bargaining associations that go beyond borders at a regional level and even an international level. China, the Chinese state will have no truck with them. The ACF, to you, will have no truck with them. So it's quite happy to attend meetings with the IUF, the International Union Food, the Chemical Workers Union, DOC Workers' Unions. It will quite happy to attend conferences like that. But the notion of forming any kind of linking up or any kind of solidarity network is not on the cards beyond, you know, having a chat and a pint together, really. So yeah, I'm quite pessimistic about that. Can I just shoot, oh, no, go ahead. I was just gonna ask if I could add to that, because my project is actually primarily about labor internationalism among DOC workers. And I don't look at China directly, but it comes up a lot. So the fact that Chinese workers aren't part of these international networks is a problem for workers elsewhere. It's not just a problem for Chinese workers. And I think that's really important to emphasize. One of the cases in my dissertation looks at the privatization of the Port of Piraeus in Greece, which the Troika essentially forced the Greek state to privatize as part of its loan repayment package. And the port was the top bidder, the only really serious bidder was Costco, the Chinese state-owned shipping company. And in fact, China is, well, part of the kind of processes that you gesture toward the investments in infrastructure in many places around the world, but China has seen the Port of Piraeus as a key entry point to the European market. It's the first major European port in the Eastern Mediterranean just out of the canal. And they're investing not just in the port, but in the kind of transportation infrastructure around the port to connect it to central European markets. And so Greek dock workers are heavily involved in these international networks, but what would have been really effective for them during their dispute is if they had been able to receive solidarity from Chinese dock workers, right? And that's obviously not forthcoming. And so that's, it's a sort of major hole in global unionism in general because of the outsized role of China in the global economy. So, yeah, thank you. I can't resist building on that a little bit because this union about this argument about trade union reform within China and the notion of do we organize, do Chinese workers organize underground, say all those risks? Or do they try and, you know, there's a world of difference between, you know, an edict from Xi Jinping saying to the ACFG, you've got to reform, you've got to do better, do a better job at heading off industrial unrest. And a bunch of workers banging on the door of the enterprise-level trade union chair and saying we want to pay rise and we want you to act more effectively. I think there's a world of difference between those two expressions of power. So, but this reform, this argument, this debate over trade union reform China has its ripples to use cases where they get outside the movement in the international labor movement. And there is that gap. There is that massive gap where Chinese workers are constrained from the effect of providing, of taking part in solidarity actions, both at an institutional level and at a local repressive level as well. And this becomes even more interesting when you should, apparently, independent trade unions engage with the ACFGU on its international work. It is very active on the international front. It has a position on the ILO Workers Committee. Many unions object to that. Many of their union support it. It's a very important and very interesting argument. As Katie will know more about one side of this than I do, but as dock workers have new dock worker unions, international unions have emerged in recent years, challenging the International Transport Federation's monopoly over international organizing on the docks. At the same time, recently I've been asked to give this presentation to the International Transport Federation around. And also at the same time, just told me that they have just started a exchange program with who? The All-China Federation of Trade Unions, which they hadn't hitherto done to. So this debate becomes very, very in... I thought you'd write that down. It's being filmed. So it becomes very, very important. It's not just about Yentian. It's not just, as you said, it's not just about Chinese workers. There is a gap there. And I would argue the way to fill it is, it doesn't really matter if it's the ACF2U, well, it does matter, but it's not just about forcing the ACF2U into taking a more progressive stance. It's about the exercise and of class power at the point of production. And that's a cliche, but I think it always comes back to that. Great, thank you. Rafiq, and then you and then Adam. I really appreciate you taking on the magic bullets problem. I think you're absolutely right about that. Although I think it comes from a good place of a bit of a desperation about wanting something so we do work and seeing this, which I think it is. When you were speaking about the line of the force that you reminded me of, I don't believe this kind of destruction was the same, and it also works as a ranger, and how it wasn't just described with everything around it, the powers that we send and the family and all the organizations. I was wondering if you had to give an example of one that works and how it's constructed. My second question is a bit, it was constructed when I started and I'm going to have to push on this in theory. Because when I first started doing this work, I completely had this conception of core periphery, but when you look at it, it's much more complicated nowadays how these relations are working. Chinese and of course it's there in the end. When you speak to them and when you introduce them, you see that all the old force there is there, they're going to get over. So it's not just the South side of it, but also South side of it. So it's... But also debt, for example, the way that the Chinese, this is a question I really want to know, is the Chinese lend money and then in the payback for the debt, they've