16 - The Dormitory Regime Revisited: Time in Transnational Capitalist Production

Summary

Introduction

This chapter argues for the need to investigate the temporal dimension of labour regimes in order to account more fully for the changing nature of capitalist production and related forms of labour control. To do so, the chapter revisits the concept of the dormitory labour regime and posits “time” as the principal category in the analysis of the transnational organization of production. Time, as I show below, reveals the novel forms of material and discursive control over labour as well as the extent to which these control practices are imbued within a normative gendered and sexual order. The aim of this chapter is thus to broaden the established spatial approaches to the transnationalization of production by drawing attention to the temporal analysis of labour regimes.

The concept of the dormitory labour regime was pioneered by Pun Ngai and Chris Smith (2007) in their discussion of export-oriented electronics production in post-socialist China. Against the backdrop of the well-established periodization in labour process theory, tracing the shift from Taylorism and Fordism to flexible accumulation in the “West”, Pun and Smith embed their analysis in the context of China to show the prominence of a new form of labour regime, which they call the dormitory labour regime. The regime's significance lies in showing how mass production is being restructured via a novel labour system of “work-residence” that merges workers’ productive and reproductive spaces. Although, typically, the notion of labour regimes stands for practices of labour control at the place of production (Taylor & Rioux 2018), the dormitory labour regime makes it manifest that capital's control of relations of production pivots on its direct control over the social reproduction of labour. Located in proximity to factories, dormitories combine work and residence, thus permitting transnational corporations to lengthen the workday and command almost all daily reproduction of labour. In that dormitories facilitate socialization among workers, the “work-life” compression also aims to suppress the establishing of labour communities and labour institutions that could improve working conditions and advance collective organizing. It is precisely such intensive reorganization of space via the dormitory labour regime, Pun and Smith (2007) suggest, that spearheaded China's integration into global industrial capitalism.