The story of 50-year-old Laowang, originally from He’nan, was illustrative of this emerging skill-based mode of differentiation. In our interview, he summed up his reasons to take up Didi in 2017 in terms of ‘low-requirement jobs are too bad, but I am not qualified for good ones’. Before 2017, he held a lower management position in a small factory in Dongguan. When the factory was relocated to the inland province of Hu’nan in 2016, he rejected a senior position in the new factory. Yet when looking for new jobs in Shenzhen and Dongguan, he found himself left with little choice: most low-skill jobs were offered on a temporary basis, while stable jobs of higher income required substantial skills like moulding or operating advanced machines. He then took up a line supervisor position back in He’nan. Yet not only was his wage discounted, but no social security was offered. Knowing that labour conditions could only be worse, in 2017, he returned to Shenzhen and became a Didi driver, mainly for the higher income.
Laowang’s experience is typical among migrant workers in low-end manufacturing sectors I interviewed. Having been the epi centre of the world factory since reform, Shenzhen and Dongguan were in the recent decade at the forefront of STER. As part of the Made in China 2025 plan to upgrade the manufacturing sectors, the local policy of tenglong huanniao sought to promote industrial upgrade by introducing higher value-added, high-tech industries, by boosting the service economy and by automating labour-intensive manufacturing. In the context of dwindling orders, the policy and its implementation by local governments, echoing Lei (2023)’s findings in The Gilded Cage, destabilized the manufacturing sector and increased their cost, to which factories responded with relocation, putting out and a flexibilization of labour use, including dispatched workers and student interns. In this process, migrant workers like Laowang became ‘old birds’ who were systematically marginalized. Having spent their lifetime performing repetitive tasks, without opportunities to develop skills, and typically of low educational attainment, the new labour market condition had meant for them declining job quality and the threat of imminent displacement. Statistics showed that in the early months of the crisis, about 23 million migrant workers lost their jobs (National Bureau of Statistics, 2009). In this context, platform-based service sectors like food delivery and ride-hailing, however informal and precarious, provided migrant workers with a steady stream of income higher than factory jobs.
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Y. ZHOU