This article presents a comparative case study that traces the reconfiguration of production and social reproduction processes under China’s upgrading reform across the hometown and worksite of a group of internal migrant garment workers. Although an upgrading regime is expected to promote labor formalization, this empirical study documents a gendered precarization in garment work. Investigating this paradox, this article makes two contributions to scholarship on informal work and social reproduction. First, the study proposes an understudied yet crucial factor impacting informal work: the standard of social reproduction. The change in the standard of social reproduction alters the expectations for women’s unpaid childcare duties and may draw workers and micro-entrepreneurs into generating new configurations of informal work. Second, the study identifies the role of the Chinese state’s workforce quality discourse on the development of the standard of social reproduction and demonstrates the upgrading reforms’ contradictory expectations for female informal workers.
AgarwalaR (2018) The development of labor under contemporary capitalism. Sociology of Development4(3): 239–260.
2.
AlpermannBZhanS (2019) Population planning after the one-child policy: shifting modes of political steering in China. Journal of Contemporary China28(117): 348–366.
3.
ArruzzaC (2016) Functionalist, determinist, reductionist: social reproduction feminism and its critics. Science & Society80(1): 9–30.
4.
BaglioniE (2022) The making of cheap labour across production and reproduction: control and resistance in the Senegalese horticultural value chain. Work, Employment and Society36(3): 445–464.
5.
BarrientosA (2002) Women, informal employment, and social protection in Latin America. IDPM General Discussion Paper 66/2002. Manchester: IDPM. Available at: https://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/30557/?v=pdf
BurawoyM (1976) The functions and reproduction of migrant labor: comparative material from Southern Africa and the United States. American Journal of Sociology81(5): 1050–1087.
8.
CarrMChenMATateJ (2000) Globalization and home-based workers. Feminist Economics6(3): 123–142.
9.
ChanJNairMRhombergC (2019) Precarization and labor resistance: Canada, the USA, India and China. Critical Sociology45(4–5): 469–483.
10.
ChanKW (2010) The household registration system and migrant labor in China: notes on a debate. Population and Development Review36(2): 357–364.
ChuN (2019) Jiagongchang household workshops as marginal hubs of women’s subcontracted labour in Guangzhou, China. Modern Asian Studies53(3): 800–821.
14.
De NeveG (2014) Fordism, flexible specialization and CSR: how Indian garment workers critique neoliberal labour regimes. Ethnography15(2): 184–207.
15.
DongY (2020) Spinners or sitters? Regimes of social reproduction and urban Chinese workers’ employment choices. International Journal of Comparative Sociology61(2–3): 200–216.
16.
DongY (2022) The dilemma of Foxconn moms: social reproduction and the rise of ‘gig manufacturing’ in China. Critical Sociology49(7–8): 1231–1249.
17.
FedericiS (2004) Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation. Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia.
18.
FincherLH (2016) Leftover Women: The Resurgence of Gender Inequality in China. London: Zed Books.
19.
FriedmanE (2018) Just-in-time urbanization? Managing migration, citizenship, and schooling in the Chinese city. Critical Sociology44(3): 503–518.
20.
GaetanoA (2015) Out to Work: Migration, Gender, and the Changing Lives of Rural Women in Contemporary China. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press.
21.
GallagherM (2017) Authoritarian Legality in China: Law, Workers, and the State. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
22.
GereffiG (2009) Development models and industrial upgrading in China and Mexico. European Sociological Review25(1): 37–51.
GreenhalghSWincklerE (2005) Governing China’s Population: From Leninist to Neoliberal Biopolitics. Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press.
25.
HsiungPC (1996) Living Rooms as Factories: Class, Gender, and the Satelite Factory System in Taiwan. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.
26.
JakobsenTS (2018) From the workplace to the household: migrant labor and accumulation without dispossession. Critical Asian Studies50(2): 176–195.
27.
KabeerN (2008) Mainstreaming Gender in Social Protection for the Informal Economy. London: Commonwealth Secretariat.
28.
KhuranaS (2020) Redefining norms, exploring new avenues: negotiations of women informal workers in Delhi. International Journal of Comparative Sociology61(2–3): 178–199.
29.
KwanH (2022) Women’s solidarity, communicative space, the gig economy’s social reproduction and labour process: the case of female platform drivers in China. Critical Sociology48(7–8): 1221–1236.
30.
LeeBHSwiderSTillyC (2020) Informality in action: a relational look at informal work. International Journal of Comparative Sociology61(2–3): 91–100.
31.
LeeCK (1998) Gender and the South China Miracle. Oakland, CA: University of California Press.
32.
LeeCK (2007) Against the Law: Labor Protests in China’s Rustbelt and Sunbelt. Oakland, CA: University of California Press.
MezzadriA (2021) A value theory of inclusion: informal labour, the homeworker, and the social reproduction of value. Antipode53(4): 1186–1205.
35.
MezzadriAFanL (2018) ‘Classes of labour’ at the margins of global commodity chains in India and China. Development and Change49(4): 1034–1063.
36.
MurphyR (2004) Turning peasants into modern Chinese citizens: ‘population quality’ discourse, demographic transition and primary education. The China Quarterly: 1771–1720.
37.
PRC National Development and Reform Commission (2016) 关于公布第三批国家新型城镇化综合试点地区名单的通知 (Notice on the third batch of national new urbanization experimentation localities). Available at: https://www.gov.cn/xinwen/2016-12/07/content_5144553.htm#1
PunN (2005) Made in China: Women Factory Workers in a Global Workplace. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
42.
PunNChanCChanJ (2010) The role of the state, labour policy and migrant workers’ struggles in globalized China. Global Labour Journal1(1): 132–151.
43.
SunSChenF (2015) Reprivatized womanhood: changes in mainstream media’s framing of urban women’s issues in China, 1995–2012. Journal of Marriage and Family77(5): 1091–1107.
44.
SwiderS (2015) Building China: precarious employment among migrant construction workers. Work, Employment and Society29(1): 41–59.
45.
VogelL (2013) Marxism and the Oppression of Women: Toward a Unitary Theory. New York: Brill.
46.
WallersteinISmithJ (1992) Households as an institution of the world-economy. In: WallersteinISmithJ (eds) Creating and Transforming Households: The Constraints of the World Economy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp.3–26.
47.
WilliamsCNadinS (2012) Work beyond employment: representations of informal economic activities. Work, Employment and Society26(2): 1–10.
48.
ZhouY (2020) ‘Good mothers work’: how maternal employment shapes women’s expectation of work and family in contemporary urban China. Journal of Social Issues76(3): 659–680.
