The literature on China's labour issues has grown impressively in the past 20 years but, with a few significant exceptions,Footnote 1 it has almost exclusively focused on secondary industries, despite the fact that manufacturing has accounted for a diminishing share of the country's employment for many years now.Footnote 2 Particularly as the government attempts to shift to a growth strategy predicated on urbanization and domestic consumption, labour politics in the tertiary sectors will be of increasing importance.
From 2012 until the end of 2015, there were at least 60 sanitation worker strikes in over 30 cities across China.Footnote 3 Experiencing recurrent strike waves since 2008, Guangzhou has come to symbolize the difficulty urban governments face in reining in militant sanitation workers. Although strikes have been widespread, 60 strikes in four years means that the large majority of sanitation workers have been quiescent in the face of poor working conditions – including those in Wenzhou. In order to better understand these uneven dynamics, we set out to investigate sub-national variation in the organization of work underlying varying levels of discontent.
Drawing on ethnographic field research in the sanitation industry in Wenzhou and Guangzhou, we show why Wenzhou workers are able to generate significant informal income beyond their formal employment, while their Guangzhou counterparts are largely restricted to formal wages. In Wenzhou, the flexibility of the family team model and the relatively loose schedule and division of labour in their formal employment, combined with worker ownership of cleaning implements, allows sanitation workers to generate significant informal income.Footnote 4 This supplements income from their formal sector employment, thereby stabilizing what is undeniably an exploitative form of employment. Workers in Guangzhou, on the other hand, enjoy higher formal wages and more benefits but are unable to generate any significant informal income owing to individualized task distribution, the particulars of work scheduling and lack of tool ownership. As a result, they have become dependent on a formal wage that is wholly insufficient. While we cannot fully account for the various factors that led to the strike waves in Guangzhou, we show why material conditions for the city's sanitation workers are significantly worse than for their counterparts in Wenzhou. We use the term “ancillary informal work” to refer to types of informal work that subsidize below-subsistence formal wages and can be accessed more easily via the worker's position in the formal economy.
The remainder of this article is organized as follows. After providing an overview of the literature on informal work in China, we describe our methods and case selection. Following that, we provide a brief comparison of workers’ formal compensation and living expenses in Guangzhou and Wenzhou. We then empirically detail the organization of work for cleaners in each city. In the analysis, we compare the two cases and point to some advances in how we conceptualize the relationship between formal and informal work. In concluding, we suggest implications for understanding the relationship between informality and labour unrest in the service sector.
Informal Work in China
Since coming to prominence in the early 1970s,Footnote 5 “informality” has been defined in a dizzying array of terms, often leading to serious conceptual confusion.Footnote 6 As well as intense debates about how to conceptualize the term, the connections between the formal and informal sectorsFootnote 7 and how formal sector enterprises can reduce labour costs by subcontracting with the informal sector,Footnote 8 there have been critiques of this sectoral binary and widely varying normative assessments of informality.Footnote 9 Some have suggested that after several decades of scholarship, the term “informality” obscures more than it reveals and should be abandoned.Footnote 10 We do not wish to wade into this thorny debate, but we do need to clarify how we are using the term in order to situate our key claim that informal income in Wenzhou serves to subsidize intolerably low formal wages.Footnote 11
We adhere to Manuel Castells and Alejandro Portes’ widely used definition of informality as “a process of income-generation characterized by one central feature: it is unregulated by the institutions of society, in a legal and social environment in which similar activities are regulated.”Footnote 12 The term “institutions of society” is ambiguous in this definition, but in the Chinese context we hold this to be synonymous with the state.Footnote 13 Given the endemic labour law violations in China,Footnote 14 it is important to note that we assume that employment that is formalized by a labour contract is “regulated” – even if legal implementation remains spotty.Footnote 15 In line with widely accepted interpretations of Chinese labour laws, we consider moonlighting (i.e. second jobs) to be informal in that such jobs do not receive full legal protection.Footnote 16 Critics of this definitional approach have noted that the state can indeed play an important role in producing informality.Footnote 17 Nonetheless, our research shows that there is an important analytical distinction between types of work formalized by a legally recognized employment contract and those which are wholly unregulated.
