Abstract
China at Work is unique in its presentation of a diverse set of empirical case studies that collectively assess the usefulness, strengths, and weaknesses of a particular theoretical approach—Burawoy’s labor process theory—for our understanding of the political and institutional outcomes of China’s ongoing economic reforms. To this end, the chapters seek to extend and modify Burawoy’s approach in order to accommodate and inform the Chinese experience. Inasmuch as many of the book’s contributions were written specifically for this volume, the shared focus on labor process theory provides a degree of coherence not often found in edited collections of this sort.
As noted by Chris Smith and Mingwei Liu in the book’s opening chapter, Burawoy’s labor process theory would locate the causal drivers of China’s diverse and changing labor regimes in the conflictual relations among workers, unions, managers, and state actors, each with their own institutional agendas and instrumental interests. Given a frequent tendency to dismiss or marginalize the political role of labor in East Asia, as referenced by the “subjugation thesis,” labor process theory encourages a more balanced view that acknowledges the overwhelming power of employers and states to control workers and to contain worker resistance, but which also allows for the possibility of labor agency, politics, and empowerment even in the context of institutional authoritarianism. By consequence, labor process theory offers a uniquely dynamic view of labor institutions as shaped and continuously challenged by ongoing strategic and political interactions among key stakeholders including labor, thus inserting worker mobilization into causal accounts of larger trajectories of economic reform.
The Marxian understanding of social class as a relational rather than a categorical construct, defined less by location in a system of stratification than by a fluid and continuing, mutually determining contest between labor and capital, informs Burawoy’s emphasis on worker agency and empowerment, on the one hand, and employer efforts to force or encourage worker compliance on the other. Of particular interest here is the nature of that compliance: whether coerced or consensual within what Burawoy terms despotic or hegemonic factory regimes. Finally, for Burawoy, the state plays a critical role in shaping the nature of factory regimes, an emphasis that invites special interest among students of labor relations under Chinese authoritarianism. All of these themes are variably explored in this important collection.
The Question of Worker Agency
Although many critical accounts of East Asian labor regimes largely depict semi- and low-skilled workers as recalcitrant victims of employer exploitation and abuse, many of the studies in this volume emphasize increased agency among Chinese workers. This theme emerges most explicitly in the chapter by Lulu Fan on the emergence of cooperative production teams among migrant female workers in low-wage informal work in the Yangtze River Delta region, in the discussion by Fuxi Wang and Mingwei Liu of managerial mobilization of auto workers to confront Japanese top management in a joint-venture auto parts company, in Chunyun Li and Mingwei Liu’s description of the supportive role of civil society organizations in union efforts to negotiate the terms of closure of a Walmart store in Changde, and in Yunxue Deng’s study of unauthorized strikes by Guangzhou auto workers during 2013 to 2015.
The contributions do fully acknowledge the reality of continuing labor subjugation rooted in managerial and party domination of factory unions, confinement of worker participation to lower levels of production (e.g., quality circles and feedback and suggestion systems), reliance on local authorities and the police to contain worker demonstrations and strikes, use of dormitory regimes to control and surveil workers, and so forth. Indeed, this more pessimistic view appears even in those chapters highlighting worker empowerment and agency. Wang and Liu, for example, note that worker mobilization by Chinese managers and the Party-controlled union in their confrontation with Japanese management implies as well continuing worker subordination to managerial and party agendas. Deng discusses the continuation of managerial and union control over newly instituted processes of collective bargaining, and Li and Liu note both the rarity of a union-led protest against management policy and the uniqueness of the case they studied. The overwhelming evidence of the continued effectiveness of institutional controls over labor points to the institutional power of the Chinese state to rein in worker independence and power.
By contrast, these same authors argue that compromised episodes of worker mobilization and protest nonetheless encourage growing social and class consciousness (Jaesok Kim) as well as new possibilities of future worker engagement, thus pointing to the emancipating and solidarity-enhancing outcomes even of defeated struggles. In my view, these and other accounts of labor politics in China point to a signal paradox: That despite the failure of most individual strikes and protests, a broader perspective suggests a more potent aggregate effect, encouraging enactment of pre-emptive pro-worker policies and laws in response to the threat of disorganized social disorder.
Emergence of Hegemonic Labor Regimes?
