A Race to the Bottom or Variegated Regimes? Capital Mobility and Labor Politics in Electronics Industry

• In Event: 2357 - Sociology of Work and the Workplace

Abstract

A key debate over globalization concerns capital mobility, labor rights, and development prospects. A popular theme in the literature is that the hyper-mobility of capital from high-wage to low-wage areas in search of cheap and pliant labor has sounded the death knell for workers’ capacity for collective resistance in both Global North and Global South. In particular, it is argued that with the mobilization of China’s vast reserves of cheap labor, a “race to the bottom” in workers’ rights and welfare has been unleashed. Notwithstanding its popularity, the thesis that capital is necessarily footloose, and that capital mobility produces a straightforward race-to-the-bottom is suspect on both theoretical and empirical grounds. This paper examines how capital mobility interacts with labor politics and local development through a comparative case study of geographical relocation and expansion of four electronics multinationals from the Yangtze River Delta to West China. I draw insights from the intersection of labor geography and the global production networks (GPN) literatures to develop an integrated framework that embeds worker agency and location-sensitive labor institutions in GPNs. Rather than a race-to-the-bottom in work conditions, I have observed variegated labor regimes in the new sites of production, depending on firms’ respective positions and labor process in the GPNs, as well as local labor institutions and worker responses. The evidence suggests a dynamic process of relocation, diversification, and specialization in the electronics industry and the importance of location-sensitive labor institutions and worker agency in making the geographies of capitalism, which belie many assumptions of the race-to-the-bottom argument associated with capital mobility.

Author

• Lu Zhang, Temple University