Preface

Dae-oup Chang

Since 2002, the Asian Transnational Corporations Monitoring Network has been working to build up a regional network through which labour organisations in different Asian countries can pursue concrete solidarity actions to improve working conditions in ATNCs....

Researchers in the ATNC Monitoring Network have been trying to move research focus from the general picture of ATNCs to particular focuses, so that we can have a comprehensive understanding of ATNCs, including the scale, forms of investment, labour rights, and methods to regulate them.

This book includes most achievements that ATNC network researchers have made over the last two years. In Part 1, Dae-oup Chang, Kaneko Fumio, Yoon Hyowon, Tsai Chih-Chieh, and Monina Wong theorise about ATNCs providing a general picture of capital movement from Asia and thereby illuminating the importance of monitoring ATNCs....

In Part Two, Dae-oup Chang, Monina Wong, Krishna Shekhar Lal Das, and Dennis Arnold look at the impact of Asian investment on labour in different countries.. the authors try to grasp not only the direct impact of capital movement on workers in the South, but also the nature of economic development that the globalisation of capital presupposes.

Part 3 shows how workers and the labour movement cope with the increasing movement of ATNCs through various concrete case studies.

The major purpose of this book is to review our strategy for controlling capital and to identify conditions under which the labour movement can develop an effective challenge to the destructive aspects of ATNCs. It also explores the underlying problem of foreign direct investment (FDI) in Asia. FDI is problematic not only because it undermines the autonomy of national development in developing countries but also, more fundamentally, because FDI is a particular form through which anti-labour development goes to the extreme. Therefore a strategy of FDI control must involve workers and be geared towards challenging anti-labour economic development in both South and North.