Building China , livre ebook

B UILDING C HINA
Informal Work and the New Precariat
S ARAH S WIDER
ILR P RESS AN IMPRINT OF C ORNELL U NIVERSITY P RESS
I THACA AND L ONDON
To my mom, Tula Grande; my daughters, Olivia and Tula; my husband, Marcin Szczepanski; and all of the amazing construction workers in my life.
C ONTENTS Preface Acknowledgments 1. Building China and the Making of a New Working Class 2. The Hukou System, Migration, and the Construction Industry 3. Mediated Employment 4. Embedded Employment 5. Individual Employment 6. Protest and Organizing among Informal Workers under Restrictive Regimes 7. Informal Precarious Workers, Protests, and Precarious Authoritarianism Appendix A Appendix B Appendix C Notes References Index
P REFACE
The context of research—and the position of the researcher within that context—is of fundamental importance to any research agenda. It shapes the research question, structures how the research is conducted and situates the outcomes (Harding 1987; Behar 1996). To fully understand the research presented in this book, then, it is important to ask: How did a white woman who grew up around farmers in one of the whitest states in the United States (Vermont) come to research male construction workers in China?
My interest in the struggles of the working class began when I took a job at a local restaurant at a hotel in a college town in Vermont. I became close friends with many of the other workers in this establishment. Some were college students who worked to earn spending money, but most were primary wage earners who had been in service work as cooks, waitresses, and room cleaners for decades. These workers were called “lifers” by the college students who moved in and out of these jobs. The lifers, in turn, called the college students “flatlanders” because they often came from places like Massachusetts, whose flat landscapes contrasted to the mountains of Vermont.
In a society that disdained their jobs, the “lifers” struggled to maintain dignity through hard work. In Vermont’s Yankee Puritan culture, a hard worker is a good worker. Though the lifers worked harder than the flatlanders, they also held a longer list of grievances against the bosses. At staff meetings, they repeatedly raised issues such as the lack of health insurance, the slipping hazard posed by the kitchen steps, and violations of the informal seniority system. I found myself situated in both groups and in neither. As a local I was on the path of lifer, but I was also a college student, though not a flatlander, which created opportunities for me to follow alternative life paths.
I participated in this micro-ecosystem with a mix of curiosity and confusion until one of my college instructors assigned excerpts from Marx asserting that the need to “work” and be productive is what makes us human. Marx’s discussion of the social relations that create labor, the realities of alienated labor, and the exploitation of the working class helped me reflect on my work at the hotel. At around the same time, I saw my boss truly angry for the first time. Red-faced, he stormed through the building yelling and waving a small pamphlet. Two days later, one of the lifers was fired. It turned out that the pamphlet that ignited my boss’s rage was a brochure from a labor union that had rented the banquet hall. Though I knew little of unions at the time, my boss’s uncharacteristic anger indicated that he feared them, which convinced me that unions must be powerful. The intersection of these events—my exposure to Marx in the classroom and the experience of working and seeing the power of unions—sparked what would become a lifelong interest in labor, labor unions, and worker resistance.
Later, while interning in Washington DC, I watched Congress fast-track the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Attempts to include provisions for worker protection failed miserably. At the same time, newspaper and magazine headlines promoted story upon story about outsourcing, manufacturing relocations, and deindustrialization. In this context, I decided to pursue a graduate education in the hope of understanding how workers could survive and maybe even thrive in this new global political economy.
Before graduate school, I headed to South Korea for a year to gain some international experience and perspective. One year turned into three (1995–98), and I experienced the vagaries of the global economy as I lived through the Asian Financial Crisis and saw its impact on my close friends. It seemed that no one was spared as people who worked in both white- and blue-collar employment across different industries lost their jobs. I witnessed firsthand the effects of forced restructuring and austerity produced by the International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs). These “structural adjustments” required a set of new national laws that made it easier to fire full-time, long-term workers in favor of part-time, temporary and contracted workers. According to the IMF, these policies produced the “flexiblization” of labor necessary for Korea to restore fiscal balance and global competitiveness.
I participated in the countermovement organized by unions, which culminated in the first general strike since the Korean War. The strike brought workers across all industries out into the streets, effectively shutting down the entire country. It was in Korea that I was radicalized as I learned about unions, strikes, and the efficacy of labor protests through direct participation. During this time, I also became aware of the “awakening of the sleeping dragon” as China emerged onto the world scene. I started learning Chinese, believing that if I really wanted to understand the dynamics shaping working-class struggles across the globe, I would have to understand what was happening in China. Since my first stay in Korea, I have regularly returned to Asia, spending a total of almost a decade in East and Southeast Asia, in some cases watching firsthand as industrial capital has helped create “low-wage” workers. At the same time, I have watched, learned about, and participated in countermovements by workers resisting exploitation and shaping the ways in which they would become integrated into the global economy; as Silver and Zhang (2009) suggest, “Where capital goes, conflict follows.”
Graduate studies kept me coming back to Asia as I focused on two aspects of labor movements, both of which were considered exceptions rather than the norm: cross-border labor cooperation and organizing among the “unorganizable.” During this rather gloomy historical period for labor, labor advocates took hope from cases of successful organizing and political action among the weakest workers. This included organizing among migrants in the United States (Milkman and Wong 2000), self-employed women in India (Bhatt 1989), and street vendors in Mexico (Cross 1998). Others focused on cross-border labor cooperation (Gordon and Turner 2000; Frundt 1999) or global unionism (Waterman 2004; Lillie 2005) as potential ways that labor could deal with global capital.
My own research focused on a case study of domestic workers in Hong Kong who were mainly women immigrants from countries in Southeast Asia. Immigrant women working in private homes as nannies and domestic workers are considered “unorganizable” because they do not have a common employer, their workplaces are in the private realm, there is a high turnover rate, and many labor protections do not extend to domestic (and immigrant) workers. However, the women I studied had organized a domestic workers’ union that was highly successful in winning protections and benefits including paid maternity leave, minimum pay increases, and severance pay. The union also provided women with legal assistance, temporary housing, and educational programs. Their amazing success provides some lessons for other precarious and vulnerable workers. Specifically, these workers may need to look beyond traditional union structures. The union for migrant women domestic workers gave each nationality equal rather than proportional representation and had a networked structure that created flexibility that allowed the union to form temporary coalitions with other organizations (Swider 2006).
Meanwhile, China’s entrance into the global economy was creating a massive new army of precarious workers. China’s urban workers had been protected under the “iron rice bowl” policy, which provided cradle-to-grave benefits including day care, education, health care, and retirement. Mao’s workers’ paradise underwent painful restructuring and privatization during the contemporary era of economic reform that began in 1978. The social compact represented by the iron rice bowl arrangements, in which workers agreed to lower wages in exchange for job stability and sustenance, was broken, and workers were thrown into the ocean to sink or swim on their own (Tang and Parish 2000).
At the same time, China embarked upon a path of urbanization that included releasing agricultural workers from the land by reforming the collectivist farming system. As a result, hundreds of thousands of farmers entered cities as “peasant workers.” Many peasant workers, mostly women, entered into factories in China’s growing export-oriented manufacturing sector (Pun 2005; Lee 1998). These women migrant workers, also known as dagongmei , played a central role in earning China the nickname, “the world’s workshop.” Because they make so many of the products that are consumed around the world, these workers have become highly visible both to academics and in the popular media.
One summer, I was in China studying the Chinese language and reading about how these peasant women were becoming workers as they entered the factories (Lee 1998; Pun 2005) and service economy (Hanser 2006; Otis 2007) and how contentious this process was as they organized and protested against their exploitation (Chan 2001). Every day I would sit on