Quartz, September 24, 2012, Monday

Quartz

September 24, 2012, Monday

Quartz (full article)

Why China's labor unrest isn't like the US in the 1930s. (At least, not yet.)

In a recent article on China’s growing labor unrest, Eli Friedman of Cornell University in New York compared striking Chinese workers with their counterparts in the United States in the 1930s. Both forced their governments to pass new labor laws, and companies in China have raised wages and improved conditions. But the comparison, he suggests, ends there: in China, the path that took American workers from labor demands to broader political involvement is blocked.