Ithaca, NY: ILR Press [an imprint of Cornell University Press], 2015. xxi, 187 pp. (Tables, figures, B&W photos.) US$24.95, paper. ISBN 978-0-8014-5693-0.
This masterly study of China’s urban construction workers is structured by an ingenious original concept: the “employment configuration,” a relational notion distinguishing the pathways workers pursue to acquire their positions and the mechanisms employed to regulate and discipline their activities on the job. Swider spent an intensive year in the midst of builders, living and sometimes working with them, sharing a smoke or a drink, and managing to enter their dorms to play cards and watch television, while forging friendships that enabled her to produce a fine-tuned, rich, and intimate portrait of those struggling in this dangerous and exhausting profession. Though Swider spent some time in Guangzhou and Shanghai as well as in Beijing, most of the work, involving 130 interviews, took place in the capital.
“Employment configuration” is a powerful tool allowing Swider to identify three large categories separating types of employment relationships: mediated, embedded, and individual. The first entails large labour contractors’ recruitment (of up to thousands) in the rural areas and control by a contract labour system. It confines the workers to specific worksites, and provides housing and nurture plus a safety net good for at least a year, at whose end wages are to be dispensed (but often are not). Since the employees are restricted to spaces behind walls surrounding their worksites, Swider calls their world a “city of walls.”
Embedded employment is arranged via social ties (of kin, hometown, province, and occupation). Their habitat is a “city of villages,” where sentiment, shared values, “bounded solidarity,” a term borrowed from Peng Yusheng (who got it from Alejandro Portes, though Swider does not mention that), “enforceable trust” (which she does attribute to Portes), or sense of obligation to one’s fellows, guide behaviour, as networks among workers transmit employment information and influence action. Those relying on such mechanisms coalesce in cities, unlike the charges of mediated employment, who trade transport into the city and a relatively secure place to work for a bonded tie to their bosses. The embedded, paid by the job, live much more flexibly and may develop a range of skills, unlike their confrères trapped in a mediated mold. Their work is self-regulated or governed by their own networks, their safety net supplied by those in their grid. Swider sharply depicts a migrant “village in the city” or migrant enclave, with its internal diverse migrant origins, occupations, and economic statuses.
The third configuration, individual, features a “city of violence.” Here employment relations are regulated through violence, while street labour markets, often commanded by powerful labour market bosses, are subject not to contracts or common ties but ruled by “an unregulated despotic market” (90). Here migrants “work for food and shelter, not for wages” (90), under total instability. It is the deplorable, unpredictable conditions of their lives and the raw vulnerability with which they must contend daily that lead many into criminality.
Swider shows how each configuration embodies a different combination of production (work on the job), daily reproduction (sustenance) and social reproduction (providing for family), but does not explicitly define these concepts. It would enrich her tale were she to spell out more fully how, for instance (103), production and social production are spatially separated in mediated employment, but production and daily reproduction are merged, whereas in individual employment, “production and social reproduction are both tenuous” (103). She may have miswritten on page 38, where she states that the mediated model’s contracted labour system “merges production and daily reproduction on the jobsite,” as on page 57 she argues that contractors “merge production and daily social production” by having “workers live and work on the jobsites.”
The book contains what is known about the hukou system and internal migration, but presents much new material on the construction trade. There is a chapter each on the three employment configurations, one on protest, and a final chapter laying out the senses in which China’s builders labour in precarity. The discussion of protest traces the structural factors causing unpaid and delayed wages and the battle for urban space between authorities and migrants: the two main prods that enrage the workers, fuelling everyday resistance, public dramas, and disruption. At times thousands of workers contend collectively for weeks on end. With the advent of the Internet and social media, it is sometimes possible to garner public attention and thereby pressure the state, though we are not informed about just how often this occurs.
I found some errors in the bibliography: Wang Feng is not Feng Wang, thus his work should be listed under Wang; Wang, Lin, and Ning’s paper is cited in the text as from 2013, but the bibliography states 2014. A tick is the persistent use of quotation marks, sometimes to set off a term coined by another scholar, such as “bounded solidarity” and “sporadic enforcement of the laws,” or for terms she herself devised (“employment configuration” and “permanently temporary”). But there are others, such as labour regime, in regular usage, and public drama, sojourner to settlement, protest of disruption, and time crunch, where the cause for these marks is obscure. These frequent markers can distract.
The book is disappointing when it comes to comparisons of places, industries, and times (despite Swider’s assertion that employment configurations can be compared along these dimensions). There is just one page (134 –135) on other countries, only a few sentences contrasting her three cities, and almost no mention of how builders differ from migrants in other professions. One final quibble: Swider maintains that literature on the Chinese urban informal economy “is largely missing” (xiii). But she omits reference to Kuruvilla, Lee, and Gallagher’s edited book, From Rice Bowl to Informalization (Cornell, 2011), Ching Kwan Lee’s edited book, Working in China(Routledge, 2007) (and much else by that author), has just two references to Lei Guang, very little from Li Zhang’s Strangers in the City (Stanford, 2001), and just one fact taken from my own Contesting Citizenship in Urban China (California, 1999). I was intrigued to note many similarities between my three gross sets of transients in the cities: the state-protected, the community-connected, and the anomic isolates, on the one hand, and Swider’s three employment configurations, on the other. But there is no mention of this congruity.
All said, however, this is an important book, well argued, expertly presented, and finely analyzed. Empirically, it adds considerably to our understanding of the construction industry, while conceptually furnishing a very fertile framework for grasping the intricacies of informal employment in the cities of China.
Dorothy J. Solinger
University of California, Irvine, USA (retired)
pp. 555-557