Abstract
Despite policy interventions to limit overtime work, workers in China’s and Vietnam’s global factories often articulate a preference for working overtime, even viewing it as a form of welfare. Based on comparative social policy and ethnographic analyses, this article examines how political economic and social policy processes interact with temporal mechanisms of labour governance employed by the factories to produce this preference. At the point of production, capitalist employers construct overtime hours as scarce goods to be distributed among worthy workers, the withholding of which is seen as a form of punishment or discipline. At the point of reproduction, the workers struggle with an increasingly commodified context through land restructuring and the quasi-privatisation of public goods and services that compels them to prioritise their immediate household needs. At the social policy making level, there are unresolvable contradictions between the goals of commodifying and decommodifying labour and the failure to account for the temporal disjuncture between factory work and the workers’ social reproductive context. The contradictions give rise to institutional frameworks simultaneously protecting labour via laws and social policies and cheapening it for the sake of capital expansion via policies to regulate population mobility and labour markets. In short, the workers’ preference for overtime work results from a combination of employers’ construction of overtime hours as a scarcity, the disembedding of labour power from the time and place of its social reproduction, and social policy contexts that facilitate the commodification of labour.
Key messages
The construction of overtime work as a scarcity renders policy interventions aimed at reducing overtime work inconsequential to the workers.
Workers’ preference for overtime is attributable to the disembeddedness of work time from social reproductive time.
The irresolvable contradictions in policy making simultaneously seek to decommodify and facilitate the commodification of labour under market socialism.
Introduction
‘Moments are elements of profit’, wrote Karl Marx (Marx and Fowkes, 1990: 352). The struggles between labour and capital are at heart struggles between time as a measurement of labour exploitation and time as a physical condition of human existence (Thompson, 1967). Under capitalism, the worker supposedly has the freedom to sell their labour to whichever capitalist they choose. Yet, the former already belongs to capital even before they sign the labour contract; the system is set up in a way that gives the worker few options other than to sell their labour power on the market – the so-called freedom is fictional. Therefore, according to Robinson (1964 [1962]: 46), ‘The misery of being exploited by capitalists is nothing compared to the misery of not being exploited at all.’ Workers in Chinese and Vietnamese global factories often corrected us when we asked them how they felt ‘having to’ work overtime. No, they would say, one ‘gets [the privilege]’ of working overtime. When asked about his welfare, a factory worker in North Vietnam mentioned the number of overtime hours he can work per month and the downturn in the possibility of him and his wife, another worker in the same factory, to achieve this. In a get-together, several workers discussed whether they should continue to work for their factory given they had not clocked any overtime hours in the preceding months. One person claimed that the factory no longer wanted them and that was the reason why there were no overtime hours for them. The basic monthly salary of about 4,500,000 VND [in 2020] is barely enough for a hand-to-mouth existence, therefore, what would be the point of working if there was no possibility to earn more money from working overtime, commented another person, to general agreement.
Overtime work has long been a built-in feature of global manufacturing, and it is not uncommon for workers in the Global South to need overtime hours to survive (Inverardi-Ferri, 2023). In Vietnam and China, the situation used to be entrenched by the long-distance rural-urban migration to industrial centres and the household registration that separates labour from its place of social reproduction (Chan and Siu, 2010; Nguyen and Locke, 2014; Siu, 2020). The puzzle is how the workers continue to consider overtime work as a form of welfare rather than a negative feature of their employment, despite the reduced commute due to industrial relocation and recent household registration reforms (Chan and Siu, 2010; Luong and Nguyen, 2024).1 This article examines the social reproductive and policy processes and the mechanisms of labour governance at the point of production that go into creating this preference. It demonstrates how temporal mechanisms of labour governance and the wage structure incentivise maximising the use of one’s labour power in ways that blur the formal-informal distinction, integrating the logics of gig labour into the assembly line (Buckley, 2022; Dong, 2023). As in other manufacturing contexts, temporal control of labour has become the most important instrument in the flexible work regime (Harvey, 2010; Mezzadri and Majumder, 2022; Luong and Nguyen, 2024). In China and Vietnam, it gradually takes over the spatial control of the dormitory labour regime that has become less common (Pun, 2005; Siu, 2020). Recent waves of industrial relocation reduce the physical distance between the workers’ places of work and home, both for the workers whom we refer to as commuters, that is, those who live with their families in the vicinity of the factory, and the longer-distance migrant workers, who continue to live a translocal life, although the distance between their place of work and home is shorter than before. The temporal control over labour today, in contrast with the earlier dynamics depicted by Pun (2005; 2016) is realised through governing tools that construct overtime work as a scarce resource, and much more sophisticated disciplining mechanisms. Employers do not explicitly enforce overtime work but make it appear optional and desirable. Yet, the apparent freedom to work overtime is as fictional as the freedom of the worker to sell their labour. The term ‘overtime’, a misnomer for regular work time, disguises a subtle structure of exploitation that extends far beyond the immediate relationship between the workers and their employer. The conditions under which workers are made to work overtime for a liveable wage, we argue, are enabled by social policy frameworks and labour regulations that provide a thin layer of social protection while promoting market provision of care and public goods. These either separate labour power from its social reproduction base through the household registration system or ignore the conflicting temporal demands of factory work and family life on the factory workers.
