Buch, Englisch, 248 Seiten, Format (B × H): 155 mm x 236 mm, Gewicht: 476 g
Women Factory Workers in a Global Workplace
Buch, Englisch, 248 Seiten, Format (B × H): 155 mm x 236 mm, Gewicht: 476 g
ISBN: 978-1-932643-18-3
Verlag: Duke University Press
An ethnography of a new electronics factory in southern China, showing how rural girls are made into compliant factory workers.
As China has emerged as an industrial powerhouse over the past two decades, a new class of workers has developed: the dagongmei, or working girls. The dagongmei are women in their late teens and early twenties who move from rural areas to urban centers to work in factories. Due to state laws dictating that those born in the countryside cannot permanently leave their villages and familial pressure for young women to marry by their late twenties, the dagongmei are transient labor. They undertake physically exhausting work in urban factories for an average of four or five years before returning home. The young women are not coerced to work in the factories; they know about the twelve-hour shifts and the hardships of industrial labor. Yet they are still eager to leave home. In Made in China, Pun Ngai offers a compelling look at the lives of these women, workers caught between the competing demands of global capitalism, the socialist state, and the patriarchal family.
Ngai conducted ethnographic work at an electronics factory in southern China's Guangdong province, in the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone, where foreign-owned factories are proliferating. For eight months she slept in the employee dormitories and worked on the shop floor alongside the women whose lives she chronicles. Ngai illuminates the workers' perspectives and experiences, describing the lure of consumer desire and, especially, the minutiae of factory life. She looks at acts of resistance and transgression in the workplace, positing that the chronic pains-such as backaches and headaches-that many of the women experience are as indicative of resistance to oppressive working conditions as they are of defeat. Ngai suggests that a silent social revolution is underway in China and that these young migrant workers are its protagonists.
"Right now, anything that happens in China's economy affects all of us. Pun Ngai's book should be required reading. It is jam-packed with richly drawn and provocative insights mined from her field work as a 'factory girl' in the midst of South China's migrant workers."- Andrew Ross, author of Low Pay, High Profile: The Global Push for Fair Labor
"Made in China is a passionate, engaged ethnography. Pun Ngai provides us with a searing critique of how global capital, with the collusion of the Chinese state, is turning China into the sweatshop of the world. Her ethnography is a moving and angry description of the lives of young migrant women, who are the guts of this process. Through Pun's ethnographic eye, these women come alive as active subjects who confront the pain and trauma of the social violence inflicted on them in a complex poetics of transgression."-Lisa Rofel, author of Other Modernities: Gendered Yearnings in China after Socialism