Debates about the analytical value of the concept of informality are often imbricated with widely varying normative positions. Scholars from the Global North were initially predisposed to see informality as a problem to be overcome, with the hope or expectation that development would lead to an expansion of the formal economy. Hernando de Soto then led the counter-charge, arguing that informality is a creative response to excessive state regulation.Footnote 18 More recently, we have seen the emergence of critical voices that do not celebrate informal workers as micro-entrepreneurs resisting the regulatory state but nonetheless recognize that informal work can offer greater autonomy than formal wage labour.Footnote 19 In the cases under review here, it is hard to come to any meaningful normative conclusion: formal employers in both cities pay the legal minimum wage (or marginally more), but it is not enough to live on. Faced with such degraded formal employment, Wenzhou workers pursue informal income as a survival strategy but suffer from severe overwork as a result.
Although China scholars have largely overlooked informal work,Footnote 20 perhaps owing to official statistics that underreport its existence,Footnote 21 much attention has been devoted to a process that has sometimes been referred to as “informalization.” Dae-oup Chang and others have argued that focusing on informalization, rather than the binary of formal–informal economy, allows us to see a process resulting in a degradation of work across and within sectors, in regulated enterprises and in own-account work, in the Global North and South.Footnote 22 For Chang, this global process is directly linked to the declining power of labour. Among China scholars, significant research has documented how informalization in the state sector resulted not only in mass layoffsFootnote 23 but also a worsening of labour conditions for most of those who remained employed in state firms.Footnote 24 More recently, and perhaps in part to avoid increased regulation,Footnote 25 formal sector employers have turned to hiring dispatch or temporary workersFootnote 26 as well as student internsFootnote 27 in order to reduce costs, divide the workforce and enhance managerial flexibility.Footnote 28
Our research in China's sanitation sector confirms the consensus in the literature that processes of marketization and outsourcing have led to the degradation of working conditions, and that formal employment is by no means a guarantee of a decent wage or work environment. Indeed, sanitation and other municipal services in China were outsourced in the 1990s and early 2000s, leading to a general decline in pay and job security and an increase in workload. But even if this process could be considered a variant of informalization, sanitation workers are still incorporated within a formal wage labour system, and employers are constrained at the very least by minimum wage regulations. And we maintain that there is analytical value in highlighting the distinction between such wages and those generated via the wholly unregulated own-account work that we observed in Wenzhou. Furthermore, if outsourcing led to worsening conditions for sanitation workers in many Chinese cities, including Wenzhou and Guangzhou, we will show that degradation has been an uneven process, and that remarkably different work regimes have emerged in different cities.
Our observation of formal workers’ uneven capacity to generate informal income has pushed us to re-evaluate the relationship between the formal and informal economies. As noted above, there has been much research on the relationship between the formal and informal sectors. We, however, are interested in workers who simultaneously straddle the formal/informal divide. We define “ancillary informal work” as unregulated income-generating activities that workers can access more easily given their position in the formal economy and which serve to subsidize inadequate formal wages.Footnote 29 In our cases, sanitation workers in Wenzhou generate income by recycling materials they come across during their rounds, collecting rubbish from small businesses or hawking goods on the streets that they clean. In each of these cases, their ability to access these informal incomes is facilitated by their position in the formal economy. Thus, we see iterative, ongoing linkages between formal and informal work for particular individuals. This is distinct from “moonlighting” in that the latter suggests an alternative or second job, rather than the relative spatio-temporal blending of formal and informal work observed in our research.
Methods
Both Wenzhou and Guangzhou are relatively developed cities in south-east China and have the material resources to provide extensive sanitation services. Guangzhou is certainly larger, more cosmopolitan and, as the provincial capital, perhaps more concerned with public order and cleanliness. Nonetheless, Wenzhou has over nine million people and is considered to be one of the birthplaces of modern Chinese capitalism. While in these respects the cities are relatively similar, their sanitation industry labour relations have been remarkably different.
The data for this study come from in-depth interviews and ethnographic research conducted by the first author in Wenzhou and Guangzhou in 2013. The author spent July and August in Wenzhou, and November and December in Guangzhou. Being transparent with his identity as a researcher, he randomly approached sanitation workers on the streets, and conducted interviews and close observation after receiving the informants’ consent. In some cases, the author did a second or even a third interview, or requested to interview family members or colleagues. We gathered data from 67 in-depth interviews (45 in Guangzhou and 22 in Wenzhou) – lasting one hour on average – and additional informal conversations with sanitation workers, management, local government and union officials. We collected data on 26 families in Guangzhou and eight families in Wenzhou. Data related to informal work and family income (the most important variables in this study) were gathered for 15 households in Guangzhou and six in Wenzhou (see Tables 1 and 2), but we were not able to ask every single question for all respondents. Direct observation was employed mainly to achieve understanding of sanitation workers’ labour processes throughout a day and allocation of time and effort across formal and informal work. The amount of time the author was allowed to conduct close observation of informers and their family members varied from two days to just several hours. In addition, we employ media reports, official documents and publicly available statistics to supplement and triangulate the aforementioned primary data.
