Precarization or Empowerment? Reflections on Recent Labor Unrest in China

Abstract

Labor scholars have highlighted the predicament of “precarization” besetting the working class everywhere in the twenty-first century. Beneath the “proletariat” now stands the “precariat,” for whom exploitation seems like a privilege compared to constant exclusion from the labor market. Amidst worldwide employment informalization and decimation of workers’ collective capacity, media reports and academic writings on Chinese workers in the past several years have singularly sustained a curious discourse of worker empowerment. Strikes in some foreign-invested factories have inspired claims of rising working-class power. Finding little empirical support for the empowerment thesis, this article spotlights the Chinese peculiarity of the global phenomenon of precarization and the dynamics of recent strikes, suggesting the need for Chinese labor studies to rebalance its prevailing voluntarism and optimism with more attention to institutional and political-economic conditions.

Shades of Authoritarianism and State–Labour Relations in China

“…Experiments with collective bargaining took off during the first decade of the millennium, mainly in state enterprises. The tale of the 2010 Honda strikes and the wave of strikes that followed in its wake has been covered in the literature (Chan and Hui ; Elfstrom and Kuruvilla ; Hui ; Chang ; Lee ). Suffice it here to say that this created an opportunity for more progressive trade union leaders, labour NGOs and worker activists to initiate collective bargaining that included varying degrees of accountability via elected workers’ representatives (Pringle and Meng ).…”

A Tale of Two Deltas: Labour Politics in Jiangsu and Guangdong

“…In the realm of Chinese labour relations, the expansion of labour civil society and passage of new workplace laws are said to have diverted workers from building the sort of movement that could win them real economic gains (Friedman and Lee ; Hui ; Lee and Shen ). Moreover, a close look at rising workplace unrest, it is argued, will reveal the government's successful fragmentation of the working class, not increased worker power (Lee ). The state is thus the prime mover.…”

“…The geographic diversity of Chinese labour politics -understood broadly as the interaction of power exercised at the state and workplace levels -is well documented. Based on research conducted in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Lee (2007) contrasts 'protests of desperation' by state-owned enterprise (SOE) workers in China's northeastern 'rustbelt' with rights-oriented 'protests of discrimination' by migrant workers in its southeastern 'sunbelt'. Yu (2010: ch.…”

Taming Labor: Workers’ Struggles, Workplace Unionism, and Collective Bargaining on a Chinese Waterfront

“…1 Most commentators agree that strikes have emerged as an important response to workplace grievances over the last decade (Lee 2016: Pringle 2013Gray 2015;Cao and Quan 2017;Chan and Hui 2012).…”