China & Inner Asia: Table of Contents
Organizer and Chair: Deborah Davis, Yale University
Discussant: Andrew G. Walder, Stanford University
Throughout the 1980s despite a decade of economic reform most large urban factories had not broken with the bureaucratized, non-commodified system of labor relations which Andrew Walder has called "Communist Neo-Traditionalist." Jobs were treated as lifetime assignments, wages did not reflect productivity, non-cash benefits nearly equaled the value of the monetary wage, and authority relations among workers and managers continued to be constrained by non-economic, particularistic dependencies.
After 1990, however, marketization of labor relations greatly intensified. For example, employers could hire and fire workers without bureaucratic approval, pension and medical benefits required co-payments, and wages were set by each enterprise. Simultaneously rapid increase in private sector employment created new opportunities among permanent urban residents (as opposed to rural migrants) and new competitive pressure on State enterprises. Some of the most immediate consequences of this more commodified, marketized environment for urban labor have been a surge in unemployment, increased job turnover, greater inequality among employees in terms of wages and benefits, and increased labor activism and unrest.
Yet because the degree of commodification and the growth of non-State employment have been extremely uneven across regions of China, it is impossible to generalize easily about the consequences for labor. In addition, the impact on workers has varied by such individual characteristics as age, sex, and education. In this panel we use case studies of income distribution and labor-management relations in factories from four coastal cities (Blecher, Chan, Lee, Lin), and three cities in the interior (He, Wang, Watson) not only to document the varied outcomes for different groups of employees but also to stimulate a more comprehensive understanding of the consequences of commodification of labor on a national scale.
Marc Blecher, Oberlin College
Commodification of labor under China’s new factory régime is pressurizing China’s working class. Yet it also involves the rise of a complex and in some respects contradictory set of institutions and relationships, including a hegemonic labor process, a despotic labor market, enterprise paternalism, anti-hegemonic class restructuration, and hegemonic and incorporative state policies. Taken together, these elements comprise a resilient, over-determined structure of state and enterprise authority over the Chinese working class. As a result, China’s workers are surprisingly acquiescent in the face of the pressures they are experiencing. In other words, the structural conditions for the state to survive marketization are coming into place.
This paper, based on interviews and Q-analytic survey research in Tianjin from 1995–98, will begin to flesh out the elements of China’s new factory régime. The explanatory "variable" is commodification of labor: labor markets; cost accounting of labor; and the transformation of labor power from a social and political activity and responsibility into individual workers’ private property. The intermediate "dependent variable" is workers’ consciousness: their discursive understandings of: their labor power; their relation with their firms; the labor process; their relationship with fellow workers; and concepts such as distributive justice, social responsibility, and social class. The final "dependent variable" is workers’ politics: individual acts of assent, acquiescence, disregard or resistance to firm authority; collective action; and organizational participation.
Anita Chan, Australian National University
This paper puts into comparative perspective the conditions of state-owned enterprise workers as compared to workers in enterprises of other types of ownership in the footwear industry. The empirical data is drawn from a 1,500 questionnaire survey conducted in five cities in different parts of China, supplemented by extensive interviews and field observations. It shall be seen that in footwear factories which have survived market competition, their workers’ employment conditions have declined substantially over the years. But contrary to general perceptions, workers in the foreign-managed footwear factories (mainly Taiwanese and Hong Kong), not in the SOEs, have the lowest wages and worst work environment.
Lin Yimin, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
This paper discusses two patterns of labor relations in Shenzhen. The first one, mostly found in Western and Japanese capital enterprises, features heavy reliance by management on clearly defined rules and technology for behavioral control. The second one, mostly found in enterprises with overseas and local Chinese (private) investment, features personal supervision, arbitrary rules and decisions, and disregard for workers’ basic rights.
In both types of enterprises, mutual commitment between workers and management is weak, turnover high, and skill level low. Workers are young, female, and rural, with no expectation to stay long because of a residency restriction imposed by the local government that is minimally committed to migrant workers. Work efforts and low absenteeism are mainly sustained by threat and penalty, rather than induced by positive incentives. Most type-one enterprises are located in the inner city, whereas most type-two enterprises are located under the jurisdiction of townships in the suburban counties where labor regulation is loosely enforced. Open conflict is more common in type-two enterprises, where turnover is higher and workers’ spatial movement tends to be more strongly oriented toward the local labor market instead of their places of origin. We search for clues to understanding the causes and consequences of these patterns of labor relations by studying the effects of ownership structure, technology, enterprise history, regulatory and market environment, managerial philosophy, composition of workers, and interaction strategies adopted by labor and management. In-depth interviews (N=316) and questionnaire surveys (N=3600) in 12 enterprises are analyzed.