San Star Factory: A Outsourcing Factory Life, Work And Management

Sheng Xing is one of the outsourcing factories located in the industrial zone of Guangdong Province. As a major form of the global economic division, factories like Sheng Xing turn out to be part of the "World Factory" since China’s opening and reform. During the course, numerous migrant workers are employed by the assembly lines of the factories. Based on half a year’s participant observation, the thesis intends to give a picture of the factory, depict the life and work trajectories of the migrant workers, and present their labor experience there.The enterprises of the Pearl River Delta are mainly contractors engaging in both foreign and domestic businesses. While making lucrative profits from the globalized market, these enterprises also take the risk of fluctuating global economy. As a result, seasonal orders is a strong characteristic of these factories. In order to mitigate the risk, small and medium sized manufacturers, lying at the lowest end of the global production chains, adopt the outsourcing strategy. They refuse to take on the cost of labor reproduction and force it back to the laborers themselves. In layers of outsourcing, factories are maximizing daily output and flexiblizing extra work by taking full advantage of the managerial techniques like overtime, payment, and dormitory systems, thus creating the making-out game which is seemingly voluntary and obedient.The outsourcing manufacturing system, built by both outsourcing production and factory management, co-acting with the sociocultural network, renders the game between management and workers contextualized and individualized. In factories, workers exercise their agency and subjectivity, such as language resistance and private friendship, to increase their opportunity in the negotiations with the management. Facing the nimble labor market, workers construct a short-term labor employment relationship by hopping between factories frequently. The class experience of the migrant workers is featured by fragmentation as they are embedded in their sociocultural network. This feature is even more obvious for the workers living in the non-local factory space and influenced by the interweaving labor system and sociocultural network.