Over the past 30 years, labour relations, and, indeed, the entirety of working-class politics in China, have been dramatically altered by economic reforms. In this review, we focus on the two key processes of commodification and casualization and their implications for workers. On the one hand, these processes have resulted in the destruction of the old social contract and the emergence of marketized employment relations. This has implied a loss of the job security and generous benefits enjoyed by workers in the planned economy. On the other hand, commodification and casualization have produced significant but localized resistance from the Chinese working class. Up until now, the activities of labour non-governmental organizations and of the official trade unions have contributed to the state's effort of individualizing and institutionalizing labour conflict resolution through labour law and arbitration mechanisms. Finally, we provide a brief discussion of the impact of 2008's Labour Contract Law and the outbreak of the economic crisis on labour relations. We conclude that the continual imbalance of power at the point of production presents a real dilemma for the Chinese state as it attempts to shift away from a model of development dependent on exports.

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Remaking the World of Chinese Labour: A 30-Year Retrospective

https://gcoe.ier.hit-u.ac.jp/research/discussion/2008/pdf/gd09-131.pdf

Identity, Inequality, and Happiness: Evidence from Urban China

We would like to express our heartfelt gratitude to Mark Selden, Chris Smith, Dimitri Kessler, Boy Luthje, Ellen David Friedman, Diana Beaumont, John Sexton, Amanda Bell, Garrett Brown, Chantal Peyer, Pauline Overeem, Jeffrey Ballinger, and activists from SACOM. We thank deeply the many scholars and union organizers around the world who contribute to improve labor conditions at Foxconn and other workplaces.

Suicide as protest for the new generation of Chinese migrant workers : Foxconn, global capital, and the state

Evaluating practices and drivers of corporate social responsibility: the Chinese context

Access to social insurance in urban China: a comparative study of rural-urban and urban-urban migrants in Beijing

Labour relations in modern China have long been unbalanced. During the Mao era, all workers were supposed to contribute their labour without reservation to the state-owned employing ‘units’, which were responsible for setting wages, as well as providing health care, housing, children’s education, and even arranging marriages. Beginning with Deng Xiaoping’s reforms in the 1980s, many state-owned enterprises were transformed into private businesses, but the organizational style — absolute power concentrated at the top of the enterprise — had not changed significantly. However, with the opening of China’s economy to outside investment and enterprises, labour-management relations characteristic of the rest of East Asia, as well as other non-communist nations, have increasingly replaced the older Maoist style relationship between enterprise and individual. Of course this shift to an overtly capitalist brand of labour relations has not by itself done anything to ameliorate the hierarchy and authoritarianism endemic to the Chinese workplace. Commissar or capitalist, management in modern China has too often ruled with an iron fist.

Wang Haiyan

Papers

China’s New Labour Contract Law: Is China Moving Towards Increased Power for Workers?