Review of Akira Suzuki's (ed) 'Cross-National Comparisons of Social Movement Unionism: Diversities of Labour Movement Revitalisation in Japan, Korea and the United States'

This edited volume, the 18 th in a series edited by Craig Phelan, is a welcome addition to the body of scholarship that has attempted to apply the notion or concept of 'social movement unionism' (SMU) to different national contexts.The term first emerged in the 1980s and applied to the South African and Brazilian contexts, and was later applied to the revitalisation of unions in the United States, which gave it a particular emphasis.This volume interrogates the diversities of labour movement revitalisation across three national contexts, namely Japan, Korea and the United States, as well as Australia in one chapter.The 18 chapters capture a wide range of trade union experiences apart from the familiar industrial unionism of Europe, North America, Brazil and South Africa.These include the enterprise unions in Japan, which have a tradition of cooperation with employers, and at the margins small 'community' unions (also called local or regional unions) which individuals can join and women's labour NGOs, which have an SMU orientation.In South Korea enterprise unions also predominated, but were more militant and less embedded.A move towards industrial unionism over the past decade and a half, as a revitalisation strategy to organise 'nonregular' or informalised workers, did not succeed, given the opposition, as in Japan, of regular workers to informalised labour.Like Japan, what the authors term 'social movement unionism' in South Korea remain at the margins of the union movement, as regional general unions and women's unions, all focussed on non-regular workers.However, unlike Japan, two enterprise unions stand out as 'SMUoriented unions', namely the New Core Enterprise Union and the E-Land General Union, in that they organised and engaged in struggles on behalf of non-regular workers, and forged alliances with social movement organisations -a legacy of the pre-1987 mobilisations against the authoritarian state.In this sense some of the South Korean experience is similar to that of the USA, where social movement unionism emerged within established unions such as SEIU, CWA, HERE and UNITE -but remain a small minority within the broader union movement, which unlike their Japan and Korean counterparts were of the business union type.The book draws on Gay Seidman's definition of SMUs based on the study of unions operating within authoritarian states in 'late industrialising countries', namely Brazil and South Africa, and Kim Voss's definition based on studies of unions in industrialised countries, namely the USA.The book sets out the common properties of SMU in both contexts as follows: the setting of broad goals beyond business or economic unionism; forging coalitions with social

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