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East Asia

The Spatial Politics of Labor in China: Life, Labor, and a New Generation of Migrant Workers

By: Ngai Pun and Jenny Chan

2013

East Asia

Abstract

Ethnicity China's capitalist transformation offers us a non-Western perspective to understand the contradictions of transnational capital mobility, the working people's lives, and the changing role of the state.

This economic and social transformation continues to require the acceleration of a specific pro-letarianization-successive generations of rural migrant workers (nongmingong) have become the mainstay of the country's export-processing sector, but they cannot become "free" laborers in the market. Within the dormitory labor regime, in which work and residence are tightly interconnected, workers turn the workplace and dormitory spaces into a battlefield to fight for their rights.

Spatial Politics of Labor in China

Abstract

Foxconn's cost-efficient use of dormitory labor ensures that its more than one million workers spend their off-hours just preparing for another round of production.

Paradoxically, workers are claiming the limited living space and time to create and remix culturally diversified repertoires in struggles. Class analysis, as a weapon of progressive social change, has to be recast in the lived experience of the working class, in relation to party-state rhetoric.

Spatial Politics of Labor in China

Introduction

As China has further integrated into the neoliberal world economy, structural economic imbalance and class inequality have become more pronounced. In our intervention here, we aim to draw out the deep contradictions among labor, capital, and the Chinese state in the context of global production.

Chinese working class in a dormitory labor regime—the highly concentrated nature of the spatiality of work and residence that workers turn into a battlefield to fight for their rights. Our case study of Foxconn shows that the provision of employer-owned dormitories for workers is integral to capital accumulation in urban China.

Spatial Politics of Labor in China

Worker resistance is also taking place in the dormitories and in workers’ communities. At their dwelling places, worker activists try to share organizing skills and disseminate protest strategies, as long as they can remain together. On the factory floor, they bring specific issues to management. In public spaces, they present collective demands to the local government.

Without the organization of independent trade unions in collective bargaining, workers are living out their own social struggles, of which class struggles are a part. In comparison to older cohorts, this new generation of rural migrant workers, whose average age is twenty-three, is better educated, more aware of workplace rights, and more likely to demand employment protection and decent work.

Spatial Politics of Labor in China

Introduction

Beginning around 2003, a labor shortage emerged in cosmopolitan coastal cities as well as small interior towns. This situation has brought hope to workers because they have been able to leverage the shortage—at least to a limited degree—to demand higher wages. The higher their aspirations for a better future, the more workers become aware of their harsh reality. Against social and economic injustice, they use the workplace and dormitory spaces to engage in life-and-death struggles.

Spatial Politics of Labor in China

Introduction

Ethnicity Most of the socialist economies, since the so-called end of history in the early 1990s, have been compelled into global capitalism as they could no longer sustain their conventional form of existence.

China, long centered on non-capitalist social relations, has since the 1990s grown to become the world’s largest industrial producer and a crucial geopolitical site for capital accumulation.

This state-guided economic. globalization and structural reform continues to require the acceleration of a specific proletarianization—successive generations of rural migrant workers (nongmingong) have become the mainstay of the country’s export processing sector, but they cannot become “free” laborers in the market.

Spatial Politics of Labor in China

The Spatial Politics of Labor

In China’s rapid incorporation into the capitalist world economy, national government leaders have reversed earlier policies that banned rural-to-urban migration and instead have encouraged peasants to become wage laborers staffing the burgeoning factories in coastal areas that feed the export boom.

But rural workers and their families, though invited to work in the city, are denied urban citizenship rights. Local officials receive no funding or incentives “from above” to provide “transient” rural laborers with the same housing, education, medical care, pensions, and other social provisions given to registered urban residents.

Spatial Politics of Labor in China

The Spatial Politics of Labor

The rural households from which migrant workers come and to which they are entitled to return do retain land-use rights to small plots of land in their native villages. For many rural residents this land staves off starvation in times of adversity, but it cannot provide a livelihood, least of all for the increasing numbers of rural migrants who grew up in the cities and do not have farming skills.

Migrants generally return to their villages only to marry and have children. This pattern persists because the children of parents whose household registration remains rural cannot receive public education in the cities, especially in the higher grades.

Spatial Politics of Labor in China

The Spatial Politics of Labor

The Such proletarianization is thus characterized by a spatial separation between production in urban areas and social reproduction in the countryside. This reserve army of Chinese internal migrant workers, more than 200 million nationwide, helps lower not only production costs, but also social reproduction costs in host cities by denying rural migrant workers various kinds of social services and public education. A permanent underclass is created in urban industrialized spaces.

While the hukou system provides a cushion in the form of equal land use rights for rural residents, including those who are living and working in the cities, thereby contributing to social stability, the system involves tacit collusion between the Chinese state and capital.

Spatial Politics of Labor in China

The Spatial Politics of Labor

By temporarily housing the laborers as they circulate from one workplace to another, the dormitory labor regime also supports the proletarianization process in that it extinguishes family life.

