Welfare for Migrant Factory Workers: Moral Struggles and Politics of Care under Market Socialism

Project Information

WelfareStruggles

Grant agreement ID: 803614

DOI

10.3030/803614

Project closed

EC signature date 29 January 2019

Start date 1 February 2019

End date 30 November 2024

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - European Research Council (ERC)

Total cost

€ 1 499 325,00

EU contribution

€ 1 499 325,00

Coordinated by

UNIVERSITAET BIELEFELD
Germany

Periodic Reporting for period 4 - WelfareStruggles (Welfare for Migrant Factory Workers: Moral Struggles and Politics of Care under Market Socialism)

Reporting period: 2023-08-01 to 2024-11-30

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

China and Vietnam are known as the factories of the world. Following decades of state socialism, the two countries adopted market reforms at the turn of the 1980s. With political systems that feature continued leadership of Communist parties alongside deepening privatization, these countries are now vastly different from what they used to be. Following years of declining socialist welfare, both governments have been introducing ambitious welfare programs, including universal health insurance, pension, and cash transfers. Another transformation has been massive rural-urban labour mobility; millions of rural people migrate to work in factories that produce consumer goods for the whole world, living away from their families. WelfareStruggles comparatively examines the moral politics underlining how the migrant labour force is being cared for by focusing on the welfare of the migrant factory workers and their families.

Our main findings are:
First, these party states’ dual goals of market liberalization and socialist control lead to welfare systems that are underpinned by differing visions of the good life and conceptions of labour. These are constantly in tension with each other in the struggles around the care of labour. Despite the expansion of basic welfare programs, workers are exposed to greater market risks because of the increasing flexibilization of labour, whereas these programs only provide a thin layer of social protection.

Secondly, the industrialisation and urbanisation in metropolitan centres have for decades been enabled by the labour of millions of rural migrants conducting family lives between places of work and their homeplaces. The more recent arrival of the global factory in hitherto considered peripheral regions introduces new patterns on labour mobility along with major changes in the welfare system. As local families have to give up agricultural land for the development, local labour is drawn into the production system of the global factory while the welfare function of land is declining. Despite the reduced distance between the workers’ places of home and work, the increasing social reproductive costs of labour continue to be borne by the workers’ households.

Thirdly, there emerges a preference for flexible and unprotected employment. This is because low-waged workers have to meet immediate needs in a more commodified context of reproduction while there is a low level of trust in existing welfare schemes. The prevalence of flexible work is also the result of global companies’ labour governing strategies to. The combination of precarious labour, commodified social reproduction, and thin social protection leads to worker households’ deeper engagement with the market, especially through financial activities.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

Between 2021-22, we successfully conducted fieldwork despite pandemic restrictions. The high quality of the data led to important analyses published by reputable journals and presses. By the end of the project, the two PhD researchers had defended their dissertations, both having been awarded with the highest grade in the German academic system – Dr Ngoc Luong also won two prestigious graduate paper prizes. Dr Jake Lin became assistant professor at the University of Texas and Dr Jingyu Mao became lecturer at the University of Edinburgh; both researchers remained associates of the project.

The project’s kick-off workshop, The Good Life in Late Socialist Asia took place in 2019. In December 2021, we organised the mid-term conference, Reconfiguring Labour and Welfare in Emerging Economies of the Global South, and in April 2024 the final conference The Politics of Care under Market Socialism. All these events were co-financed by Bielefeld Centre for Interdisciplinary Research (ZIF). Apart from co-organised workshops with partner institutions, we also organised mutiple panels at the conferences of American Anthropological Association, European Association of Southeast Asian Studies, European Association of Social Anthropologists, German Sociological Congress, and Association of Social Anthropology. Our well-received lecture series New Frontiers of Research on Welfare in the Global South featured well-known scholars. In 2024, the PI carried out a visiting professorship at the National University of Singapore (NUS) and was awarded NUS’s Isaac Manasseh Meyer Visiting Fellowship. During the fellowship, she co-organised the writing workshop Care, Welfare and Government in Marketizing Asia.

By the end of the project, we have completed five special issues and two books:
1. Rural Life in Late Socialism (European Journal of East Asian Studies;
2. Same title above as edited volume with Brill;
3. The Good Life in Late Socialism (2024, positions: asia critique);
4. Reconfiguring Labour and Welfare in the Global South (2024, Global Social Policy);
5. Welfare in Crisis (2024, Journal of Labor and Society).
6. The Countryside in a Globalizing World (Journal of Political Sociology.)
7. Reconfiguring Vietnam: Global Encounters, Translocal Lifeworlds (in press by Yale South East Asian Monographs).

We also published peer-reviewed articles in high-ranked and highly regarded journals such as Focaal: Journal of Historical and Global Anthropology; Development and Change, HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory; Global Social Policy; Global Public Policy; Economic Anthropology; Global Political Economy; Emotions and Society; Journal of Contemporary Asia, and others. For the broader public, we published a well-received Policy Brief Series featuring topics such as taxation, household registration systems, and labour laws.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

Our article The Cycle of Commodification offers a novel analytical framework to understand welfare regimes as a social and political field that keeps evolving in response to the changing global valuation of labour.

We provide important empirical analyses of the dynamic linkages between labour mobility, welfare provision and changing configurations of social protection. They explain the contradiction between the privatization drive and socialist goals, while revealing the specific relationships between labour, government and the market of each country. In particular, we show how the flexibilization of labour is related to the restructuring of land via industrial relocation of and urban development, which induce an increasingly commodified context of social reproduction. Consequently, private risk management becomes increasingly significant, while self-entrepreneurship, and along with it, self-responsibility, has come to define how people and the state operate to ensure livelihoods and wellbeing.

Our publications also situate labour and welfare as part of people’s quest for the good life under market socialism, broader dynamics of restructuring in the Global South, and changing rural-urban relations.

The ethnographic studies have produced fine-grained analyses about unfolding transformations in labour mobility, welfare provision and the social reproduction of labour. Our comparative social policy analyses add new understandings of how market socialism is being sustained at the intersection between neoliberal economics and socialist imperatives of state care. Aimed at a wider readership, our Policy Brief Series covers comparative issues such as household registration systems, taxation systems, labour laws, maternity leave and land acquisition.

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