Table 1: Income Structures of 15 Sanitation Worker Families in Guangzhou
Table 2: Income Structures of Six Sanitation Worker Families in Wenzhou
Note:
The third sanitation job undertaken by Yang and her husband is regarded as informal work here because it does not provide the same employment protection, such as social insurance, as the other two.
By 2015, there were over 8,000 sanitation workers in Wenzhou,Footnote 30 and 45,000 in Guangzhou.Footnote 31 Based on our sample, Wenzhou and Guangzhou sanitation workers are similar in terms of age, gender, migration status and level of education. In both cities, the workforce is about half male and half female, as it is typical for both husband and wife to work in sanitation. Within our sample, Guangzhou workers are mostly above 40 and average over 45 years old, whereas Wenzhou workers are approximately five years older on average. But both groups belong to the so-called first generation of migrant workers – former peasants from inland rural areas – and are typically middle-school educated at most.
Background Information
Before showing how Wenzhou workers generate informal income, we first need to establish the different levels of formal income in each city (see Table 3 for a side-by-side comparison). Guangzhou workers receive 10 per cent more than the local minimum wage in basic compensation, while Wenzhou workers receive only the minimum wage. Guangzhou workers have one day off and another day with double wages (for working on the weekend) each week, while Wenzhou workers work seven days a week, 365 days a year. There is no overtime pay in Wenzhou aside from the 11 national holidays. Guangzhou workers also receive other benefits that most Wenzhou workers do not, including a special occupational allowance for sanitation workers as well as better (although by no means perfect) social insurance coverage. At the end of the month, this results in a significant disparity: a typical Guangzhou worker will take home 2,235 yuan (1,705 in base wages plus 620 overtime pay for working weekends and 338 special allowance but minus 268 in social insurance payment and 160 housing provident payment), while in Wenzhou most workers receive just the minimum wage of 1,470 yuan without any deductions for social insurance.
Table 3: Background Information for Wenzhou and Guangzhou in 2013
Notes:
†July 2013 data taken from: http://zhishi.fang.com/xf/dl_39405.html. Accessed June 2016; ‡September 2013 data taken from: http://wenku.baidu.com/view/51e69238f18583d0496459ff.html. Accessed June 2016.
Despite Wenzhou being smaller and more geographically remote, the cost of living is similar to that in Guangzhou in relative terms. Given the absence of official municipal-level purchasing power parity (PPP) data in China, we have developed a crude indicator of living expenses by calculating the percentage of a monthly minimum wage salary that is required to rent an average-priced 25 square metre apartment. In 2013, such an apartment in Guangzhou would have cost 66 per cent of the monthly minimum wage, while in Wenzhou it was 63 per cent. Having stayed in each city for two months, the first author found that food is no less expensive in Wenzhou. There is thus little evidence to suggest that Wenzhou workers’ lower formal income corresponds to significantly lower living expenses. As we will now detail empirically, workers’ differential ability to generate informal income while maintaining formal employment results in varying levels of total family income across these two cities.
Wage Dependence and Individualized Work in Guangzhou
Beginning in the early 2000s, the Guangzhou municipal government began to subcontract sanitation services in the city. Sanitation work was previously a state-apportioned position, which came with good job security and benefits. Following marketization, the employment landscape in the city became incredibly fractured, with roughly 700 companies in operation by 2008.Footnote 32 Workers experienced a general decline in their material standing, although conditions were uneven. As we will see, Guangzhou workers’ dependence on the formal wage in a context of informalization and degradation of work has resulted in a subsistence crisis. In order to illustrate these dynamics, we turn to a detailed description of a cleaner couple's regular workday.
Ms Shao, and her husband, Mr Jin, wake up around 3:30am. In order to get to work on time, they have to leave their apartment before 4am. Unlike most Wenzhou sanitation workers who ride their own rubbish-hauling tricycles, sanitation workers in Guangzhou usually commute on public transportation. Shao and Jin first hop on bus line 92, and then transfer to line 15. After their 50-minute commute – they could save some time by taking the metro but the fare is twice as much – Shao gets off the bus, while her husband has two more stops to go. The area he cleans is about six blocks away from where Shao works, although both are employed by the same company. As confirmed by numerous interviewees, it is quite unusual for a couple to work together in the same area, despite the fact that for most couples, both people work in sanitation and often for the same company.
