Building China

Informal Work and the New Precariat

Sarah Swider

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Hardback

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English

ILR Press
15 October 2015

Migration, immigration & emigration; Labour economics; Construction industry

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.

By: Sarah Swider
Imprint: ILR Press
Country of Publication: United States
Edition: 1
Dimensions: Height: 229mm, Width: 152mm, Spine: 22mm
Weight: 454g
ISBN: 9780801454158
ISBN 10: 0801454158
Pages: 216
Publication Date: 15 October 2015
Recommended Age: From 18 years
Audience: General/trade , College/higher education , Professional and scholarly , ELT Advanced , Primary
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

Sarah Swider is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Wayne State University.

Reviews for Building China: Informal Work and the New Precariat

In Building China, Sarah Swider provides a fascinating, in-depth, and deeply empathetic view into the diverse range of labor structures emerging in modern China. This book makes male migrant construction workers visible, drawing the reader into the complex texture of their daily lives through clear, almost novelistic, prose and extremely rich and persuasive empirical research. -Rina Agarwala, The Johns Hopkins University, author of Informal Labor, Formal Politics, and Dignified Discontent in India Sarah Swider uses rich ethnographic materials in Building China to investigate a kind of worker rarely studied. Insightfully applying the concept of employment configuration, she investigates some of the mechanisms that push workers into informal employment. -Feng Xu, University of Victoria, author of Looking for Work in Post-Socialist China: Governance, Active Job Seekers and the New Chinese Labor Market