Labour in the Clothing Industry in the Asia Pacific by Vicki Crinis Adrian Vickers

Author:Vicki Crinis, Adrian Vickers [Vicki Crinis, Adrian Vickers]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781138125704
Barnesnoble:
Goodreads: 30409659
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2016-11-23T00:00:00+00:00

Migrant workers in short supply

From as early as March 2004 it had become clear that the MFA, which for 30 years had apportioned textile, clothing and footwear markets in developed countries, would lapse and would not be replaced by a similar WTO-sponsored agreement. It was then recognized that there would be a substantial increase in investment in low-cost manufacture and particularly in textile and clothing production in China. This investment would exploit the low wages paid to China’s migrant workers and would benefit from the basic literacy skills of these workers in concert with the production flexibility afforded by long hours of usually unpaid overtime. However, as China’s volume of low-cost goods for export increased, the shortage of workers willing to be employed became increasingly evident.

In 2009, as the contracts lost to the GFC were reinstated, Chinese media noted that ‘about 45 per cent of the enterprises in the Pearl River Delta and 34 per cent in the Yangtze River Delta’ were looking for workers (China Daily, 16 April 2009). By 2010–11 media sources noted that 67 per cent of producers in the Yangtze River Delta were short of workers, with a similar situation in the Pearl River Delta. Today (in 2015), it is estimated that the low-end manufacturing centre of Dongguan alone is short of 100,000 migrant workers (Xinhua, 8 May 2015). The deltas have been ‘the preferred location for low-cost export manufacturers’ (Xinhua, 25 March 2010).

The growing shortage of migrant workers was attributed to a number of causes. By 2006–7 a popular view among China’s academic commentators was that labour shortages were short-lived anomalies. However, there was another equally popular view that was diametrically opposed: that labour shortages were a result of an inevitable structural Lewisian turning point (Rapley 2002: 14–15, 30). Economists at both China’s Academy of Social Sciences and at the Institute of Population and Labor Economics argued that ‘most developing countries experience a common process of dualistic [two-step] economic development’ (China Daily, 9 March 2007). In this process ‘the surplus rural labor force provides cheap labor for industrialization and the wage level increases slowly’ (China Daily, 9 March 2007). As this process continues, it is expected that the seemingly endless supply of rural labour is absorbed. The Academy and Institute economists stressed that as China reached ‘its second stage of development [and rural labor became scarce], it must face a situation where wages are rising’. They advised that measures were needed to cope with these rising labour costs. In addition it was expected that ‘the supply of rural labor cannot [and will not] meet the urban need’ (China Daily, 18 June 2007b). This conclusion was a factor in the central government’s policy choice to downgrade labour-intensive manufacture in favour of capital-intensive ‘high-tech’ production.

While the Lewisian argument continued to be popular, the ‘short-term anomaly’ argument tended to lose ground. In a collection written by respected Western and Chinese scholars in 2010, the Lewisian turning point is invoked to address the ‘considerable controversy over labor shortages and rising wages for unskilled workers’ (Oi et al.

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