Flexible production - the new capitalist production regime that produces an increasingly fragmented labour force, with great emphasis on temporary, part-time, and outsourcing workers - has become dominant globally since the mid-1970s. Its spread has depended upon state action such that privatization and outsourcing are stressed while organized labour is constrained. This study examines the political-economic story of how flexible production has changed industrial relations and class politics at the workplace level in Hong Kong. Flexible production has engendered structural and ideological difliculties for labour organizers to mobilize workers at the workplace. This study also empirically compares different labour mobilization processes at three Hong Kong university campuses (CUHK, HKUST...[ Read more ]

Flexible production - the new capitalist production regime that produces an increasingly fragmented labour force, with great emphasis on temporary, part-time, and outsourcing workers - has become dominant globally since the mid-1970s. Its spread has depended upon state action such that privatization and outsourcing are stressed while organized labour is constrained. This study examines the political-economic story of how flexible production has changed industrial relations and class politics at the workplace level in Hong Kong. Flexible production has engendered structural and ideological difliculties for labour organizers to mobilize workers at the workplace. This study also empirically compares different labour mobilization processes at three Hong Kong university campuses (CUHK, HKUST and HKBU) between February 2003 and August 2004. The comparison of three labour mobilizations at these university campuses as flexible production workplaces suggests that: labour organizer, in face of various difficulties resulted from flexible production, has to go beyond workplace and go into community in order to foster new pattern of labour insurgency - "flexible labour movement" - that publicity, coalition building and subjective mobilization are emphasized.