However, the PRC is determined to minimise the capacity of its proletariat to fight national and international capitalism, and this gives the process of proletarianisation in China certain specific characteristics.[9]
After 1949 the Chinese state played the determining role in shaping industrial relations, primarily through the Five Year Plans and the All China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU). With the transition to capitalism the core of that intervention moved to collaboration with the largest employers to provide a recruitment-work-residence pattern that produces an exceptionally profitable and productive labour force.[10]
In China, the state plays a major role in the labour markets by regulating the movement of labour from rural to urban industrial areas. This is done through local governments and inter-province co-ordination and co-operation for the provision of labour directly to local factories, to the SEZs and the cities. For example, the inner provinces of Hunan and Guangxi have long-standing undertakings to systematically provide labour through their own recruiting offices for the construction sites and factories of Guangdong at a rate which attempts to ensure that labour costs remains at one fortieth those in the USA.[11]
The provision of cheap labour, for every kind of work, has become an important activity for the governments of inland provinces because they benefit directly from the fees paid by the companies to which they supply labour, and indirectly from the monies remitted home. The local governments are ideally placed to be the recruiting agents, to co-ordinate supply and demand, screen and recruit (predominantly) single females aged between 17 and 22, supply all necessary documents (no fewer than six separate visas might be required for the major cities), and arrange transportation from village to factory.[12] The recruits would invariably be eager to leave their villages where there is an oppressive patriarchal system, little or no schooling after the age of 16 due to cut-backs in education, few job opportunities and, possibly, to flee an unwanted arranged marriage.
By the end of the 1990s, these government agencies were complicit in widespread illegal practices such as covering up the failure by the hiring company to provide work contracts as required by the Labour Laws of 1995 (and 2008). Without a contract it is impossible to claim such entitlements as paid maternity leave or for a worker to take an employer to court for compensation for occupational injury. To cut costs, migrant workers are deliberately kept in ignorance of their entitlements.[13]
However, for the Chinese working class industrialisation and urbanisation are two different processes. The peasants come to the cities to work but have no right to live in those cities and must return to the village in which they are registered at the end of their contract. From this arrangement arises the extraordinary situation that, for example, only 30% of Shenzhen’s population are categorised as permanent residents.[14] This system has its origins in ancient China and applies even to the children of migrant workers born in the cities because status is passed on through the mother. The hukou system is now a hereditary system for ensuring a generous supply of low-cost rural labour for the SEZs. It saves urban governments which co-operate so willingly with the capitalist enterprises from having to meet medical costs for these migrants and their children who are not entitled to attend the local urban state school. In fact there is an entire range of benefits and rights which are denied the migrant labourers, including the right to vote.
The migrant worker is a temporary resident, tolerated in the towns only so long as s/he is employed. Any action of which the employer disapproves could mean not only dismissal but removal of the residence permit and forced return to the home village. Because the migrant worker has no right to stay in the city, residence permits are a means by which the state attempts to control both labour mobility and worker dissent. The benefits for employers are immediately obvious, they have access to an abundant supply of cheap labour to hold down costs, and there is substantially less likelihood of organised labour solidarity to fight for better wages and working conditions.
Richer elements from the countryside, however, can obtain an urban residence permit provided they are married, purchase a residence within the city limits, and hold down a post for a prescribed period of time, typically a year. Given the prohibitive cost of apartments in China, migrant workers are excluded from this arrangement.
The dormitory-labour regime is an integral and important part of the system for the control of migrant workers to maintain China’s status as the global workplace. Workers’ dormitories are temporary residences for single workers (the great majority) for one or two years. Usually they are close to or within the grounds of the factory they serve, integrating working and non-working life so that the company exerts exceptionally close control over the workers’ activities. Such dormitories are communal multi-storey buildings, housing hundreds or even thousands of workers. Generally, between eight and twenty workers share a room with communal washing and toilet facilities. Living space is intensely collective, only the area within the closed curtains of the worker’s bunk is private space. To cut costs there is always pressure to overcrowd the dormitories which can make them dirty and unhygienic.
