In The Race to the Bottom Returns, Diamond explores the impact of China’s integration into the world economy on labor relations in China and in the developed world. He rejects the simplistic accounts of the "race to the bottom" and says the real issue is "the ability of sophisticated multinational corporate capital to combine high-productivity technology with labor that is paid substantially less than that found in the developed world." Diamond goes on to explore the ramifications of this new form of capital-labor combination. He shows how this new form of capitalism is a vast departure from the industrial relations era in which productivity and wages were linked by a variety of democratic political and economic institutions. The new era, he argues, rests upon authoritarian regimes such as the one that exists in China today. The article describes the authoritarian nature of the Chinese production system and its state-sponsored trade unions. He demonstrates that the economic success of China in recent decades depended upon state-sponsored repression of genuine trade unionism. He ends by criticizing those in the global labor movement who seek constructive engagement with existing Chinese institutions, arguing that it is more important to bring about democratic reform.
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