Description:
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.
