A ‘race to the bottom’ or variegated work regimes? Industrial relocation, the changing migrant labor regime, and worker agency in China’s electronics industry

Abstract

This article examines how capital/industrial relocation interacts with work regime dynamics through a case study of geographical relocation of four electronics multinationals from China’s coastal regions to its interior. Based on fieldwork conducted in Chongqing and Chengdu between 2012 and 2017, I find that a migrant labor regime in coastal regions has shifted to a local-labor based development strategy in western regions when capital moves inland. This shift, I argue, has increased labor agency and given rise to capital’s labor control problems and work regime dynamics that are unique to the relocation process and western China. Specifically, rather than a race-to-the-bottom in labor conditions, three distinct work regimes have emerged in the new sites of production, depending on firms’ positions in the global production networks (GPNs) and workers’ responses/agency embedded in the GPNs and local labor institutions. They are: (1) advanced quality production and negotiated commitment between workers and management; (2) lean-and-dual and fragmented worker discontent; and (3) flexible Taylorism and high-level worker resistance. The evidence highlights the important role of local state in building location-sensitive labor institutions and workers’ constrained, varied agency in influencing work regime dynamics, which challenge many assumptions of the race-to-the-bottom argument associated with capital relocation.

Keywords:

• Worker agency
• global production networks
• work regime
• industrial relocation
• migrant labor regime
• labor control
• location-sensitive labor institutions
• electronics industry
• China
• global value chains

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Gary Herrigel, Mary Gallagher, Beverly Silver, Tobias Schulze-Cleven, Lauren Olsen, Laura Orrico, Rebbeca Tesfai, the RIPE editor, and four anonymous reviewers for comments on this paper. The paper also benefited from discussions and comments from participants at the ‘Varieties of Backlash’ workshop at the University of Michigan and the Center for East Asian Studies colloquium at the University of Pennsylvania. Funding for this research was made possible, in part, by research grants from Temple University, for which the author is extremely grateful.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 For important exceptions, see McKay (2006) and Mosley (2011).

2 I use ‘work regimes’ to refer to systems/ways to organize work, localize production, and control labor at the workplace level. A work regime consists of work organization, production and human resources practices, and employment relations. For more detailed discussion on the notion of work regimes, see McKay (2006, p.19).

3 Except for Intelligence Co., which shut down its Shanghai plant and opened a new plant in Chengdu, all other cases have kept their manufacturing bases in the YRD, while opening new plants in western China.

4 For elaboration on capitalism’s inherent contradictions between crises of profitability and crisis of legitimacy, see Silver (2003).

5 Minimum wages in China are set by local governments and vary widely by region. They are considered a good indicator of wage levels in labor-intensive manufacturing sectors, since employers generally set workers’ base pay at the local minimum wage level.

6 China’s 2011 Social Insurance Law attempts to establish a national framework of social security. The law states that the social insurance system should cover all employees (including migrant workers), and social insurance benefits should remain with workers when they move. However, this has proved difficult to implement because of the highly localized social welfare system in China.

7 The CWTS calculates working hours and overtime based on weekly, monthly, or annual cycles, rather than the statutory standard working time stipulated by China’s Labor Law.

8 According to government regulation, student interns should not work more than eight hours a day, and internships should not be organized, arranged, or managed through intermediary agencies.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Lu Zhang

Lu Zhang is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Global Studies at Temple University. Her research focuses on globalization, labor and labor movements, development, and the political economy of China. She is the author of Inside China’s Automobile Factories: The Politics of Labor and Worker Resistance (Cambridge University Press, 2015). She holds a Ph.D. in Sociology from the Johns Hopkins University and a Master’s Degree in Sociology from the University of Warwick. She is currently working on her book project, which explores how the movements of capital interact with labor politics and local development through a comparative case study of the global electronics industry from China’s coastal region to its interior.