While workers are moving frequently from temporary dwelling to temporary dwelling, they are continuously separated from their families. Elder family members and school-age children tend to live in the birth village while working-age relatives are usually scattered among different employers and different dormitories.

The sociopolitical institution of the dormitory labor regime therefore keeps a massive internal migrant labor force without the support of family networks and communal life.

Spatial Politics of Labor in China

The Spatial Politics of Labor

China’s export sector, organized around the capitalist principle of profit before people, has turned most of its profits into enterprise savings, dividends, and reinvestment, rather than sharing it with workers. Capital accumulates, enterprises and multinational corporations get rich, and migrant workers from the countryside suffer.

The Irrespective of industrial types and localities, we have found that high-rise dormitories are central to the organization of production and the daily reproduction of the workers at the lowest possible costs and highest efficiency in the service of foreign-invested, privately or publicly owned companies. The dormitory compounds are often built inside factory complexes or adjacent to workplaces, forming freestanding, all-encompassing industrial cities.

Spatial Politics of Labor in China

The Spatial Politics of Labor

Far from being a form of company welfare, the dormitory labor regime is deployed by management to maximize control of workers. And yet, the other side of this process remains understudied: workers’ subversion of the dehumanized environment to their individual or collective interests.

The institution of the dormitory labor regime is centered on bureaucratic control as much as on self-discipline. Sexuality is highly regulated by the gender-segregated dormitories. Male and female workers—most of them unmarried teenagers and young adults—are forbidden to visit one another’s rooms.

Spatial Politics of Labor in China

Control and Resistance within the Dormitory Labor Regime

Currently a standard dormitory room is usually shared by six to twelve workers in double bunk beds. Newly built multistory dormitories tend to have better facilities than the old ones and are equipped with hot-water showers, air conditioning, personal lockers, shared television rooms, and elevators.

Despite this, basic conditions remain largely unchanged: workers with different jobs and even different shifts are mixed in the same dormitory. They are awake and asleep at different times and frequently disrupt one another’s rest. Private space is limited to one’s own bed behind a self-made curtain.

Spatial Politics of Labor in China

Control and Resistance within the Dormitory Labor Regime

Random dormitory reassignments break up friendship and localistic networks, increasing isolation and loneliness. And yet the divisions of age, skills, native place origins, and conceptions of fairness and justice may be transcended, especially when the workers face common threats.

In the densely populated and intensely stressful environment, grievances arising from poor public hygiene in the dorms, lack of sleep from excessive overwork, humiliation and punishment from breaking rules, exposure to occupational safety and health hazards, and blocked communications between workers and management are common topics.

Spatial Politics of Labor in China

Control and Resistance within the Dormitory Labor Regime

Young workers in their late teens to mid-twenties who have been placed in the factory-cum-dormitory environment experience alienation in the classic Marxist sense. The “flexible” manufacturing of Foxconn dictates that labor, as a commodity, together with other means of production, is organized into a twenty-four-hour nonstop operation dedicated to satisfying global consumers’ demand for electronic gadgets.

As rural migrants, Foxconn workers enjoy little labor protection in society at large and suffer from heightened work pressure and desperation in the workplace that lead to suicides and to daily and collective resistance.

Spatial Politics of Labor in China

Control and Resistance within the Dormitory Labor Regime

In the midst of China’s high-speed economic growth, a younger generation of workers faces growing income and opportunity inequality worse than that experienced by their parents or older cohorts.

The experience of workers, who are objectified by the process of having to sell their labor to a capitalist who is then in control of their capacity to work, contrasts sharply to the purposive action of a self-empowered person who works to do something that is ultimately more beneficial to himself or herself than to a relentless employer.

The moment the Chinese laborers see there is little possibility of finding decent work and building a home in the city, the very meaning of their jobs, and even their lives, collapses.

Spatial Politics of Labor in China

Conclusion

In the accelerated accumulation of capital from coastal to central and western China, the dormitory labor regime ensures both cost-efficiency and that workers spend their off-hours solely preparing for another round of production.

Paradoxically, as our study of Foxconn shows, workers also reclaim the limited living space and time to which their labor and lives are confined to create and remix culturally diversified repertoires of social struggles, through slogans and public statements expressed in protests. By turning their collective dormitories into communal spaces, they open up new opportunities for labor resistance.

Spatial Politics of Labor in China

Conclusion

In China’s capitalist transformation offers us a non-Western perspective on understanding the contradictions of transnational capital mobility, working people’s lives, and the changing role of the state. The children of the post-Mao reform era have grown up. They raise legitimate concerns about the “citizenship rights” discourse articulated by the state.

They pierce through the hypocrisy of the global corporate image of “care,” behind which companies’ actual ordering practices go against everything they promise in their labor and environmental standards programs. Workers invite conscientious consumers of Apple products and concerned academics to produce knowledge that can enhance their ability to win in global labor politics.

Spatial Politics of Labor in China

Conclusion