Shao retrieves a rubbish-hauling tricycle, dustpan, broom and other tools from on-site storage. Unlike in Wenzhou where workers own their own tools and commute with them every day, means of production in Guangzhou belong to the company and are kept in storage. Shao and her colleague are responsible for cleaning an area of roughly 10,000 square metres – almost three times the official standard of 3,800 square metres. The morning sweep officially begins at 5:30am, but they usually have to start before 5am in order to get the job done by the 7am deadline.
Shao and her colleague typically gather nine cartloads of rubbish each day. Directly across from her work zone is a major textile trade centre. While they are not officially responsible for collecting textile waste from the shops, inevitably some rubbish ends up on the street, thus creating more work for the cleaners. Shao dumps collected waste in a nearby collecting station. But, unlike Wenzhou where street cleaners have to haul materials by tricycle, in Guangzhou the waste is collected from these small stations by truck and then transported out to larger facilities in the suburbs. This division of labour makes street cleaning work in Guangzhou somewhat less physically taxing.
Shao heads home after the morning shift ends at 7am. Her colleague stays behind for the second shift of the day, which lasts until 12pm. Shao's husband is scheduled for the first and the second shifts some days, so Shao goes home by herself. She then needs to complete various domestic tasks, including preparing lunch and doing the laundry. At noon, Shao goes back to the avenue and works the third shift alone until 6:30pm. Her husband returns from his second shift totally exhausted just before 2pm. Mr Jin has a quick lunch and goes to bed. He needs to catch up on sleep because he works the entire morning and early afternoon. After getting up at about 4:30pm, he organizes the bottles and paper that they have gathered from the streets. This recycling earns them approximately 200 yuan a month. Mr Jin leaves for the night shift at 5:30pm. Typically, Shao's colleague will relieve her for the fourth and final shift of the day, which lasts until 8:30pm. But on the day the author observed her, the colleague “borrowed” two hours in order to visit her hometown, so Shao had to cover both the third and the fourth shifts. At about 9:30pm, Shao and Jin finally arrive home, utterly exhausted.
It is noteworthy that scheduling is inconsistent across work teams. We have identified patterns of work scheduling that vary based on time of the day (for example, some busy commercial districts have street maintenance until 10:30pm) and the size of the team. Larger areas, for instance, will sometimes have three people on a team, resulting in more complex scheduling systems. No matter which scheduling system is used, two features are consistent. First, work time is supposed to be limited to eight hours, no matter how many shifts they take during one day. Second, workers rarely work a continuous eight-hour day. They almost always need to take at least two separate shifts each day, fragmenting their spare time and constraining their ability to moonlight. None of the cleaners we spoke to could give a sound reason for this work schedule, but many of them confirmed that this is the dominant model in Guangzhou.
Furthermore, workload sharing within teams is limited to exceptional circumstances. Given that workers are bound largely by collegial rather than familial bonds, on the rare occasions when they get their colleague to cover a shift, they have to figure out how to repay the hours as soon as possible. As noted in the example above, Shao needed to work from 12:00pm all the way to 8:30pm, taking both the third and the fourth shifts to cover the final shift for her colleague. Her colleague promised to cover one of Shao's shifts later that week.
This work organization system has three important implications for Guangzhou's cleaners. First, although workers spend roughly eight hours on the job, their shifts are discontinuous and their spare time is therefore fragmented into several separate short periods. Second, and relatedly, owing to their numerous daily shifts, they spend a lot of time commuting between home and work, usually making two round trips each day. Third, the scheduling is not consistent, so workers are not able to set regular schedules for longer than a couple of weeks.
