More than just breadwinners: how Chinese male migrant workers’ family relationships shape their factory labour process

ABSTRACT

Labour scholars have carefully examined how being daughters, wives, and mothers influences women’s labour process. In contrast, labour studies on men have rarely considered their family involvement except for being the breadwinners. Based on an ethnographic study on rural migrant workers in a Chinese factory, this article presents more complex work-family mechanisms for male workers. First, the married male migrant workers expressed deep family commitment. Shouldering family responsibilities made them more labour conservative, not only because they prioritized having a stable income but also because they empathized with the family obligations of married managers. However, the same family value could also lead to labour resistance when it was disrespected by the management. Second, the parents and relatives of single young male migrant workers played crucial roles in directing them to factories and made it difficult for them to resist unpleasant working conditions or leave. And the anticipation of future marriage further shaped the young male migrant workers’ labour practices. This article contributes to labour studies by demonstrating the indispensability of family to the analysis of male workers’ labour practices. It also challenges the gender stereotypes of male breadwinner/female caregiver and presents working-class men as being deeply embedded in family lives.

RÉSUMÉ

Les spécialistes du travail ont découvert avec soin comment les rôles différents d’une femme, soit une fille, une épouse ou une mère, influence leur performance au travail. En revanche, les études sur les travailleurs masculins, considérés comme le soutien de toute la famille, ont rarement pris en compte leur vie familiale. Basé sur une étude ethnographique à propos des travailleurs migrants ruraux dans une usine chinoise, cet article présente des mécanismes plus complexes à travers lesquels leur famille agit sur leur processus de travail. Premièrement, les travailleurs migrants de sexe masculin mariés ont exprimé un profond engagement familial. Le rôle du pilier de la famille les rend plus conservateurs dans le rapport capital-travail, non seulement pour un revenu quasi stable, mais aussi pour une empathie avec des directeurs mariés. Cependant, la même valeur familiale pourrait également entraîner une résistance des travailleurs lorsque celle-ci ne serait pas respectée par la direction. Deuxièmement, les parents et les proches de jeunes travailleurs migrants célibataires ont joué un rôle crucial en les dirigeant vers des usines. Ce sont toujours eux qui empêchent les pauvres jeunes de quitter leur travail ou d’exprimer leur mécontentement. D’ailleurs, l’attente de leur mariage futur pèse également sur le travail des jeunes travailleurs migrants. Cet article contribue aux études sur le travail en démontrant le caractère indispensable de la famille pour analyser les pratiques de travail des hommes. Il remet également en question les stéréotypes de genre comme homme travailleurs, femmes ménagères. Le lien entre les hommes de la classe ouvrière et leur famille, allant plus loin, ne se limite pas au soutien économique.

KEYWORDS:

• Factory workers
• gender stereotypes
• male breadwinner
• work-family articulation
• capital-labor relations

MOTS-CLÉS:

• Ouvriers d'usine
• stéréotypes de genre
• soutien de famille
• travail-famille articulation
• capitale-travail relations

Acknowledgement

I would like to thank Dr. Patricia Hill Collins, Dr. Jeffrey Lucas, and Dr. Yang Cao for their patient help with the preparation of the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 The state has been adjusting its policies regarding rural migrant workers over the decades. For example, with the market reforms of the 1980s and 1990s, the state gradually loosened the migration restriction and allowed qualified rural migrants to become legal residents in designated towns and small cities (Chan, 2010; Chan & Zhang, 1999). But welcoming rural migrant workers into the few wealthy metropolitan cities like Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen remained off limits (Buckley, 2014). In fact, recent events show the exact opposite trend, as Beijing evicted and drove out rural migrant workers on a massive scale (Buckley, 2017; Buckley, Sui-Lee, & Wu, 2017; Hernandez & Zhao, 2017; Ramzy, 2017). The big cities have also been expelling rural migrant children from urban schools as well as shutting down ‘uncertified’ schools built by NGOs to accommodate rural migrant children (Hernandez & Zhao, 2017).

2 More extensive discussions of complex experience of Chinese masculinity are available in the literature. See, for example, Chan (2019); Kong (2019); Liu (2019); and Wang (2017).

3 The exact locations and the real names of the factories are concealed for confidentiality.

4 All conversations were conducted in mandarin, and the transcript was later translated by the author into English.

5 I did encounter one male migrant worker who suffered from depression and insomnia, partly because he felt extremely guilty about not being able to take care of his old and sick father who lived in the countryside. This had impact on his work experience in the sense that he seemed to have lost interest of bonding with his co-workers during or after work.

Additional information

Funding

This project was funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) Dissertation Improvement Grant (2016), entitled as Rural Migrant Workers and Periods of Structural Change; Project Number: 1602481.

Notes on contributors

Rachel Y. Guo

Rachel Yu Guo received her Sociology PhD degree from the University of Maryland – College Park in 2018 and is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at Albright College in Pennsylvania in the United States.