Reform, globalization and crisis: reconstructing Thai labor

This article seeks to assess the extent to which post-crisis economic and social policy has been durably influenced by the political turmoil and conflict rooted in the deep Thai recession of the late 1990s. More specifically the article explores, to what extent were workers and trade unions able to insert a labor agenda in those government and corporate policies which most affect workers.

It is argued that:

• a major initial outcome of the crisis was to accelerate economic structural reforms that had been underway since the 1980s, as well as to exacerbate and thus politicize the already apparent negative social outcomes of those reforms for workers
• while this politicization has slowed some of the more socially destructive reform programs, its longer term impact has been blunted by a number of economic structural and political institutional changes associated with and accelerated by those same reforms as well as by the crisis itself
• given that economic globalization has comprised both an implicit strategic goal and a structural outcome of market-augmenting policy reforms, the politics of crisis management have become in part a politics of globalization as well, as symbolically suggested by the growing presence of anti-IMF slogans and posters as the crisis deepened
• the crisis precipitated renewed and subsequently contested elite efforts to adapt national and transnational labor systems to the pressures of crisis but within the guiding principles of a liberal reform vision
• social programs, driven by the immediate (or threatened) pressures of public protest, have largely been addressed through short-term alleviative measures, while development issues, prompted by the more substantial institutional representations of domestic capital, have been addressed through longer-term initiatives relating to SME and agro-industry development, in both cases fully consistent with dominant elite strategies of open, world-market-oriented development
• the political impacts of the crisis (state reconfiguration and extroversion, marginalisation of democratic politics, and an undercutting of the institutional and organizational strength of popular sector organizations) have in turn strengthened the dominant reform vision by undercutting popular sector policy representation even under democratic reforms and despite the growing mobilization and consolidation of labor and popular sector groups. [author]