While the Guangzhou model appears to be closer to complying with the eight-hour workday than the Wenzhou model, workers still feel quite busy and tired. Indeed, most workers’ first shift begins at 5am, and they do not finish the workday until 6:30pm, 8:30pm, or even later in some cases. In between shifts, they are busy with domestic work, commuting and napping, and have very little time to generate supplementary informal income. Shao and Jin, for instance, could only make approximately 200 yuan a month from the recyclable material they collected while on the job. The quantity of the material that this couple can yield is also limited by the fact that they commute by public transportation. In Wenzhou, on the other hand, a couple own and typically ride a cleaning trolley filled with recyclable material back home after a day's work. Even if workers in Guangzhou were willing to squeeze in some informal work between shifts, the constantly changing schedule complicated matters. Widespread complaints about this scheduling were neatly summarized by Ms Zhu:
You cannot take two jobs. The morning is busy, and the afternoon too, such that there is no time for any of that. It is impossible, for example, if you want to do housekeeping [providing on-call household cleaning services], or anything else. [With work scheduling] like ours, from 10am to 12pm, and 5pm to 10:30pm, you have to leave home at 4:30pm and take a half-hour bus, and in the morning [I have to leave] at 9:30. Can you actually do anything? Take housekeeping for example, you may be available in the morning, but employers don't want you to come that early as they are still asleep. There is no way you could do it. We also can't do fast food [delivery]. You get off work at 12:30pm, but they start to deliver food between 10am and 11am, so we could not do it.Footnote 33
Table 1 lists 15 households in our sample for which we have at least partial data on family income structure. Most of the couples we interviewed in Guangzhou reported zero informal income. When pressed, many of them reported very minor additional income from recycling, but such income is so trivial that they generally failed to consider it “income.”
In a few exceptional cases, workers did report significant informal income, but it came at great personal cost. For instance, after finishing up her first job at 9pm, Ms Ouyang would go to a second job as a janitor at a bar. She reported working 5.5 hours a day at this second job for 1,400 yuan a month. She described her regular workday:
I get off work from here at 9pm, go back home, and take a shower … then go there [the bar], and get back home at 4am. Then I go to sleep … As the street cleaning begins at 10:30am, I have to get up at 9am to cook breakfast. I need to rush because I cook and also do laundry. [I can do this] only because I live close to the street. If I lived far, I couldn't even do laundry, and I would need to have breakfast in a real hurry.Footnote 34
As Ms. Ouyang notes, the only reason that she was able to maintain this second job was because of the proximity of her residence to her place of work. This is unusual for street cleaners in Guangzhou, particularly for those cleaning the central districts where rents are extremely high.
This type of moonlighting is very unusual in Guangzhou – most people who had informal, second incomes had to find flexible activities that could be wedged into small time blocks. For instance, Ms Lü’s husband undertook food deliveries for a small restaurant on a limited basis, usually just two hours a day at an hourly rate of 15 yuan. This extra work can add an extra 900 yuan to the monthly family income. Typically, the sanitation workers who did engage in informal work had to find extremely flexible and short-term arrangements, including dishwashing, putting-out processing work and on-call domestic services. But, again, the majority of people do not engage in any informal work aside from some minimal recycling activities.
Even though their wages had increased significantly in recent years, workers frequently complained about the hardship of working and living in Guangzhou and indicated that the wages are barely sufficient to survive. With other avenues for generating informal income largely precluded by the organization and location of work, Guangzhou workers have continually turned to wildcat strikes to improve their lot. Indeed, 15 of our interviewees indicated that they had participated in at least one strike (some even two or three). One cleaner explained the straightforward motivation for the strike:
HZ: Is your income enough [for your family] to survive?
Cleaner: No, it's not enough. Children need a lot of money, and our wages are too low.
HZ: Have you suggested increasing wages to [management]? I heard that you once went on strike?
Cleaner: Yes, we once went on strike … Because our wages are too low, and we do not have two days off a week, we went on strike.Footnote 35
In some strikes, they did not directly ask for wage increases but put forth demands regarding severance pay or year-end bonuses. However, common to each strike was a generalized dissatisfaction with compensation and fears of a subsistence crisis. Thus, it is clear that wages for formal employment in Guangzhou are insufficient to meet basic subsistence needs.
Family Team Work and Informal Income in Wenzhou
As in Guangzhou, sanitation outsourcing in Wenzhou resulted in work informalization and degradation. In contrast to the dizzying array of subcontractors in Guangzhou, the Wenzhou government has subcontracted major avenues in the central Lucheng 鹿城 district to a single cleaning company, Huanghe 黄河. One major consequence of this has been an erosion of workers’ benefits in Wenzhou, which today are much worse than in Guangzhou. Furthermore, sanitation workers receive only the local minimum wage, without getting overtime for weekends (as is legally required).
The key employment arrangement in Wenzhou's sanitation industry is the family team model. Under this system, a husband and wife are each issued individual employment contracts but work together as a team in the same area and perform all work tasks (from sweeping and street maintenance to dumping rubbish). A couple is given responsibility for a given space and must complete a set of tasks each day. Couples can thus capitalize on flexible scheduling by strategically dividing up tasks and engaging in various informal activities. This scenario can be best understood by a close examination of a regular working day of one couple.