Work teams receive pay based on collective performance; hence, the sharing of rooms can increase pressure to conform and perform. However, many companies have a policy of assigning dormitory places at random. This means that there is frequent disruption of sleep because of different working hours, there may even be nightshift and day-shift workers mixed into the same dormitory. The purpose is to break up any existing social networks, and hinder communication and interaction between workers on the same shift. It is believed that this reduces the self-organisation of the workers. At the same time, it also makes the factory a solitary place for newcomers, who, having forfeited their personal and social lives, encounter great loneliness and anxiety, and the resulting alienation can lead to acts of desperation. Suicide is the extreme manifestation of the migrant work experience.
Dormitories are ideal for the Just-in-Time production system, so favoured by international companies. Confined to the factory compound, workers can be asked at a moment’s notice to work overtime or to work during their rest day to ensure the company meets its delivery deadlines. Living in company-supplied dormitories with extended work hours ties the worker to one employer because it is almost impossible for workers to look for another job.
In total, the pressures on these young women are unlike anything previously experienced by the working classes. Apple made the world’s largest ever recorded profit in the last quarter of 2014, nearly US$18 billion, mostly from sales of 74.5 million iPhones made by second generation female migrant workers in China. Apple supplier Foxconn employs over one million workers across China[15] and its working conditions were the subject of an investigation by Pun Ngai and Jenny Chan after 14 young migrant workers committed suicide, and another four attempted suicide during 2010. All were between 17 and 25 years old. This section draws on the investigation of working conditions at Foxconn by Pun and Chan.[16]
Foxconn moved its production base from Taiwan to mainland China in the late 1980s to benefit from state support and cheap labour. This support has enabled Foxconn to grow rapidly and now it dominates the global market by producing half of the world’s electronic products. Initially confined to the Shenzhen SEZ, its thirty factories are now dotted all over China with the smallest factory employing some 20,000 and the largest over 400,000.
This geographical expansion has enabled Foxconn to continue to tap into the lower cost labour available in northern, central, and western China. With the encouragement of the central government, these local governments are creating a business friendly environment by promising to provide access to land, roads, railways, bank loans and labour. Naturally, the local governments are in competition, each fighting the others for Foxconn investment.
For example, after the Sichuan government won a US$2 billion Foxconn investment project a total of 14 villages were demolished to create space for a 15 km2 Foxconn “Living Zone”. It is reported that the Sichuan leaders waived a “significant” amount of rent and tax and provided land “far below the market rate”. In addition the Sichuan government provided a free labour recruitment service, with local government officials being given a recruitment quota, setting up stalls at the sides of roads and escorting recruits to the factory gates. It is claimed that over-eager officials told villagers that if no-one from a family went to work at Foxconn, then that family would be fined 1,000 yuan.[17]
Foxconn’s largest factory complex is in Longhua, Shenzhen, and has more than 430,000 workers. Within the walls of Foxconn, most of the employees are young women migrants who work and live there with an average age of about 21 years. Such women are preferred for their supposed docility, nimble fingers, lack of experience of worker self-organisation and preparedness to pay attention to the monotonous, detailed, and mind-numbing work undertaken.
Company managers refer to it as the ‘Foxconn campus’ and it is the model factory presented to visitors from media organisations and other inspection units. This ‘campus’ includes the factories themselves, twelve storey dormitories, warehouses, an employee care centre including a counselling clinic and hospital facilities, a library and bookstores, a post office, a small fire brigade, an exclusive television network, an educational institute, numerous sports facilities, supermarkets, cafeterias and restaurants, and even a wedding dress shop.
In designing its production lines, Foxconn was able to draw on lessons learned around the world ever since Henry Ford first introduced mass production of automobiles. Thus, notwithstanding its facilities, Longhua is a dormitory-labour regime which seeks to organise workers’ activities 24 hours a day to maximise profit. Terry Gou, the CEO and founder of Foxconn has made clear the philosophy which underpins the ‘campus’: “Leadership is a righteous dictatorship.”[18]
Production lines have two properties: minimise human qualities in order to standardise production and eliminate errors, and a division of labour so precise and detailed that workers become cogs in the machine. Today, Foxconn production operators in general are engaged in endless, mechanical repetition of movements made as fast and as simple as possible.