Burawoy’s account emphasizes the role of the state in encouraging a shift from despotic, coercive labor regimes to more consensual, hegemonic regimes through pro-labor policies and programs that partially insulate workers from managerial exploitation, that insulate workers from exclusive reliance on employment for their livelihood, that accord legal rights to workers, and that variably empower workers through participation in workplace decision making. Several of the chapters in this book point to a number of such pro-labor initiatives taken by the state, including labor laws that require formal labor contracts between companies and workers (Xiangmin Liu and Can Ouyang), restrictions on the use of temporary workers (Liu and Ouyang), requirements that foreign companies establish workplace unions (Li and Liu), efforts to institute direct union elections (Chris King-chi Chan and Elaine Sio-ieng Hui), and efforts to institute collective management-labor consultation (Wang and Liu). At the enterprise level, managers facing growing labor shortages have sometimes instituted labor-upgrading strategies of wage coordination to retain core workers (Hao Zhang).
Despite these and other pro-labor measures, the authors are in general agreement that, contrary to Buroway’s account, factory regimes have in large measure become more despotic (Lefeng Lin), as explained in part by the downsizing and marketization of the state enterprise sector, rapid growth of private and joint-venture enterprises, and increased reliance on contract and agency workers (Wenjuan Jia; Liu and Ouyang). In part, too, despotic regimes have responded to the increased employment of migrant workers who lack urban residency and who, for that reason, are highly vulnerable to employer abuse and violation of labor laws; to a continuation of management and party-dominated workplace unions (Chan and Hui); to management reliance on police intervention during labor disputes; to use of dormitories to surveil and manage workers; and to political controls over pro-labor civil society organizations. These and other measures, scholars argue, have discouraged a transition to more hegemonic regimes despite pro-labor policies (Lin; Chan and Hui).
Some of the contributors have further elaborated their characterization of China’s despotic factory regimes. Chan and Hui, in recognition of growing worker resistance, refer to new patterns of contested despotism in which managerial and party/union controls are themselves targets of worker protest even as workers lack the organizational resources (especially independent unions) to more effectively register their dissent. Alternately, Lin builds on C. K. Lee’s reference to China’s disorganized despotism, noting inconsistencies and contradictions in emerging labor institutions themselves alongside an inability on the part of workers to mount effective, organized opposition.
Employment Dualism as Managerial Strategy
Several of the contributors see the intensification of despotic, coercive controls among some but not all workers as closely related to an explicit managerial reliance on labor market dualism/segmentation as a labor strategy. Jia notes the way in which state enterprise managers have instituted despotic controls over contract and temporary workers alongside hegemonic controls over regular workers that offer greater organizational loyalty and stability, and are more apt to informally accumulate skills during work (Liu and Ouyang). Contract and temporary workers, although sometimes more expensive (Jia), discourage troublemaking and dissent among regular workers for whom protest can lead to displacement by contract workers. The complementary economic and political roles played by these two segments of the workforce thus offer important advantages to managers. Zheng, in his discussion of Japanese subsidiaries in China, finds that Japanese firms utilize labor segmentation cross-nationally, locating peripheral functions reliant on Chinese contract workers overseas and core functions utilizing regular workers back home. And Rutvica Andrijasevic and Devi Saccetto, in their study of Foxconn in Europe, note that the firm employs different labor practices for direct and agency hires, using agency workers to absorb the impact of demand fluctuations while relying on direct hire workers for ongoing core functions. Chris Smith and Yu Zheng replicate this finding: SOEs operating abroad implement hegemonic, loyalty-supportive controls for direct hires, and despotic controls for contract and agency workers.
Role of the State
The discussion to this point already anticipates key aspects of government influence over Chinese labor relations and institutions. Those influences include, on the one hand, pre-emptive controls over enterprise unions; reliance on police powers to contain worker dissent; support for managerial control over workers, the labor process, and institutions of worker participation; and controls over outside organizations and international groups that might seek to inform and empower workers. These various modes of labor control, particularly among non-regular and migrant workers, go far in explaining a continuance of despotic factory regimes among large numbers of Chinese workers. On the other hand are pro-labor measures, including encouragement of limited worker participation in decision making; more open and direct elections of workplace unions; the formation of unions in foreign and joint-venture enterprises; the requirement that employers offer legally binding contracts to workers; and other policies and programs that, collectively, might seem to encourage more hegemonic factor regimes. The articulation of these two seemingly conflicting elements of labor policy and law is best understood by reference to a further, more pervasive institution: hukou residency rules that establish citizenship entitlements to education, health, and other government services only in a person’s registered place of residency. As noted by Jia, it is this institution that contributes importantly to the dualism between the large numbers of migrant workers subject to despotic labor regimes in urban centers, and regular urban workers (many previously laid off by state enterprises) who enjoy more hegemonic regimes.
This volume is, to my mind, a must-read for Chinese labor scholars and others interested in labor process theory, labor politics, and labor relations more generally. I have found these case studies very useful in my courses on East Asian development and social change.