Mr Qiao and his wife, Ms Sun, are sanitation workers employed by the Huanghe company. They are responsible for a major avenue in one of the busiest commercial areas in Wenzhou. They work as a team on the 300 metre-long avenue, and are responsible for cleaning, maintenance and dumping rubbish. Qian and Sun receive a monthly salary of 1,470 yuan each. On the day of observation, the couple woke up at 3:30am as usual, had a quick breakfast and then left home for work. They had to arrive at the avenue before 5am so that they could start the morning sweep. Their commute took 20 minutes riding their rubbish-hauling tricycle. After arriving, the couple spent two hours sweeping up the rubbish that had accumulated overnight. The morning sweep needed to be accomplished by 7am, before the street filled up with pedestrians and vehicles, as it then became too busy to be able to sweep effectively.
After the morning sweep, the couple took a short break by the roadside to have some tea. But time was of the essence as the scorching late-summer sun was approaching, and Mr Qiao had to haul the rubbish to the waste station located a few miles away before things got too hot. Come autumn, additional waste from fallen leaves would require him to make two or three round trips to the waste station in the morning alone.
At this point, Ms Sun left the street to return to their dorm room. She now needed to do some work in their housing compound, cleaning the buildings and yards and dumping rubbish. This was her second job, for which she received 800 yuan a month and a free room of about 15 square metres where she, her husband and their two children lived. In addition, she also organized the recycling – cans, bottles and papers – that she had just brought back from the avenue and stored in their bathroom. This recycling business could potentially bring the family another 100 yuan for the month. As noon approached, she prepared lunch for her husband.
After two round trips to the waste station, Mr Qiao could finally take a break. But he needed to regularly jump up to collect cigarette cartons, water bottles, plastic bags or other rubbish that drivers and pedestrians discarded on the street. Sometimes there would be rubbish in the middle of the road, which required him to dodge traffic to collect. This could be a dangerous task – indeed, he had previously been seriously injured after being struck by car, and he took a full year to recover. Nevertheless, he still had to put up with this risk, as the company sends in a supervisor to monitor street cleanliness. If the supervisor finds rubbish on the street owing to the cleaner's idleness, the worker can be fined 100 yuan – roughly equivalent to the total daily wages for the couple. When Ms Sun arrived with lunch and a fresh bottle of iced tea, Mr Qiao could stop work for a moment. However, rubbish continued to accumulate on the street, and always wary of accruing fines, Ms Sun had to sweep up litter while her husband ate.
After lunch, Qiao resumed sweeping the street. At this point, Sun set up a stool and a small sign that read “Professional screen protector service” – her transformation to a street hawker was complete. Over the next three hours, she sold two mobile phone protectors. While this might not seem like much turnover, she indicated that this business has a big margin. She charged 30 yuan for one protector, the cost of which was only 10 yuan; the second protector was sold for 10 yuan, but she still netted 7 to 8 yuan in profit.
But Sun was also involved in other, legally murky, endeavours. In addition to selling screen protectors, she “recycles” mobile phones and sells them to second-hand dealers. While sitting on the street, people occasionally stopped by to ask how much their phones would fetch. Seeing as how this business was banned by city management (chengguan 城管), she did not advertise this activity on her sign. Nonetheless, many people seemed to understand that pawning phones was part of her business. One man came by several times to negotiate a price for a Motorola smartphone, but they were not able to reach an agreement. Sun later revealed that this guy sold phones to her regularly. She did not think he stole the phones himself but rather that he sold on phones that others had likely stolen. Later that evening, presumably after doing some comparison shopping, the same man came back and agreed to Sun's final offer. Sun called her dealer to confirm the final price, and the transaction was complete.
Sun later said that she earned 50 yuan from the purchase. It eventually became apparent that this is indeed her most profitable business. She said that if unencumbered by other work, she could earn up to 7,000 yuan per month from selling screen protectors and buying second-hand phones. But given that she had to juggle this business with sanitation work, she earned only about 3,000 yuan per month.Footnote 36
While these transactions were being conducted, Mr Qiao yet again pedalled the rubbish over to the waste station. At about 9:30pm, the couple finally finished their day of work and rode the 20 minutes back to the dorm.
While we have presented just one example in detail, this blending of formal and informal work is widespread in Wenzhou's sanitation sector. Throughout the central district, it is typical for the husband to take primary responsibility for the formal sector work, with help from his wife at critical moments. In all of such cases that we encountered, informal revenue constituted a significant portion of total family income (see Table 2).