By placing labour relations in the social reproductive context of workers’ lives, we reveal the disjuncture between production and social reproduction underlying the overtime work regime and the changing methods of labour discipline in global factories today. Social reproduction here refers to self-care, care for others and the maintenance of social relations on a daily basis and intergenerationally (Brenner and Laslett, 1991: 314); it is ‘a set of structured practices that unfold in dialectical relation with production, with which it is mutually constitutive and in tension’ (Katz, 2001: 711). Our analysis chimes with that of Dong’s (2023) of how workers’ preference for overtime is a result of the interaction between the factory’s seasonal distribution of working hours and the intensification of caring responsibilities for female workers in a much more commodified context. Yet, we focus more on the relationship between the temporal governance of labour and capitalist value extraction (Burawoy, 1982; Harvey, 1992; 2010), while underscoring the implications of the contradictory goals of these party states for this relationship.
This article combines comparative social policy analysis with ethnographic research conducted by the authors as a team since 2019. Between the summers of 2020 and 2021, the ethnographic research was carried out with workers employed by two major global electronic companies located in Chinese and Vietnamese provinces that until recently were marginal in global production – we will refer to them with the pseudonyms X-Smart (China) and U-Tech (Vietnam). Apart from policy documents, public discussions and secondary data, our analysis draws on one year’s fieldwork by two team members who conducted participant observations and interviews with about 70 workers each, plus shorter field trips by other team members, who also interviewed government officials and NGO workers. The arrival of these global factories in the two provinces generated large-scale restructuring in land use, infrastructure development and employment structures, signifying a broader trend of industrial relocation in both China and Vietnam with major implications for the patterns of labour mobility into global manufacturing.
Time and the commodification of labour
Two interrelated concepts guide our analysis: the commodification of labour and the work time – social reproductive time configuration. The commodification of labour, according to Karl Marx (Marx and Fowkes, 1990), is the primary means of value creation under capitalism; it is a process in which the human capacity to work, that is, labour power, is incorporated into the productive system to generate surplus value for the capitalist. Like other means of production, labour power is treated as a commodity whose market price is the worker’s wage, which represents only a portion of the value they create. Labour power belongs to the capitalist during the contracted time and so do the products of their labour, leading to their alienation. In Vietnam and China, where global factories produce most of the world’s consumer goods, decades of state socialism had been primarily aimed at building a system supposed to counter the commodification of labour and its alienating effects until both countries’ market reforms around the 1980s ushered in what is now often called the socialist market economy (see for example Hansen et al, 2020). More recently, these countries have also been installing welfare systems that provide a basic floor of social protection. Given the simultaneous privatisation of health care, education and public goods, however, these new systems have in fact facilitated recommodification (Duckett, 2020; Lin and Nguyen, 2021). The thin universal social protection widely promoted in the Global South by global institutions (Nguyen et al, 2024a) thus provides a useful policy instrument for the two Communist party states. Above all, it helps them to justify the deepening privatisation that transfers the responsibilities of care and welfare to individuals and families while still positioning themselves as the main guarantors of care and wellbeing (Wong, 2005; Nguyen and Chen, 2017; Nguyen, 2018).
