All Workers are Precarious: The ‘Dangerous Class’ in China’s Labour Regime

Many labour experts have discussed the ‘dormitory labour regime’ in China’s manufacturing industry, addressing especially how the dormitory housing offered to workers nearby their workplaces comes with paternalist managerial practices facilitating control over the labourers and maximizing exploitation. As dormitories have been less frequently deployed within manufacturing factories, others have contended, based on data collected between 2010 and 2014 from seven garment factories in the Pearl River Delta, that a new labour regime of ‘conciliatory despotism’ has been forming. As we shall see in this essay, however, there is clear evidence of what deserves to be called a new ‘precarious labour regime’ emerging within the high-tech manufacturing sector in both processing and assembly factories. This regime operates directly in the production process through three specific mechanisms of labour control, elucidated in this essay, which are applied to formal workers. Through a phenomenon known as the ‘cascade effect’, the firms at the top of global supply chains place pressure on all firms in the chain, which with their tight profit margins in turn pass the pressure on to their employees, thereby exploiting the labourers who are notably rural migrant workers. In the labour regime of these high-tech factories, transnational capital, local state authorities, and factory management combine to treat rural migrants as cheap disposable labour without proper employment security, regardless of the signing of labour contracts. Capitalists increase profits and maximally decrease labour costs through this new labour regime. Due to the high frequency of involuntary employment turnovers this new labour regime entails, formal workers are ‘precarious’ even within large and formal high-tech factories. These precarious migrant factory workers are at the core of the making of a new Chinese working class. Since the members of the class are increasing in number dramatically, identify themselves as a group of ‘gongyou’ (workmates) with common interests, and are willing to take collective actions for the improvement of their employment and social security for themselves and families, this new class is dangerous for both capitalists and central and local governments