Labor, Class Formation, and China's Informationized Policy of Economic Development by Hong Yu;

Author:Hong, Yu; [Hong, Yu]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 678208
Publisher: Lexington Books/Fortress Academic

CARROT-AND-STICK: MANAGERIAL DEVICES AND LABOR DISCIPLINE

The modes of labor control in the ICT sector are perceived as paradigmatic because electronics manufacturing was one of the few sectors to undergo a systematic production globalization in the 1960s and, then, it pioneered the development of communication and production technologies to facilitate more complex cross-border production networks in the 1990s.80 However, as Mohseni pointed out, rather than break away from “traditional” industries, the electronics and computer industry has perpetuated the capitalist imperative of ruthlessly saving labor costs through labor control techniques. In the mass production stage of creating high-tech products, the labor process continues to be labor intensive, highly exploitative, and strictly following Taylorist and Fordist principles; even corporate global expansion to peripheral parts of the capitalist world is largely motivated by the drive of saving on labor costs.81 Through globalization of production, transnational corporations get closer to new markets, but it does not reduce, in the eyes of foreign investors, the attraction of “diligent and qualified Chinese workers as the most important factor.”82

Besides the drive of transnational capital, the state also plays a central role in constructing China’s labor relations. In particular, the state has acquiesced to the expansion of capitalist relations spearheaded by foreign-invested firms in the electronics and computer industry. Ever since the beginning of China’s economic reform, the state has given foreign-invested firms considerable autonomy in the management of labor forces. In the late 1970s, for example, foreign firms were granted by the 1979 Joint Venture Law with the power to “hire and fire” and to “determine wages and bonuses as the market dictate.”83 The decentralization of the foreign investment approval process and the opening up of more sectors and regions to foreign capital further incited unchecked competitions among local governments for foreign capital; local governments tended to undertake “more accommodating and less restrictive postures” toward foreign investors in the field of labor relations.84 At the outset, the state endorsed capitalist relations not so much to contain costs as to attract foreign investment. This was particularly true in the ICT sector because, as we saw in chapter 2, the state authorized foreign direct investments to jumpstart China’s ICT production and exports.

Indeed, labor relations in the ICT sector have been shaped concertedly by neoliberal globalization and by the state-initiated transition to the market economy. As China-based ICT firms are mostly engaged in “nondifferentiable production activities,”85 the working conditions, “from working with high-powered microscopes for assembling components, to using hazardous chemicals for washing the wafers, to working in ‘clean rooms’ where the most sensitive computer components are fashioned, are dangerous and unbearable.”86 Although the overcrowded, government-engineered labor market has compelled workers to accept jobs in this industry, other managerial techniques are still needed to maintain workplace discipline and compliance. Control devices in the workplace, including technical architecture, depersonalized management, divisive reward systems, and hierarchical job structures, help strengthen the capitalist power relations and subsume workforces under the organizational control of capital. Recognizing the orchestrated nature of constructing the capitalist labor relationship,

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