A ‘race to the bottom’ or variegated work regimes? Industrial relocation, the changing migrant labor regime, and worker agency in China’s electronics industry

This article examines how capital/industrial relocation interacts with work regime dynamics through a case study of geographical relocation of four electronics multinationals from China’s coastal regions to its interior. Based on fieldwork conducted in Chongqing and Chengdu between 2012 and 2017, I find that a migrant labor regime in coastal regions has shifted to a local-labor based development strategy in western regions when capital moves inland. This shift, I argue, has increased labor agency and given rise to capital’s labor control problems and work regime dynamics that are unique to the relocation process and western China. Specifically, rather than a race-to-the-bottom in labor conditions, three distinct work regimes have emerged in the new sites of production, depending on firms’ positions in the global production networks (GPNs) and workers’ responses/agency embedded in the GPNs and local labor institutions. They are: (1) advanced quality production and negotiated commitment between workers and management; (2) lean-and-dual and fragmented worker discontent; and (3) flexible Taylorism and high-level worker resistance. The evidence highlights the important role of local state in building location-sensitive labor institutions and workers’ constrained, varied agency in influencing work regime dynamics, which challenge many assumptions of the race-to-the-bottom argument associated with capital relocation.