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While the term "class" has largely vanished from China's public discourse, class discourse has endured within the country's labor struggles over the last four decades. Nevertheless, class discourse has been articulated in distinct ways across three instances of labor activism: state workers' opposition to industrial restructuring, worker-initiated collective bargaining, and Marxist-inspired agitation, manifesting as nostalgia, collective rights, and labor emancipation, respectively. This article delves into the origins of these distinct articulations of class discourse by delineating three modes of their emergence: endogenous, exogenous, and symbiotic. It further elucidates how these modes materialize through the interplay of workers' experiences and the roles undertaken by labor activists from both shopfloors and civil society. The article's objective extends to evaluating the degree to which these three discursive expressions encapsulate class consciousness, while also delving into their underlying ideological implications. (Crit Asian Stud/GIGA)

AbstractPaid family leave (PFL) aims to help working parents balance their careers and family responsibilities while also improving the well‐being of infants. Using linked U.S. birth and infant death data with a difference‐in‐differences framework, I find that a 6‐week PFL in California reduced the post‐neonatal mortality rate by 0.135‐ that is, it saved approximately 339 infant lives. There were fewer deaths from health‐related causes and larger effects for infants with married mothers and for infant boys. Additional checks and placebo examinations indicate that the observed effect is not due to contemporaneous shocks but rather is causal.

In 1968, at the height of the Chinese Cultural Revolution (CR hereafter), Mao Zedong mobilized industrial workers to form Workers' Mao Zedong Thought Propaganda Teams (WPT hereafter) and to "occupy" the superstructure. This move empowered the working class in an unprecedented way. Did Mao's move bring about a new model of worker power under communism that was distinct from Lenin's vanguardist model and Rosa Luxemburg's model based on her perception of workers' spontaneity and creativity? In contrast to the workers' spontaneous rebel groups during the first two years of the CR, the WPTs were a quasi-institutionalized form of worker power created by the political elite to serve the CR agenda. It was also the Mao leadership's attempt to realize the leading role of the working class by absorbing workers into the structure of political authority, an attempt which reflected the Party's declared ideological principle. While the WPTs provided workers with opportunities to participate in politics, they were a misplacement of worker power in both social and organizational senses. The article examines the roots of this power misplacement and explores the dilemmas it brought for the Party as well as the working class itself, and why. (China Q/GIGA)

'Worker Representation' (WR) originated as a spontaneous practice backed by workers' collective actions in response to the failed role of trade unions. It allows workers to bargain with employers in a somewhat organized manner, thus facilitating the possibility of voluntary negotiations for dispute settlement. WR activists have sought to regularize the practice and establish its legitimacy in pragmatic, normative and cognitive terms. Yet WR poses a dilemma to the government, as it brings two divergent outcomes: it provides solutions to labor disputes and it inspires labor activism. As a result of its dual institutional logic of dispute resolution and stability maintenance, the government's response to WR has oscillated between accommodation and suppression. (J Contemp China/GIGA)