All interviewees acknowledged that sanitation work is exhausting, dangerous, dirty, and that they endured long hours and poor pay. However, when asked why there had been such little conflict in the industry, workers did not give clear answers and hinted at complacency. While this complacency was initially confusing, our interview with Mr Zhang clarified things. Zhang is one of the few people to work alone, as his wife works in a kindergarten.Footnote 37 When asked why he and his colleagues had not gone on strike to protest bad working conditions, he had this to say:
For a couple that works together on the streets, in fact one of them can leave and do something else, therefore earning one more salary … they do not rely on the 1,470 yuan … Even if you gave them 1,200 yuan, they would not strike. They do not depend on the wages [emphasis added] … For instance, [some people collect rubbish] for famous hotels like the Victoria Hotel and the Heavenly Plaza, and can earn over a 1,000 yuan per month per hotel, plus all the recyclable materials. All told this can equal several thousand yuan. So they do not [complain].Footnote 38
In one sense, Mr Zhang is the exception that proves the rule: he was more dissatisfied than other workers, in part because he was one of the few people who was not part of a family team system. Zhang's family was also engaged in some informal work such as collecting rubbish for businesses or putting-out work for small electronics parts factories (as shown in Table 2). However, because his wife worked full-time in a kindergarten, there was not much time for either of them to undertake any informal work. It is noteworthy that his wife had some time to do putting-out work but only when the kindergarten was on summer vacation. Without the typical family team arrangement, Zhang's family income was significantly less than the other families we interviewed. To offer an illustration of a couple who did benefit from additional rubbish-collecting revenue, the Chen and Zheng family worked for a department store and a hotel located on their street, which yielded 3,300 yuan per month as well as recyclable materials (see Table 2).
We do not mean to suggest that sanitation work in Wenzhou is an ideal job – families earn more than in Guangzhou simply because they work more. The additional informal work requires more time and effort, and even with the additional income, many are barely scraping by. Mr Qiao worked more than 16 hours most days, and he was by himself except for the two hours during the morning sweep, and lunchtime, when his wife accompanied him. His wife, Sun, also worked for more than 16 hours, moving back and forth between her formal job, informal work and various forms of reproductive labour. Both work for twice as long as the eight-hour standard, and they reported working 365 days per year. The fifth family in Table 2, Ms Yang and her husband, provide probably the most straightforward example of this overwork. They took on a third sanitation job in addition to their two jobs, receiving three salaries in total, in order to compensate for the low wages for each job – “We would not have any savings without this third job,” Yang told us in an interview. And this is not an exceptional case – Mr Zhang's daughter and her husband were also combining three jobs.
In sum, the relatively flexible scheduling and family team model allow for couples to take on additional work to generate informal income. In contrast to those in Guangzhou, workers in Wenzhou can eke out a living by extending their working hours far beyond the eight-hour day. For some workers, ownership of their work implements allows them to engage in more extensive informal recycling activities. Informal income subsidizes intolerably low formal wages in Wenzhou.
Accessing Ancillary Informal Income
Why do workers have significant informal income in Wenzhou but not Guangzhou? We contend that distinct formal employment systems provide differential access to informal income. Three features differentiate the family team system in Wenzhou from the rationalized and individualized model in Guangzhou (summarized in Table 4). First, Wenzhou workers own the means of production, including brooms, dustpans and rubbish-hauling tricycles.Footnote 39 This allows sanitation workers to collect waste materials from local businesses, the primary source of informal income for many families. In Guangzhou, on the other hand, cleaning implements are owned by the company and are stored on site, thus street sweepers neither own nor have access to rubbish-hauling vehicles of any kind. Second, even though workers have individual labour contracts, the division of labour in Wenzhou is negotiated within the family unit, and all tasks – sweeping, maintenance and rubbish hauling – within a given area are completed by the couple. In Guangzhou, on the other hand, people work in teams, with each team member having clear task descriptions. Team members generally do not have pre-existing social bonds, and workload sharing and redistribution is limited. In other words, without the social capital characteristic of the labour process in Wenzhou, Guangzhou workers have less leeway to negotiate with their colleagues. Task redistribution does happen in Guangzhou, but only under exceptional circumstances. Thus, while on the clock, Guangzhou workers cannot regularly engage in informal activities such as hawking. Finally, and most importantly, the payment and scheduling systems produce very different outcomes. Wages in Wenzhou are project based, i.e. employers do not exert direct control over workers’ specific organization of time (aside from setting the beginning and end of the shift). As long as a certain level of cleanliness is maintained, employers do not intervene in the labour process. This, combined with the ability to negotiate task distribution within the family, allows for greater time flexibility. In Guangzhou, however, workers’ tasks and working time are strictly regulated. Workers cannot leave the street for extended periods of time during their shifts, as their workmates would be unable to handle the additional workload. The multi-shift schedule fractures the working time of Guangzhou street cleaners, requiring them to spend more time commuting and depriving them of the relatively unbroken stretches of time necessary to generate significant informal income. While we are not arguing that Wenzhou's employers have consciously granted greater access to informal work as part of a conflict-avoidance strategy, the greater openness to informal income has in fact served to subsidize a formal wage that is intolerably low.
