SOAS Research Online

Abstract

This edited volume examines how ‘work’ is being recomposed by mobile capital in Asia. In so doing, it traces the interaction between multinational companies and local labour, drawing on the examples of the evolution of emerging multinational giant Samsung Electronics, the world’s most profitable automaker Toyota, and the survival strategies of the Taiwanese national brand Tatung. We show how the world of labour and living has changed for Asian workers as a result of these TNCs’ operation and expansion in Japan, Korea, Indonesia, Philippines, Thailand, Malaysia, India, and China. Cases studies demonstrate how those advanced individual capitals from East Asia absorbed all possible social resources, including human labour, and turned them into corporate energy on which a miraculous capital accumulation has been made possible. Studies also present particular labour problems in Asian developing countries as moments of a bigger global transformation of social relations, in which labour becomes informal and purely capitalist in the face of growing mobility of capital in and beyond Asia.