Labor and Domination: Worker Control in a Chinese Factory

Abstract

China’s export-led manufacturing model has been built on extensive exploitation of its migrant workforce under a despotic labor regime, but the methods of control have shifted considerably during the past decade and a half. This article examines new modes of domination over Chinese factory workers, based on fieldwork conducted while the author was living with workers at a foreign-invested garment factory in southern China. The article shows how mechanisms to control the workers are embedded today not only in directly coercive practices but also in a new shop floor culture with affective personal ties and implicit bargaining in wage systems. Against the scholarly literature of management controls that emphasizes rupture and discontinuity between labor regimes, this article argues that China’s emerging labor regime, here referred to as “conciliatory despotism,” inherits despotic features of the labor regime exercised in the 1990s but adds new normative measures of soft control that seek to conciliate worker resentments. This hybrid form of management control represents a stage in China’s evolving labor-management relations in which workers possess more implicit power and can push management into greater concessions than previously.

Am I a peasant or a worker? An identity strain perspective on turnover among developing-world migrants

“…When confronting such discrepancies, migrants experience identity strain (Kraimer et al, 2012) that activates a variety of reactions, including anxiety and depression (Liao et al, 2015;Naeem et al, 2015). To illustrate, migrants may encounter negative stereotypes from urbanites who see them as 'country bumpkins' doing menial work (Gu et al, 2007;Kim, 2015;Siu, 2017) or even as vagabonds (Swider, 2015). These stereotypes clash with migrants' identity standards as versatile and respected farmers.…”

“…Taylorist industrial regimes also induce supervisors to behave uniformly toward precariats, even when interacting with them individually (Choi and Peng, 2015;Yu, 2008). After all, manufacturing or construction supervisors must ensure that all subordinates meet demanding production goals by performing routinized tasks according to strict time schedules and comply with a host of regulations through constant surveillance, exhortations or sanctions for infractions (Chan et al, 2013;Siu, 2017;Yu, 2008).…”

“…A shortage of migrant workers now looms in China, exacerbating the turnover problem (Choi and Peng, 2015;Siu, 2017). As noted above, excessive migrant attrition adversely affects organizations (Beamish, 2006;Harney, 2010), such as decreased organizational efficiency and profitability (Park and Shaw, 2013), and may even undermine a nation's development model (especially one 'predicated on surplus and cheap migrant labor'; Lee, 2016: 325).…”

Conceptualising Socio-Economic Formations of Labour and Workers’ Power in Global Production Networks

“…However, the interviews showed that workshop workers with skill and experience prefer subcontracted work as it gives them more scope and power to bargain about their wages. They are usually skilled migrants, unmarried, and who have worked in factories for many years since they were young (Siu, 2017). Such workers usually form work teams to take up subcontracted orders from the firms, working directly inside the factories or setting up household workshops.…”

At the Roots of Labour Activism: Chinese and Cambodian Garment Workers in Comparative Perspective

“…While the garment sector in both countries employs mostly younger women from the countryside, generally viewed by employers as docile and apt at sewing, since the early 2000s coastal areas in China -including Dongguan -have been hit by cyclical "labour shortages" that have forced employers to be less picky (Zhang and Liu 2012). With many young Chinese rural women deciding to stay home to raise a family or to look for a job in townships closer to their hometowns, factories find it increasingly difficult to recruit young female workers, so they have to hire older women or even men (Siu 2017). In Cambodia, on the contrary, 87% of garment workers are female (ILO 2017).…”