In sum, China’s state-led, tech-driven economic restructuring (STER) project results in the dispossession of rural subsistence and new forms of labour market informalization and differentiation, leading to the double crisis of employment and social reproduction. It reinvents the hukou system, subjecting migrant workers to neoliberal looking social welfare and public service provision while luring them to aspire for a better future in cities. A decade into economic restructuring, the level of unemployment remained high, especially after the pandemic. It is in this context this chapter examines the relationship between migration and precarity/ solidarity among platform workers in China.
5 Three Modes of Differentiation and Migrant Platform Workers’ Precarity
In this section, I identify three main modes of differentiation found among migrant platform workers’ experience of precarity, namely skillbased, gender-based and hukou-based, and explicate how they, in their unique ways, link to migrant platform workers’ precarity.
Tech-Driven Industrial Upgrade and Skill-Based Differentiation
Skill-based differentiation refers to instances where migrant platform workers are rendered to a disadvantaged position in, or entirely excluded from, certain segments of the labour market because of their lack of certain skills, due to constraints related to educational attainment, resources and time to acquire these skills. In the context of China’s STER, the institutional basis of this skill-based differentiation lies in the fact that when the state lent enormous support to industrial upgrade, its efforts in ‘skill upgrade’ are sluggish, for it largely fails to provide migrant workers with related opportunities and resources. For one thing, rural-to-urban migrant workers are typically less educated, and they have always been excluded from skill training provisions by the state due to their nonlocal hukou status, making it unlikely that they can possess the literacy needed to acquire new skills demanded by the restructured economy. For another, even when they do possess such literacy, many were either excluded from state provision of skill training due to their non-local hukou status, or because of the lack of time and income to sustain their lives when receiving training. Given the widening gap between wage increase and living expenses, many migrant workers are living a handto-mouth existence, which is further exacerbated in the aftermath of the pandemic. Unable to skill upgrade, migrant workers were hence channelled to platform-based service sectors like ride-hailing and food delivery, for the relatively high income these sectors can offer.
8 MIGRATION, PRECARITY AND SOLIDARITY AMONG
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