JennyChan.PhDThesis.2014.FINAL

what ways do the interns, or “student workers,” understand their internships on the
line? Government education departments demand that vocational schools send
students to labor-wanting Foxconn factories. Schools become the labor contractors.
The abuse of intern labor and migrant workers is a result of collusion among the
local state, company, and global buyers in capitalist accumulation.
Production and consumption are interconnected spheres. Chapter 7 discusses
workers’ social and family lives as well as their living conditions in the city. Factory
dormitories as physical and socio-cultural spaces are potential resources in labor
mobilization, though they are also tools for managerial control. They are a frequently
negotiated site of contestation between labor and capital, and a place emergent from
the withdrawal of the local government from worker housing provision. Outside of
employer-provided dormitories designed primarily for individual worers, migrant
families who bring children with them to the city face a heavy financial burden
securing housing. Decent work and upward social mobility remains a distant
“Chinese Dream” for many.
Chapters 8 and 9 document lawsuits and extra-legal activisms waged by aggrieved
workers to defend their dignity and rights. While class consciousness is situational
and transient in nature, at times of crisis the awakening of consciousness is
heightened, and this can be observed in workers’ slogans, poems, and open letters.
Despite severe limitations, Foxconn workers employ a wide array of organizing
strategies and tactics of resistance, including taking their boss to court, going on
strike, rioting, threatening mass suicides, organizing a slowdown on the assembly
line, and staging protests at the factories and in the dormitories. These instances of
individualistic and/or collective conduct serve to protect one’s class interest as well
as moral status (such as the right to human respect and negotiation on an equal
footing). Local government officials react quickly to break the workers’ front in
high-profile incidents. Workers face a formidable alliance of capital, including
international capital, and the Chinese state, but also demonstrate their strong
capacities for class actions.
My conclusion (chapter 10) highlights the contributions of this labor study and the
social transformation at the grassroots level in global capitalism. Some workers have
accumulated organizing skills and public communications techniques in successive
struggles. Meanwhile, the geography of production is changing. As capital moves
rapidly to central and western regions, workers are now living closer to their native
place, and they can draw on local family and social networks to make their demands.
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