Work is timed to the second and must meet targets set by time and motion studies, at the limit of what workers can produce: “I take a motherboard from the line, scan the logo, put it in an antistatic-electricity bag, stick on a label, and place it on the line. … Every ten seconds I finish five tasks” reported one young woman. In a typical day she might repeat this operation more than 15,000 times, little wonder that so many of these workers claim they feel worthless. It is soul destroying.
If one worker commits an infringement of the rules the entire shift – possibly a hundred or more workers – must remain after work. The woman (80% of these workers are women) is forced to stand and read aloud a statement of self-criticism. She must be loud enough to be heard. The line leader drives home this lesson in humiliation by asking if the worker at the far end of the workshop clearly heard the mistake made. This process forms part of a policy used to penalize workers for petty offences and so enhance shop-floor discipline. A worker can “lose points for having long nails, being late, yawning, eating, or sitting on the floor” and such loss of points jeopardises the monthly bonus. Production workers who stand during work are supposed to receive a ten-minute break every two hours but this only applies if they meet the hourly production target. After a 12-hour shift, factory-floor managers and supervisors can lecture production workers for as long as half an hour, evaluating the shift’s output and listing those areas where performance needs to be improved.
The hours worked and the wage rates paid at Foxconn appear to fit the national pattern and Foxconn likes to point out that workers sign written “agreements” before working overtime. However, since workers have no effective trade union representation or protection, such agreements are meaningless, and whilst Chinese Labour Law specifies a maximum of 36 hours overtime per month, Foxconn workers can work 80 hours of overtime a month. Effectively, the working day is 12 hours, leaving the workers exhausted to the point of tears, for as little as US$300 a month. Workers are lucky to get one rest day a week.
However, despite the near total domination of workers’ lives, the close confinement means that if an issue of common interest arises – e.g. the local government decides not to raise minimum rates – the workers are in a position to discuss and take immediate action. Hence, once action is agreed, the dormitory arrangement can greatly strengthen the workers’ unity.[19]
It has also been found that workers use proximity to form study groups and that they listen to educational programmes on the radio, particularly on labour law to help them in formulating demands on employers: e.g. that in law each worker must have a contract, that the rates paid must be equal to or greater than the local legal minimum wage, that the company must pay social insurance premiums, and so on.[20]
Clearly, the Foxconn management exercises as much control as possible over the workers, yet despite these efforts, Pun and Chan found the workers resisted in many ways, including go slows, stoppages, small-scale strikes, and sometimes even sabotage. As reported by Foxconn workers, on one particular occasion they deliberately failed to meet targets in order to have senior management remove a rude and harsh line leader, and on another occasion everybody stopped working when there was a rush order in order to gain specific concessions.[21] The lessons learned at grandmother’s knee are paying dividends.
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Engels, F. Conditions of the Working Class in England, 1887, www.marxists.org.
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Pun, N. and Smith C. Putting Transnational Labour Process in its Place, Work, Employment and Society 21(1)27-45, March 2007.
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CLB, Wages in China, clb.org.hk.
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Pun N. et al. The Role of the State…, Global Labour Journal, 1(1)132-151, 2010.
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Pun N. and Lu H. A Culture of Violence, The China Journal, No64, July 2010.
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Pun, N. Women Workers … Gender & Development, 12(2)29-36 July 2004.
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BBC Panorama programme, 18 December 2014.
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Pun, N., and Chan, J. Global Capital, the State, and Chinese Workers: The Foxconn Experience, Modern China: 38(4)383-410, 2012.
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Economic Observer, 4 May 2012.
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Mail Online, 26 June 2010.
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Pun, N. Gender and Class, International Labour and Working Class History, No81, pp178-181, Spring 2012.
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Pun, N., and Lu, H. Unfinished Proletarianization …, Modern China, 36(5)493-519, Sept. 2010.
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Pun and Chan, Global Capital, … Op. cit.