In this study of labour unrest in Shenzhen, Chris King-Chi Chan illuminates with a series of detailed case studies some of the game-changing developments in labour relations since 2003–2004. It was about this time that two converging employment trends in the Pearl River Delta (PRD) emboldened migrant workers and gave rise to generally successful labour protests. First, the once seemingly limitless supply of migrant labour for the region's export-oriented factories rather quickly declined and led to labour shortages. Second, local officials who had once looked the other way began to do more than pay lip service to the enforcement of new and existing labour and wage regulations. In this sense, Chan's study is extremely timely, as it documents what I think will become a watershed period in the history of labour relations in China.
The book's theoretical framework adheres to older questions of class formation and class consciousness in the context of global capitalism. This leads the author to conclude that the labour conflict he documents among migrant workers in the PRD represents “class struggle without class organization.” Perhaps it is too soon to make firm generalizations about the identities and ideologies among the new and decidedly more contentious generation of migrant workers. The rich detail in Chan's cases certainly suggests a more nuanced and complex picture than that which can be provided in a class-centred analysis.
The author spent considerable amounts of time in the communities and workplaces of migrants employed in three companies and branch factories in and around Shenzhen, over a three-year period beginning in 2005. From this ethnographic data, Chan draws a portrait of a much more assertive, strike-prone migrant labour force than the earlier generations of migrant workers documented in the same region by past studies. The soaring numbers of labour disputes and the largely successful demands for higher wages have occurred in the absence of unions or other modes of labour representation. As Chan documents in a chapter on unions and other forms of representation, the stark reality remains that NGOs and various corporate social responsibility campaigns do little to provide adequate representation in the face of the party-controlled union branches. If anything, the lack of functioning mechanisms to represent workers' interests leads to unmet grievances and greater frequency of protests.
One of the most significant and novel observations that emerges from Chan's account is the role of leadership in labour resistance. In a labour regime in which union branches of the Party-state act as little more than extensions of personnel departments and management, those who oversee workers on the factory floor are most often the leaders of walkouts and other forms of “wildcat strikes.” Chan shows that the same native place networks and gangs based on local affinities that helped owners and managers to recruit and control migrant labour played a catalyzing role in leading the strikes. The dense networks of patron–client relations among supervisors, skilled workers, and production workers that facilitated managerial control when labour was in abundant supply were also crucial in co-ordinating and leading resistance when management tried to impose cost-cutting measures such as internal contracting. In this sense, labour unrest in the contemporary PRD bears fascinating parallels with the accounts by Elizabeth Perry, Emily Honig and others, of labour relations and strikes by loosely organized semi-skilled workers in pre-1949 Shanghai.
The strikes documented in the empirical chapters also show conclusively how labour shortages in the Pearl River Delta have increased the bargaining power of workers. With the ability to find employment elsewhere, workers can credibly threaten to quit. In response, management has increased wages and accepted demands for occupational safety and health measures, social insurance (including health care and pensions), and other benefits. Chan also cites evidence of spiralling minimum wage levels, as local governments engage in a competition – a virtuous cycle, from the perspective of workers – to increase minimum wages in order to attract and retain much-needed labour.
The author also enters the debate over how best to interpret the motives of labour protestors. He stresses the fact that the demands raised in various strike episodes were generally focused on wages, benefits, and other work-specific grievances. From this he concludes that protest is more about the pursuit of interests, even the pursuit of class interests, than the pursuit of justice, rights, or claims based in China's legal regime. Whether this distinction holds up depends on the extent to which interests can be separated from the values and institutions in which workers derive their pursuit of, for example, higher pay or safer working conditions. Nonetheless, this book's rich documentation of a transformative moment in labour relations makes it a valuable addition to the study of labour in China.