taken, for example, a 99 year concession on a port in Colombo, or established military bases alongside, which is an old school imperialist thing, is to take their military bases and commercial bases next to each other. So how is that different? Yeah, collect all the questions and then the gentleman in the back. Association of power, yeah. I'm listening then, but yes, but they're both activists. Because it's a good capitalist state that can adapt to anything. Wow, I mean, that's one way. Adam? Yeah, obviously it's important having kind of subjective presence of militants. I think that partly explains this variation. Would you like to go first? Yeah, so thank you for the questions and actually all three of your questions, I'm going to kind of roll into one because I think they actually, they fit together really nicely. I figured. So I guess I'll just, I'll actually kind of work backward from Adam's question on associational power and the role of political militants in these processes and then link that with the question of so how do you build associational power and how does that link up with this question of the flank protecting the fortress? So in both of the successful cases in my dissertation, which I alluded to several times in Chile and Portugal, political militants from small far left political parties were played an incredibly important role. So I'll explain the Chilean case because it was a national strike and it has a lot of kind of really interesting facets. So Chile, obviously a country in the global south in terms of the kind of contrast to what Tim's talked about with China, with Colombia, but many other countries in the global south, it's very much on the kind of end of the spectrum where there's a lot more freedom of association, much lower levels of state violence and other forms of violence in the society. So a relatively more propitious playing field for labor to organize in. Chile had a long dictatorship under Augusto Pinochet for 17 years, but prior to that was really for most of the 20th century had the strongest sort of organized left within Latin America. And it was a very heterogeneous left. There was the sort of Moscow-aligned Communist Party. There was a non-aligned Socialist Party. There was always a strong anarchist presence, armed groups. So a very broad left with lots of different tendencies. And despite this dictatorship, this left-wing tradition still has very strong roots in the society. And although the sort of legacy or the transmission of this historical memory was broken to some degree by disappearances of trading and activists and political militants during the dictatorship, the kind of roots stretching back to the 60s and 70s in particular are still very much in evidence. And so many of the dock worker union activists and leaders in Chile either themselves were involved in these militant groups in the 60s and 70s, in underground organizations fighting the dictatorship in the 70s and 80s, or for those who are like my age and younger come from families like that. And overall, kind of nationally, many of the activists within this union are members of a small far-left group called the Esquier de la Libertadía, which is a sort of left communist or anarchist grouping depending on who you ask and what day you ask. But this grouping provided a very effective national network for the dock workers. And they didn't have a parliamentary presence, but they have very strong roots in the student movement, the university student movement in particular. University students played key roles in the national strikes of the dock workers, provided them with linkages to the teachers unions, to miners unions, to forestry workers, and others. And this very poorly resourced union had essentially a full-time historian, a full-time economist, a full-time labor lawyer working for them either for free or for almost nothing. They had university students leaving school for a while to go work on the docks to participate in the strikes. And the union leadership themselves were incredibly savvy coming out of these long-term histories of struggle. So I think that that is a super important dimension. It's really, I think it's unfortunate that it's so often left out of these stories. There's an excellent article that was just out in the latest issue of work employment in society by a guy named Omar Monkey, who actually is a student of Eli Freedman's at Cornell, who's just written a piece on miners unions in Chile and makes it exactly the same point. So not just bringing the political back in in the sense of analyzing the role of the state, but bringing the political back in in terms of its role in organizing worker struggles as well. And this is particularly important in places where workers are so constrained in what they're able to do. This question that you posed of how do you build associational power in the first place? Well, in many places, just trying to do that at the point of production, it's not gonna be effective. You're just gonna be crushed. You have to build these broader layers of support outside to provide something of a buffer. So, yeah, yeah. But and again, in the Portuguese case, very similar. And if you look at, historically, some of the most powerful dock worker unions like the ILW on the West Coast in the United States, the San Francisco general strike in 1934, the Communist Party played an incredibly important mediating role, bringing in students and unemployed workers, the London dock strike, which is the first general strike in the UK at the end of the 19th century. So, I think that this is a pattern that crops up again and again. And I completely agree with you that it's under developed theoretically and that, and Rafiq, to speak to your point, that part of what this broader political organizing does is to bring in large groups of people who are considered non-strategic in terms of their economic role. But actually, without whom these strategic workers would simply be crushed. They need this sort of buffer of civil society to be able to kind of break out of powerlessness. So, yeah, thank you. Wow, yeah, okay. So, I'm processing what you were saying there, but