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Local Strategies of Labor Control: A Case Study of Three Electronics Factories in China

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 May 2008

Hong Xue
Hong Xue
Affiliation:
Chinese University of Hong Kong
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Abstract

This article explores production politics and labor conditions in electronics manufacturing in China. With case study analysis of three electronics factories in a production chain at an export processing zone, it examines external factors of labor regulation from local government or international challenges and labor market situations that help shape a sociopolitical environment for local strategies in global production. It also considers some key internal factors of firms—enterprise scale, market capabilities, and requirements of the labor process—that influence work organization on the shop floor. The central argument of this article is that manufacturing factories in the global production apply local conditions to work organization and take different strategies in recruitment and labor control within and beyond the workplace.

Type
Labor in a Changing China
Information
International Labor and Working-Class History , Volume 73 , Issue 1 , Spring 2008 , pp. 85 - 103
Copyright
Copyright © International Labor and Working Class History, Inc 2008

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References

NOTES

1. Anita Chan., “A ‘Race to the Bottom’: Globalization and China's Labor Standards,” China Perspectives 46 (2003): 41–9; Ngai Pun, “Global Production, Company Codes of Conduct, and Labor Conditions in China: A Case Study of Two Factories,” China Journal 54 (2005): 101–13.

2. Ngai Pun, Made in China: Women Factory Workers in a Global Workplace (Hong Kong, 2005); Anita Chan, China's Workers under Assault: the Exploitation of Labor in a Globalizing Economy (New York, 2001); Ching Kwan Lee, Gender and the South China Miracle: Two Worlds of Factory Women (Berkeley, 1998).

3. Gwo-Shyong Shieh traces the development of a network labor process in the subcontracting network (from the family workshop to the capitalist workshop) under export-oriented industrialization in Taiwan at the end of 1980s. McKay also points out that different factories in global high-tech industries in the Philippines have applied different production politics on and beyond the shop floor. See Gwo-Shyong Shieh, “Boss” Island: The Subcontracting Network and Micro-Entrepreneurship in Taiwan's Development (New York, 1992); Steven C. McKay, Satanic Mills or Silicon Islands?: The Politics of High-tech Production in the Philippines (Ithaca, 2005).

4. The names of the town and all the firms are pseudonyms. I acquired access to Power Ltd. and interviewed its general manager from an introduction by the Taiwanese Businessmen Association in Dongguan. I also got to know some engineers and interviewed them. For Victory Cable, I was introduced to the founder by an official with the Electronics Industries Association whom I had interviewed before. I entered the shop floor and workers' dormitories in the two factories. However, I was unable to contact the management at Express Production and could not enter the firm. I interviewed workers from Victory Cable on the shop floor and interviewed the workers from Power Ltd. and Express Production outside the workplace, e.g., near their factories, at workers' communities, at KFC, and in snack bars.

5. In Chinese culture, a person's native place is regarded as a crucial factor for his or her identity. Native place connections and networks, which are based on shared native place, play important roles in social life, politics, and the economy in China. See R. Keith Schoppa, Revolution and Its Past: Identities and Change in Modern Chinese History (Upper Saddle River, NJ, 2002), 11–12.

6. Michael Buroway, Politics of Production: Factory Regimes under Capitalism and Socialism (London, 1985), 87.

7. Ibid., 126.

8. Ibid., 12–15.

9. Ibid., 149,263.

10. Gary Gereffi used the term “buyer-driven global commodity chain” to denote the transborder production network. See Gary Gereffi, “The Organization of Buyer-Driven Global Commodity Chains: How US Retailers Shape Overseas Production Networks,” in Gary Gereffi and Miguel Korzeniewicz, eds., Commodity Chains and Global Capitalism (Westport, CT, 1994).

11. Berch Berberoglu, ed., Labor and Capital in the Age of Globalization: The Labor Process and the Changing Nature of Work in the Global Economy (Lanham, MD, 2002); Ngai Pun, “Global Production, Company Codes of Conduct, and Labor Conditions in China: a Case Study of Two Factories,” China Journal 54 (2005): 103.