Lin and Nguyen (2021) use the term ‘cycle of commodification’ to refer to these overlapping dynamics of commodification, decommodification and recommodification. In both China and Vietnam, the commodification of labour has long been facilitated by the household registration system (hộ khẩu/ hukou) that enforces spatial separation between the migrant workers’ family lives and their work (Nguyen and Locke, 2014; Jacka, 2019; Murphy, 2020). A central tool of state socialist governance, the system originally tied work to reproduction by restricting mobility and providing welfare for urban workers through work units, and rural people with access to communal land and basic care through agricultural cooperatives. Post-reform, it no longer restricts mobility but continues to tie access to essential public services and welfare, such as schooling and health care, to one’s place of registration. With millions of rural people migrating to work in factories in industrial centres away from their families, the system functions to disembed work time from the time of social reproduction. Since work time and social reproductive time are interdependent, and impact on and transform each other in what Elias (2007) refers to as work-leisure time configuration, the spatial division of family-social life and work deprives work time of its organic connection to the latter. The more time workers spend working to provide for their family or to prepare for their children’s future, the less time they have to fulfil potentials and possibilities outside of work (Elias, 2007). This disembeddedness underpins the workers’ view of overtime as a way to maximise their labour time to improve the wellbeing of their families, producing a further clash between their immediate and future social reproductive needs. As discussed later, these contradictory temporal orientations are rooted in the contradictions of the market socialist labour and welfare regimes. Modelled on the ideas deriving from welfare capitalism but, unlike in other welfare capitalist systems, these are presided over by Leninist institutions such as the party state, the household registration and collective property ownership, while state-owned enterprises continue to play a dominant role. As rural-urban boundaries are becoming blurred through industrial relocation and urbanisation, meanwhile, the value extraction enabled by the household registration, which externalises social reproductive costs to the countryside, is gradually ceding to a mode of extraction primarily based on optimising the use of labour time at the point of production. Enabled by the simultaneous commodification of rural land (Chuang, 2020; Zhang, 2024), this involves a much greater degree of flexibility of labour in line with the state’s promotion of self-entrepreneurship and self-responsibility as the mainstays of livelihoods and wellbeing. In the next section, we trace the changing political economic conditions that have given rise to the industrial restructuring that shapes for the negotiations around overtime work.
Market socialist political economy and the reconfiguration of labour
The varying terms that refer to the post-reform polity of China and Vietnam include ‘post-socialist’ (Chan and Hui, 2023), ‘late socialist’ (Nguyen et al, 2024b) or ‘market Leninism’ (London, 2020) – some authors also refer to the Chinese polity as ‘post-Mao’ or ‘state capitalist’ (Perry and Wong, 2020; Petry, 2021). ‘Market socialism’ suits our purposes because it refers both to these two countries’ constitutional deliberations of their political model and the actual discussions of Vietnamese and Chinese policy makers and researchers. In addition, we incorporate an anthropological understanding of ‘socialist’ as denoting not only a form of government, but also affective structures of subjectivities, social relations and state legitimacy that continue to shape social and political lives (Ong and Zhang, 2008; Schwenkel and Leshkowich, 2011; Palmer and Winiger, 2019). There is indeed a gap between official rhetoric and actual practice regarding ‘socialist orientation’, but we also identified political reasonings guided by values of socialist construction and solidarity alongside those in favour of growth and accumulation among state actors (Luong and Nguyen, 2024, see also Duckett, 2020 for the co-existence of left- and right-leaning tendencies within the Chinese Communist Party in social policy making). The words ‘Communist’ or ‘socialist’ might be nominal, but this very nominality is the source of state power, which, however, has to be continually legitimated by how the state lives up to the image of a caring state. The tension between the goals of commodification and decommodification in post-reform policy making, we argue, results in labour and welfare regimes that enable the temporal mechanisms of labour value extraction by capitalist employers such as U-Tech and X-Smart.
Labour and welfare restructuring was essential to the market reforms through which the former socialist worker class was disbanded, ending what Andreas (2019) calls state socialist industrial citizenship. Despite their submission to party leaders, industrial workers had enjoyed lifelong employment and welfare as part of the revolutionary class. The shift from socialist towards market-oriented valuation of labour required some ideological justification. According to the former Chinese Communist Party Secretary Deng (1984), socialism is the primary stage of communism; its fundamental task is to develop the productive forces, and the Communist principle of ‘from each according to his ability and to each according to his needs’ shall not be applied until the advanced stage of communism. Subsequently, the principle ‘each according to his labour’ returned as the state-owned enterprises (SOEs) labour and welfare system was phased out (Lin, 2019: 35). Similarly, albeit on a smaller scale, processes occurred in Vietnam following the introduction of the renovation (đổi mới) policy, during which the urban socialist working class was decimated with massive lay-offs and closures/sell-offs of SOEs in the 1980s and 1990s (Malesky and London, 2014; Chae, 2018). In both countries, however, the privatisation of SOEs started to slow down from the 2000s, and SOEs retain a dominant role, now employing 70 million people in China and more than a million in Vietnam with much better social protection than Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) workers (Dang et al, 2021).
