TY - BOOK T1 - Building China: Informal Work And The New Precariat Y1 - 2015 A1 - Swider, Sarah KW - China KW - construction workers KW - ethnography KW - labor law KW - migrant workers KW - rural-urban divide AB -

Roughly 260 million workers in China have participated in a mass migration of peasants moving into the cities, and construction workers account for almost half of them. In Building China, Sarah Swider draws on her research in Beijing, Guangzhou, and Shanghai between 2004 and 2012, including living in an enclave, working on construction jobsites, and interviews with eighty-three migrants, managers, and labor contractors. This ethnography focuses on the lives, work, family, and social relations of construction workers. It adds to our understanding of China's new working class, the deepening rural-urban divide, and the growing number of undocumented migrants working outside the protection of labor laws and regulation. Swider shows how these migrants—members of the global "precariat," an emergent social force based on vulnerability, insecurity, and uncertainty—are changing China's class structure and what this means for the prospects for an independent labor movement. The workers who build and serve Chinese cities, along with those who produce goods for the world to consume, are mostly migrant workers. They, or their parents, grew up in the countryside; they are farmers who left the fields and migrated to the cities to find work. Informal workers—who represent a large segment of the emerging workforce—do not fit the traditional model of industrial wage workers. Although they have not been incorporated into the new legal framework that helps define and legitimize China's decentralized legal authoritarian regime, they have emerged as a central component of China’s economic success and an important source of labor resistance.

PB - ILR Press CY - Ithaca, NY L2 - eng ER - TY - BOOK T1 - Labor Activists And The New Working Class In China: Strike Leaders' Struggles Y1 - 2015 A1 - Leung, Parry P. KW - anthropology KW - China KW - ethnography KW - human rights KW - labor activists KW - political economy KW - sociology AB -

Labor Activists and the New Working Class in China is an ethnographic work examining an export jewelry industrial district in Pearl River Delta of China. While well known that China is undergoing an unprecedented capitalist transformation, few have noted the new working class of China are also actively striving to alter their fate through labor struggles. Parry Leung lived for twelve months in the migrant worker dwelling sites, and kept close contact with the strike activists. Leung illuminates how strikes emerge and transform in an authoritarian state, by enhancing our understanding on the informal agency power of strike organizers in labor activism.

PB - Palgrave Macmillan CY - New York L2 - eng ER -