App-based transport has grown rapidly in Indonesia, and now provides work for over a million private commercial drivers. A large proportion of online drivers have joined self-organised community organisations that operate on a mutual aid logic, characterised by horizontal networks and strong social commitment. This mutual aid-based approach, which builds on a long tradition of associational behaviour in Indonesia’s large informal sector, has facilitated high levels of membership and member participation in small, geographically based driver communities. It is less well suited, however, to staging large-scale protests, negotiating with the app-based transport companies or engaging with government. Drawing on extensive qualitative fieldwork, this article argues that mutual aid-based organising has indeed proved an effective way to reach out to this group of non-traditional workers, but is not in itself enough to effect structural change. Ultimately, everyday forms of collectivism must be complemented by large-scale mobilisation, legal challenges and industrial action if drivers are to challenge the power of their pseudo-employers. To date, however, successful integration between driver communities and larger scale organisations has proven difficult in the face of external hostility and internal divisions.

In the 1980s and 1990s, Suharto's New Order government (1967-98) had adopted a strongly interventionist approach towards the regulation of overseas labour migration through official channels. After the Suharto regime's demise in 1998, the Department of Manpower (now the Department for Manpower and Transmigration) continued to pass regulations determining the process through which potential labour migrants would be recruited, trained, and managed, and to issue licences to private sector companies (or PJTKI,

Privatisation is contentious but in Myanmar it has not so much been its merits or drawbacks that have attracted attention as questions around implementation. In Myanmar, the implementation of privatisation has broad significance for the political economy. A first phase of privatisation was focused on small to medium-sized enterprises and did not have a significant economic impact. A second phase, commenced in 2008, consolidated the interests of a business elite with personal connections to the military regime. The impact of this second phase of privatisation was such that some elements of this elite strengthened to the extent that they no longer relied entirely on patronage, creating opportunities for diversification in their strategies of wealth creation and defence. For this reason, it is argued, the wealthiest strata of Myanmar's business elite is now best conceived as not simply consisting of cronies but rather as a nascent form of oligarchy. In theoretical terms, this suggests that greater attention to the qualitative difference between cronyism and oligarchy is warranted, as is close study of processes-like privatisation and political reform-that enable or require a wider range of strategies of wealth defence.

There has been little engagement between the organized labour and labour migration literatures. Studies of organized labour movements in Asia have traditionally focused on trade unions that organize workers in factories, in offices, and on the plantations of the countries in which those unions are based, or on international cooperation between such unions. Studies of migrant labour, on the other hand, have tended to emphasize the demographic features of labour migration flows, or the experiences of migrant workers in either their country of origin or their host society. Yet, with the help of local and international non-governmental organizations (NGOs), migrant workers from countries such as the Philippines and Indonesia are beginning to organize both at home and abroad. This article examines the emergence and operation of both migrant labour NGOs and migrant labour associations from a labour movement perspective. It focuses on the schism between the literature on labour migration, in which descriptions of migrant labour NGOs most often appear, and the literature on organized labour, which has generally ignored both the increasing significance of temporary overseas labour migration and the role of non-union bodies in the organization of labour. Examples from Indonesia and Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of China (herinafter Hong Kong) are used to argue that the experiences of migrant labour NGOs and migrant labour associations should be taken more seriously by trade unions and by the scholars who study them.

In recent decades, trade unions have been challenged to attempt to develop new forms of representation, action and institutional engagement in response to the increasingly transnational character of production and service delivery. This has necessarily required a shift in focus beyond national boundaries, and thus beyond the traditional scale of industrial relations systems. Among the most important actors in these attempts to globalize industrial relations have been the global union federations (GUFs), which represent national sectoral federations in key industries. Over several decades, the GUFs have sought to engage with multinational corporations through various strategies including policy campaigns and the negotiation of Global Framework Agreements and have provided support for workers and their unions in different national settings, including emerging labour movements in the Global South. This article reviews the growing literature on transnational industrial relations, focusing on the historical development of the GUFs, their core repertoires of action and their impact on industrial relations practice both internationally and within national boundaries. In doing so, it identifies and assesses not only the opportunities for GUF interventions in international industrial relations, but also the many obstacles -including resource constraints and dependence on unions at other scales -that limit their reach and ability to achieve these strategic goals.