Table 4: Work Organization in the Sanitation Industry in Wenzhou and Guangzhou
We consider these additional income-generating activities of Wenzhou workers to be “ancillary informal work.”Footnote 40 The work is ancillary in two senses: first, the income provides a necessary supplement to the incredibly low formal wage; second, workers’ formal employment actually facilitates access to this kind of informal work. Workers in both cities are able to collect recyclable materials owing to the fact that they are handling waste. Many Wenzhou workers generate informal income by collecting rubbish from various businesses. They are able to accomplish this because they have the necessary tools and skills from their formal jobs. Equally important is that sanitation workers maintain “jurisdiction” over the space of the street and some degree of flexibility in their delivery of street maintenance. Business owners are interested in preserving a good relationship with the workers to ensure that sufficient attention is paid to their section of the street, and they sometimes try to curry favour with sanitation workers by providing them with additional rubbish collecting work. The case of Ms Sun hawking mobile phone covers on the street is somewhat more complicated – of course, it is not necessary to have a job as a street cleaner in order to be a hawker. And yet this work remains ancillary to her formal employment in the sense that she occupies the same space and can therefore move seamlessly from hawking to assisting her husband with cleaning. It is a type of informal work that is organized to accommodate her formal employment. We are not arguing that ancillary informal work implies a monopoly on a certain type of informal work. While sanitation workers are strategically positioned to generate income from activities such as recycling and hauling rubbish for businesses, they do not necessarily control the market.
Conclusion
In this article, we have shown that the family team system, its attendant scheduling and ownership of the means of production allow sanitation workers in Wenzhou to access informal income, thereby stabilizing formal but exploitative work. In Guangzhou, on the other hand, workers face tighter control by management and fractured working times, preventing them from generating much informal income. As formal employment only provides them with subsistence wages, workers in Guangzhou have repeatedly turned to direct confrontation in order to demand higher wages. Wenzhou workers, on the other hand, are severely overworked but are able to make ends meet by engaging in ancillary informal work.
We have made brief mention of the uneven levels of worker unrest in the two cities and would like to conclude by considering the implications of these findings for understanding the dynamics of strikes. Guangzhou's sanitation workers have been highly militant in recent years, with a series of strikes beginning in 2008 capped by an intense city-wide strike wave in late 2012 and early 2013. There is certainly a range of possible explanations for this militancy, including the region's relatively permissive political environment, a culture of resistance among Guangdong's workers and a preponderance of labour NGOs. But our comparison with Wenzhou raises another possibility: Guangzhou's wages are simply too low and the avenues for generating informal income so restricted that workers are left with no choice other than to directly challenge their employers. In Wenzhou, on the other hand, workers have no expectation that their employers will pay them a liveable wage. Given access to, and dependence on, ancillary informal income, it is more likely that workers would attribute inequality to individual industriousness or simply good luck rather than placing the blame on formal employers. And indeed, our data show that Wenzhou workers evince much greater quiescence. While most research on worker politics in China has sought to explain why workers protest, it is of equal importance to carefully consider those who do not. Particularly in the rapidly growing tertiary sectors, it will be valuable to understand both formal and informal work arrangements in order to grasp the source of worker grievances.
Acknowledgements
The authors are grateful to the Cornell Institute for the Social Sciences China's Cities Project, and the Research Funds of Renmin University of China (18XNF004).
Biographical notes
Hao ZHANG is assistant professor of labour relations at Renmin University of China's School of Labor and Human Resources. His research focuses on employment relations, informal work and skills development, with special attention to China.
Eli FRIEDMAN is associate professor of international and comparative labour at Cornell University's ILR School. He is the author of Insurgency Trap: Labor Politics in Postsocialist China, as well as numerous articles on China's labour and development.
