Not the Epicenter of World Labour Unrest? Conflict in China's Automotive Industry Since 2010

Since World War II automotive manufacturing has been a driver of economic growth, exports, and employment in mature and emerging economies alike - and of globally shifting patterns of labour conflict. Extrapolating from her observations for the 20^th century, Beverly Silver hypothesised in 2003 that “we have good reasons to expect the emergence of strong, independent autoworkers’ movements in Mexico and China during the coming decade [2010-2020]” that would transform China into the “epicentre of world labor unrest” (Silver/Zhang 2009: 174). We take the conclusion of said decade as an opportunity to ask to what extent and why such predictions for the car industry and its workers in China have come to pass.

Embracing Silver’s own argument on the importance of the “product cycle” and drawing on a combined 28 months of fieldwork and over 150 interviews we argue that beyond political adversity, the formation of a labour movement in China’s car industry has been impaired by the maturity of the industry and correspondent managerial strategies to maintain profitability. Concretely, around the year 2015 the industry experienced a slowdown of previously rapid expansion of combustion engine car production in China. The sector did not react with relocation but a shift in product to electric vehicles, linked to the emergence of new, domestic private manufacturers as the driving forces of growth in the sector. This contracted the room for concessions to employees at the large foreign-domestic joint ventures and their suppliers, with unrest taking on a defensive character. The focus on product cycle/industrial maturity helps us to explain the relative stability of labour relations in a situation of segmented internal labour markets and supply chains. It is unlikely that the auto sector will catalyse wider labour unrest, or the formation of a labour movement, in China.