Capital-Labour Relations in China's Car Industry – What Is “Chinese” about Them?

Facing shrinking profit margins, and driven by a quest for cost-efficiency and market access, manufacturing enterprises intensified their expansion into the global South since the 1970s. It was especially the automotive industry that was eager to venture into promising markets, first and foremost China. Though global car manufacturers have been present in China since the 1980s, research on their operations is still limited – especially when dealing with sensitive issues such as labour relations and unrest. 

The presentation thus sets out to shed light on workers’ reactive and pro-active agency in relation to enterprise strategies, trade union culture and developmental policy in a global car manufacturer operating in China. Based on intensive fieldwork in Mexico and China multiple factors determining the specific patterns of workers’ agency in China’s car industry shall be mapped out and questioned for whether they are rightly attributed to local “Chinese” specificities – or aspects that are better explained by reference to the qualities of the industrial sector and a capitalist global economy, respectively its current stage. On the one hand this will concern the enterprise orchestrating its established strategy with local conditions – of which labour issues are merely one factor amongst others – thus producing boundaries, potentials and vehicles for workers’ political-economic agency on the shop floor. On the other, it will focus on workers’ subjective concerns, rooting their agency in their more complex social conditions of existence. Relating these findings to a functional examination of certain political and institutional patterns in China, the uniqueness of Chinese capital-labour relations will be raised to question.