"Economics is the Deciding Factor": Labour Politics in Thaksin's Thailand
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The landslide electoral victory of Thaksin Shinawatra and his Thai Rak Thai (TRT) Party in February 2005 means that the most powerful elements of big domestic capital will continue to manage the affairs of the Thai state. In this article, we focus on the relationship between this capitalist state and the politics of labour, with considerable emphasis on the organized elements of the working class. We argue that the TRT, during its first term in office, pursued a clutch of labour-specific policies, with two broad objectives: first, to facilitate the creation of a more flexible and better-skilled labour force, seen as necessary for the development of a restructured, globally competitive capitalism; and second, through the construction of a new social contract, to deal with some of the inevitable tensions that have been generated by structural change and wage labour's deepening exposure to the vagaries of local, regional and global market forces. The TRT is also embarking on further reforms, the nature of which indicate that, for business and the state, labour's interests will be further subordinated to the shifting demands of capital accumulation. Now that domestic capital has mostly recovered from the economic crisis, the populism of the TRT's first electoral campaign, which appeared to reject neo-liberal reform, is being replaced by a populism that accepts neo-liberal restructuring. Most notably, privatization, which the TRT opposed when it was part of IMF-sponsored reform, is now being embraced by the party, and looms as a key area for further tension between organized labour and the government.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".