Katie, but yeah. So, do we need a more complex notion of theorizing around imperialism? Yes, am I gonna do it? No. But let me contextualize that answer a little bit as well. It's because I guess my reaction earlier on around to some of the stuff that we are fed about the nature of Chinese investments in Chinese aid or Chinese or Belt and Road in other Southern countries is, you know, on the one hand, we will see in the financial time, or the times rather that it's actually a rerun of the scramble for Africa. On the other hand, we'll see it as a form of profound and extreme exploitation that the Chinese are exporting. And again, these arguments are then reproduced and repeated among trade unionists, among labor activists in those notions. So, I guess I'm overreacting to that really. Simply on the grounds that I think that if we look, and it's not just a reaction that I think is informed by, if we look at the difference between the Chinese investment and Chinese aid in let's take Angola and Ethiopia, does not reproduce the conditionalities that neoliberal aid has generated and structural adjustment policies have generated in all the same type of outcomes that Western investment have, which isn't to say it's not exploitative, which isn't to say that it's not another form of imperialism or requires a new form of imperialism. I was overreacting then, but it is not the same thing. As we speak right now, there are three major, there are processes in three, especially economic zone in Vietnam, city in Vietnam, and two major Chinese zone factories in Vietnam against a new law that is in Vietnam that is allowing special economic zones to be bought up for 99 years in Vietnam and in which Chinese investors are showing great interest in and Vietnamese are saying this is the takeover of Vietnam by China. So, it's really important how to theorize it. I think, you know, help. On the notion of, does China, are we being too optimistic about China? I think it's a really interesting question. Having spent six years working for a labor NGO based in Hong Kong, where my main job was to plow through mainland reports of labor unrest, industrial accidents, labor protests in mainland China, and it was profoundly depressing during, from 1996 to 2002, I did that. And it was very, because it was a horror story, it was like watching a horror story evolve from a safe distance. It didn't affect me, not directly. But, you know, for six years, and you look at the Gong Le Bao, you look at workers daily, you look at the Guangzhou Evening Post, you look at Nanfang Daily or the Southern Daily. Where there was, and is a tradition of investigative reporting in mainland China, that there's real acknowledging, they were, you know, we had great reporters reporting on this stuff and trying to bring it to like, and it did produce changes. But it was, you know, for, you know, there was no cause for optimism. You know, at one point in 2002, the best place to go in the world to get a limb sewn back on was Shenzhen in South China. Why? Because every 13 minutes in Shenzhen, in 1999, somebody lost a limb. Every 13 minutes, there would be a leg or a finger, an arm or something. And so there was a cottage here, or a major industry, they grew up around that, around getting those limbs sewn back up. So this was using a horror story was, is not, so I'm painting this very bleak picture to show, to demonstrate that when the tide began to turn, when we had the labor contract law in 2008, it came out labor arrest. And we had a shift away from blanket repression. When we had the state beginning to discipline capital, it was a great time. It was, you know, and, you know, it was, you know, our side were winning. We're not winning, but they were making a difference. And it was a very exciting time to be involved in that, particularly in contrast to what came before it, what proceeded, and the horror show that proceeded, a predatory capital there. So I'll, you know, and I think some of us, probably me included, did go a bit too far, particularly when we see recent events and the clamp down that we've seen on feminists, on human rights lawyers, on labor activists, on civil society in general, which kind of takes me to Adam's point about associational power. And I couldn't agree with you more, Adam, if we get fixated on associational power at the point of production, and ignore the fact that political agency, political organizations, civil society plays a role, then I think this is, you know, then we are a lot. Then we're not really gonna go anywhere, really, in terms of generating a labor or a social movement. And indeed, the working class militancy and the nascent labor movement that evolved in Guangdong, say, you know, up until quite recently, was very much informed, was very much a part of the operation. So particularly Hong Kong registered labor NGOs operative in Guangdong, who pushed collective bargaining, who pushed, began to get directly involved in strike organizing, began to take significant risks. So yeah, that is important. Nevertheless, I think on the other side is, you know, those dot workers in the NTN, they weren't assisted by civil society. None of them ever went to a labor NGO. One of them, they did go to a labor lawyer who was famous for his labor law work, but civil society wasn't particularly directly involved in that, so it was an expression of associational power that was duly tamed. Now, whether it would have been sustained by a wider involvement of civil society, I think in the context of China, no, because of that authoritarian nation, but in the wider context of labor organizing, I would say yes. So, and that's a kind of a bit of a fudge, but I think we do have to recognize that power at the point of production, structural power can produce material gains that don't necessarily involve the front workers. There's a point of, yeah, yeah, good. Thank you so much, both of you. This has been particularly useful for me because I'm writing the chapter right now which starts with a strike in Aden in 1948, the one that Thanos talked about. And so it's, this is incredibly useful and very good for me to actually think with. Thank you so much.