malaysia and its national controls

[Michael Hoover]

> much has been said about malaysian capital controls.  nothing about what
> workers in malaysia confront. 
> 2. national workers can be in unions, except for those defined as 'pioneer
> enterprises', eg, electronics, where unions have been banned since the
> 1970s, and this sector accounts for around 40% of malaysian exports, and
> where most workers are women. 
> Angela

Interested listers might check out Gerald Sussman's 'Electronics, 
Communications, and Labor: The Malaysia Connection' in _Global
Productions: Labor in the Making of the "Information Society_,"
Sussman and John Lent, eds., Hampton Press, 1998.

Sussman traces Malaysian electronics production (world's third largest 
producer and largest exporter of semiconductors), a foreign, mostly US 
and Japanese enclave economy, to creation of free trade zone in 1971.  
He notes that country has received little technology transfer or skills 
training from this sector.  Amd he shows the role played by Malaysian 
political state in developing and maintaining local class alliances with 
transnational capital while repressing labor and reorganizing it along 
gender and ethnic lines to intended to protect capitalist interests 
(gov't has permitted some in-house 'unions' although it does not 
officially recognize them).   Michael Hoover