12. McKay, Satanic Mills or Silicon Islands? 13.

13. Lee, Gender and the South China Miracle, 20–21.

14. Ching Kwan Lee, “Three Patterns of Working-Class Transitions in China,” in Politics in China: Moving Frontiers, ed. Francoise Mengin and Jean-Louis Rocca (New York, 2002), 62–91.

15. George Tsogas, Labor Regulation in a Global Economy (Armonk, NY, 2001).

16. The antisweatshop campaigns and consumer movements in western countries, criticizing sweatshop manufacturing in developing countries, have resulted in the corporate social responsibility movement in global outsourcing. See Rhys Jenkins, Ruth Pearson, and Gill Seyfang, eds., Corporate Responsibility and Labor Rights: Codes of Conduct in the Global Economy (London and Sterling, 2002); Laura P. Hartman, Denis G. Arnold, and Richard E. Wokutch, eds., Rising above Sweatshops: Innovative Approaches to Global labor Challenges (Westport, 2003).

17. Steven C. McKay, “Zones of Regulation: Restructuring Labor Control in Privatized Export Zones,” Politics Society 32 (2004): 171–202.

18. McKay, Satanic Mills or Silicon Islands?, 16.

19. Leslie Salzinger, Genders in Production: Making Workers in Mexico's Global Factories (Berkeley, 2003).

20. Lee, Gender and the South China Miracle; Pun, Made in China.

21. Elizabeth Perry once emphasized that the politics of place based on native place lines could provide an important factor for solidarities of early labor protest in Shanghai. See Elizabeth J. Perry, Shanghai on Strike: The Politics of Chinese Labor (Stanford, CA, 1993).

22. Ministry of Information Industry of China, 2006 Annual Economics Data Report on the Electronics and Information Industry, http://www.mii.gov.cn/art/2007/03/20/art_942_29463.html (accessed January 27, 2008).

23. Dongguan City is regarded as the epitome of the development of export processing manufacturing in China. See George Chu-sheng Lin, “Intrusion of Global Forces and Transformation of a Local Chinese Economy: The Experience of Dongguan,” in R.F. Watters and T.G. McGee, eds., Asia-Pacific: New Geographies of the Pacific Rim (London, 1997): 250–63.

24. Statistics Bureau of Dongguan, 2006 Annual Report on Economics and Social Development of Dongguan, http://tjj.dg.gov.cn/website/web2/showArticle.jsp?ArticleId=1262columnId=112parentcolumnId=114 (accessed January 27, 2008).

25. The foreign capital in this paper conventionally includes global capital from Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Macao as well as investments from other countries and regions.

26. From the Website of Stone Town.

27. These TNCs also have global networks for researching, manufacturing, and marketing to serve buyers. Some of their electronics products even take first place in output and sales in the global market. They also have certifications or licenses from their buyers as well as the international quality and environment certifications, e.g., ISO 9001:2000 ISO14001, OHSAS18001 from related international associations.

28. According to China's labor law, workers are entitled to at least one day off a week and must not do more than three hours of overtime work a day, or thirty-six hours a month.

29. The development of the electronics industry in Stone Town speeds prosperity to the local service industry. The local clustering of electronics industries not only attracts a large number of migrant workers, but also many young engineers, administrative clerks, professionals, managers, and business people from other cities in China or from Taiwan, Hong Kong, Japan, and Western countries. It brings many work opportunities in the service industry. In the small town there are many restaurants, shopping centers, entertainment facilities, and even a five-star hotel. When I was in Stone Town, I also found that quite a few waitresses had work experience in electronics assembly lines.

30. Switching power supply is a typical application of power supplies with switcher technology to convert utility's alternating current (AC) input power into lower regulated direct current (DC) voltages required for electronic equipment. It is widely used in personal computers, servers, workstations, networking, peripherals, and office equipment.

31. A power management solution is a term mostly used in industrial areas and refers to a set of hardware and software systems designed to provide and manage the power supply units of some electronic/electrical devices or the underlying ideas on how to provide the systems. For example, a manufacturer of laptop computer “power adapters” can claim that it is providing a “power management solution” for laptop computers. Another manufacturer of laptop computer “batteries” can also claim that it is providing “power management solution” for laptop computers.

32. McKay, “Zones of Regulation: Restructuring Labor Control in Privatized Export Zones,” 182. As McKay explains, “disciplinary management relies, on the technical side, on data generated by the computerized assembly line… . On the social side, discipline is maintained by strict enforcement of company rules.”

