Precarious Intersections: An Ethnographic Study of the Work, Lives, and Everyday Ethics of Industrial Workers in a Chinese State Railway Company

Abstract

This dissertation explores Chinese industrial workers’ labour, lives, and everyday ethics in the context of growing labour precarity. My ethnography, based on a year’s fieldwork at a Chinese state railway company’s construction site and its headquarters, demonstrates how new forms of precarity profoundly affect all aspects of workers’ lives, including romantic relationships, marriage, social relationships with co-workers, plus a sense of security, and changing ideas of achievement.

I propose a fourfold model in which labour precarity intensifies social, affective, and structural precarity. Thus, since the reform of state-owned enterprises in the 1990s, temporary employment has largely replaced socialist, lifelong employment. Structural precarity refers to precarity resulting
from particular economic and political configurations. Social precarity is characterised by vulnerable social relationships. Affective precarity indicates subjective experiences of precarity, such as the emotions that emerge in the context of labour, structural, and social precarity. The extent to which workers are affected by these different forms of precarity, or able to mitigate them, largely depends on their positions in a complex, gendered labour hierarchy of permanent state employees, temporary agency workers, workers with oral agreements with the company, interns, apprentices,
and migrant workers. Exegeses and experiences of these kinds of precarity are shaped by distinct moral frameworks: Confucian philosophy emphasising filial obligation, socialist ideas of collective worth, and recent ideas of self-improvement and individual advancement. Drawing on all these
three frameworks, workers piece together solutions to moral dilemmas, building a patchwork of everyday ethics, which I term the ethics of precarity.

My contributions are threefold. First, I offer new insights to scholarship on precarity by exploring how different forms of precarity intersect and are experienced. Second, I provide a novel analysis of how everyday ethics and precarity are intertwined. Finally, I provide an original ethnography of
Chinese railway workers’ labour and lives.