Informalising Labour in Asia's Global Factory

Abstract

This article analyses the way in which informality becomes the common feature of capitalist labour in globalising Asia. As the mobility of capital has developed, different industries and production processes are now neatly interwoven. This transnationally co-ordinated capitalism subjugates almost all of Asia's population to the expanding circuit of capital that builds hierarchical forms of the division of labour for the creation and realisation of profit. In this “global factory,” capitalist labour becomes the common basis of living for the people of Asia. At the same time, the global factory gives a particular informal nature to capitalist labour and changes its social form in Asian societies as mobile capital requires flexible and disposable forms of capitalist labour. Throughout Asia, unwaged workers and workers in informal employment are increasing in number. These workers lack legal, institutional and, most of all, union protection. It is urgent for the labour movement in Asia to develop a new organising and solidarity strategy that addresses the comprehensive recomposition of labour.

Key Words:

• Global factory
• mobile capital
• social labour
• informalisation of labour
• labour movement

Acknowledgement

Parts of this article appeared in issues No. 58 and 59 (2006) of Asian Labour Update, a quarterly magazine published by the Asia Monitor Resource Centre. This article combines and revises those earlier essays.

Notes

¹ Increase in the social cost of labour can be caused by an increase in wages, increase in indirect labour costs, such as taxation for welfare cost, and the increasing cost of exploitation that increases investment cost, which fails to accompany proportionately the increasing rate of exploitation (increasing organic composition of capital in Marx's term); in other words, costly investment without making workers work harder or faster. In the last case, as the facility cost per unit of labour increases, the rate of profit tends to decrease. That is, the exploitation of labour becomes more expensive (Holloway, 1995: 24-5).

² The “Toyota system” is a production, supply chain and management system developed by the Japanese car maker Toyota. It is known for its pursuit of slimmer workforces through effective component supply flow with the Just-In-Time system, and workers' participation for continuous innovation in the work process.

³ Inspired by the concept of “social workers,” created by Italian labour advocates and, in particular, as used by Hardt and Negri (1994), we use the concept of “social labour” to describe the contemporary condition under which the whole of society is permeated with the rule of value-producing capitalist labour. However, here “social labour” emphasises the aspect of labour being a dominant form of social “tie” between people inside and outside the factory, rather than of labour being “immaterial.” While “factory labour” describes the partial domination of capital over social relations through the imposition of capitalist labour in the immediate labour process, social labour refers to the more comprehensive and global domination of capital over social relations at the level of society. The global factory is expressing “time and space” in which social labour exists as the dominant form of social inter-connection.

⁴ Although capitalist labour becomes the common substance to the livelihood of people, this development does not come with a monolithic response from the working class. On the contrary, divisions within working people tend to develop even further on the basis of stark uneven development between industries and countries as well between core and peripheral workforces. Along the line of the division, the emergence of the contradiction of socialised capitalist labour takes different forms that can be individual, collective, class-conscious or non-class-conscious. In short, socialised capitalist labour does not automatically create a material basis for a united response from the workers.

⁵ The informal form of “employment” here refers to the wide range of people whose working relation is based on direct and indirect “wage relations.” This informal “employment,” however does not cover the “unwaged” form of capitalist work, such as many forms of self-employment. Normally, self-employed are related to employers or corporation service users through commercial, not wage, relations, even if they work for corporations. Although their relations with employers are vague and untraceable and sometimes practically do not exist, they are still doing capitalist work, for their work functions to reproduce capital (by reproducing the labour power of others, contributing to produced value, etc.). It is also obvious that the reproduction of their labour is subjected not to the concrete achievement of their work but to the “amount” of money s/he earns. In many cases, they have no means of production and cannot afford employees. Furthermore, many of these workers are getting in and out of employment relations and stay unemployed in between. Many self-employed are as vulnerable as informal employees in that they enjoy no social protection, such as social insurance, let alone union protection.