33. The high turnover is now becoming a prevalent phenomenon in the manufacturing industry. In my field work from August to November of 2006 in the Yangtze River Delta (where the working conditions are much better than those in Stone Town), I found the turnover rate of many large electronics manufacturers to be about five to eight percent per month. I believe that the characters of migrant workers, the management of firms, the changing labor market, and the requirements of global flexible production have contributed to the high turnover of Chinese manufacturers.

34. The basic wage is RMB 580 in Power Ltd., which is a little above the local minimum wage of RMB 574. But usually the overtime compensation covers at least forty percent of monthly net income.

35. In Stone Town, there are about twenty to thirty labor agencies serving large factories like Power Ltd. Some labor agencies have government background and have official licenses. However, most of them have no official licenses. The development of labor agencies is a result of a demand for a large but flexible labor force.

36. The introduction fee is the promissory money paid by a job applicant to a labor agency if the job application through the agency is successful.

37. In my interview with the general manager, he denied such place discrimination. However, in labor agencies, they said they did not recruit male workers from two provinces. Workers in Power Ltd. also confirmed place discrimination.

38. Besides Power Ltd., two other large Taiwanese factories in Stone Town refuse to recruit male workers from these two provinces. I think the main reason is that these factories want to reduce the high percentage of workers from the two provinces in their labor force in order to avoid the risk of collective actions. In these factories, more than half of the workers are from the two provinces. Compared with female workers, male workers are more likely to be organizers in workers' collective actions.

39. For example, in 2004, Hong Kong Christian Industrial Committee (HKCIC), a labor NGO, had criticized the poor working conditions in Power Ltd. In the same year, the Catholic Agency for Overseas Development (CAFOD), a United Kingdom-based international aid agency, had taken Power Ltd. as a case to show inhuman working conditions in China's computer manufacturing industry in the campaign report of “Clean up your Computer.” See HKCIC, Research on the Working and Safety Health Conditions of Workers in the Computer Manufacturing Industry in Foreign Invested Enterprises in Mainland China, 2004; CAFOD, Clean Up Your Computer: Working Conditions in the Electronics Sector, 2004: http://www.cafod.org.uk/policy_and_analysis/clean_up_your_computer (accessed January 27, 2008).

40. In my interview with the general manager, he also commented that western people did not fully know about the Chinese situation and sometimes their requirements are difficult to implement. I also found some inconsistencies in my interviews with workers. For example, although the firm said underage workers should not work at night or do overtime and posted it as a rule on the notice boards, workers said it was impractical because assembly lines are based on group work and do not allow anyone's absence. Therefore, the underage workers still keep the same work time as their line peers.

41. Female workers do not need guarantors because male workers are more easily labeled as troublemakers or as organizers of collective action.

42. The essential reason for labor shortages is the relative decline of wages. Maybe migrant workers' withdrawing their labor is a passive and individual action. However, such individual or unconscious resistance has contributed to the labor shortages in the Pearl River Delta, which have received great attention from the government, media, and the public. For example, Xiaodong Bao, “Lao Gong Duanque” (Labor Shortage), Nanfang Dushi Bao (Southern Metropolitan Daily), March 3, 2004; Zuojun Li, “Minggong huang de genyuan shi yuanli huang, ruhe jiejue” (Disenfranchising Migrant Workers is the Ultimate Reasons for Labor Shortage: How to Solve it?), Nanfang Zhoumo (Southern Weekly), August 24, 2004.

43. Anita Chan commented that in the crisis of labor shortages, migrant workers in China were “engaging in a form of spontaneous collective action and initiating changes in China's macrolabor market.” See Anita Chan, “Recent Trends in Chinese Labor Issues: Signs of Change,” China Perspectives 57 (2005): 25.

44. For example, the minimum wage in Dongguan was increased to RMB 574 in March 2005 and then to RMB 690 in September 2006. In 2001–2004, it was only RMB 450 and had not been changed for four years. And some cities even increased the minimum wage with higher frequency. The minimum wage in Suzhou was RMB 620 in July 2004, RMB 690 in November 2005, and then RMB 750 in September 2006. It will be increased to RMB 850 in October 2007.