Families and Factories in the Field: A Critical Approach to Understanding Migrant Farmworkers and their Families on a Corporate Vegetable Farm in Northwestern China

This paper examines the role of family in the process of labor control on large-scale vegetable farm in China by looking to their everyday life. In doing so, I spent two weeks in summer 2019 on the vegetable farm to do participant observation, and also did follow-up semi-structured interviews with both the manager of the farm and 11 households both face-to-face and through online apps. To begin with, I explore the formation of this form of family migration, which are found that the presence of family is not at the behest of the boss, but rather a result from the subcontracting system and a rational choice related to the family cycle. Then, by looking into their gender division of household labor, I found that economic independence did not alleviate wives’ burden on doing housework; rather, most of the wives were captured in the “double shifts”, where they performed at home in addition to the paid work performed in the labor market. I further argue that even for those husbands who are willing to help with certain type of housework, it is largely a pragmatic solution rather than an ideological transformation of the gender norm, which, in turn, does favor to the farm owner. Last, I argue that instead of distracting the farmworkers, the presence of family indeed does benefit to the farm owners by playing an important role in the process of labor control, in terms of preventing shirking in the pre-harvest stage and lowering their mobility in the peak seasons. In this specific case of corporate farm, the conspiracy of “capitalism and patriarchy” was found