Informal Exploitation and Unregulated Expansion: Assessing the Construction Labour Regime in Contemporary China

초록

This article investigates China’s construction labour regime and its origin, arguing that it features informal recruitment and exploitative labour use, both of which contribute to the hyper-exploitation of the vast majority of workers in the sector. The origin of such a labour regime lies in the inherent characteristics of the construction industry and local intensification of such characteristics through the unregulated marketisation and expansion of the industry, the particular corporatisation of construction enterprises, the creation of a hierarchical inter-firm functional division of labour between contractors, institutional segregation between urban and rural-migrant labour, and a lack of socio-political representation of migrant construction workers.

키워드