Spinners or sitters? Regimes of social reproduction and urban Chinese workers’ employment choices

Abstract

Despite China being the world’s factory, its labor market is now primarily service-based with a high level of informality. When formal manufacturing and informal service sectors co-exist, how do workers make their choices? While existing literature focuses on rural migrant workers’ experience in the Chinese labor system, this study extends the analytical scope to low-skill urban workers. Drawing on archival, interview, and ethnographic data in a large industrial city in central China, I compare urban women’s different trajectories in textile manufacturing and informal domestic service. Building on labor regime studies and Social Reproduction Theory, I develop a framework called “regimes of social reproduction” to explain workers’ job choices. I argue that China’s post-socialist industrial restructuring has given rise to a public–private hybrid regime of social reproduction, which keeps workers’ pension and healthcare schemes in the public domain and pushes childcare, elderly care, and domestic work to the private sphere and then marketizes them. For urban workers, when choosing between formal manufacturing and informal service, it is their position within the regime of social reproduction that plays a decisive role. Their position is assessed along the following two dimensions: (1) the degree of a worker’s dependency on the employment-based welfare provisions and (2) the degree of demand for reproductive labor in a worker’s family. Challenging the conventional view that formal manufacturing jobs are more desirable than informal service jobs, I conclude that under the current regime of social reproduction, the booming informal service market may provide some best earning opportunities for low-skilled urban workers. However, the same regime has also set significant limits on such opportunities as these urbanites’ availability to work is highly contingent on (lack of) demand for reproductive labor from their own family.