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.
Product Identifiers
Publisher
Cornell University Press
ISBN-13
9780801456930
eBay Product ID (ePID)
225024592
Product Key Features
Subject Area
Social Work
Author
Sarah Swider
Publication Name
Building China: Informal Work and the New Precariat
Format
Paperback
Language
English
Publication Year
2015
Type
Textbook
Number of Pages
216 Pages
Dimensions
Item Height
229mm
Item Width
152mm
Additional Product Features
Title_Author
Sarah Swider
Country/Region of Manufacture
United States
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