The latter make up a new class of labour emerging from the growing expansion of global capital into manufacturing following these countries’ WTO entries. Via rural-urban migration, millions of former agricultural producers became wage labourers in emerging urban and industrial centres ‑‑ about 300 million in China (National Bureau of Statistics, 2024) and over 6 million in Vietnam (General Statistics Office, 2019). Unlike the former socialist working class, whose industrial citizenship enabled considerable political agency and justice claims (Andreas, 2019), and the better protected SOE and state employees today (Duckett, 2020), this class of labour has been subjected to intense capitalist value extraction, lack of social protection and little political representation (Lee, 1998; Chan et al, 2020; Lin and Nguyen, 2021).
Global factories, migrant labour regimes and industrial relocation
Since the 1950s, capital has relocated from Japan and the West to Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan, and from these countries to China and other Southeast Asian countries. More recently in China, capital has ventured from coastal cities to inland provinces, where the majority of rural migrants come from, and the establishment of X-Smart in Central China is part of this movement (see also Chuang, 2020). Similar patterns have occurred in Vietnam, with previously peripheral provinces now becoming new industrial centres, as has the one in which U-Tech is located. The intra-country relocation is also connected to the growing movement of global capital from China to Vietnam, following a familiar trajectory of ‘spatial fix’ (Harvey, 2001) in search of the most advantages for value extraction. Both of our field sites were until recently predominantly rural; large areas of agricultural land have now been expropriated to build industrial zones to service the relocated global factories. This process has generated very different impacts on the local populations. Some are able to use the land compensation cash to build rental businesses for migrant workers; others have not been so successful, having to take up wage work for the newly arrived global factories through a process that Tian (2024) refers to as ‘commuterisation’. The land use conversion does not merely imply a change in local livelihoods, but also the loss of the social welfare functions of land. The compensation offered, in the form of an apartment in a high-rise building or a sum of money, may offer people momentary financial relief or the possibility of owning large-ticket consumer items, but they fail to provide them with critical subsistence resources in times of employment downturn and old age, as farmland did and continues to do so for translocal migrants (Rigg et al, 2016; Liu, 2023).
The combination of economic liberalisation and the intact monopoly power of their Communist party states (London, 2020) distinguishes China and Vietnam from other Newly Industrialising Countries. These very party states are avid promoters of market development and capital expansion via policies ranging from currency and tax, labour mobility and welfare provision. Their household registration system, despite recent reforms, remains a powerful tool in determining citizen rights and migrant workers’ access to welfare, especially in top-tier Chinese cities such as Beijing or Shanghai (Dong and Goodburn, 2019; Lin and Mao, 2022). In contrast with the other contexts, it is the party states that determine how marketisation unfolds, often with state socialist instruments. Here, market competition is encouraged along with the subjection of individuals and the economy to the state’s monopoly power. Trade unions are the party states’ tools rather than workers’ independent representative bodies (Lin, 2019), allowing them to arbitrarily roll back labour protection to encourage FDI investment at will. In the words of a Chinese lawyer: ‘The Chinese Communist Party could potentially have a regulation to protect workers’ rights today, and another regulation to protect the companies’ interests tomorrow. In the end, no one is really protected’ (Yang, 2021).
For decades, the household registration system has been instrumental in turning rural labour power into a cheap commodity in Vietnam and China (Lin and Nguyen, 2021). Apart from externalising welfare provision for the workers to the countryside, it does so by spatially separating migrant labour from its reproduction, which often takes place in the countryside by unpaid kin labour (Nguyen and Locke, 2014; Jacka, 2018; Nguyen and Wei, 2024). While this continues to shape the lives of translocal migrants, the commuters from the surrounding region have to juggle daily between the contradictory temporalities of factory work and family life. Both the commuters and the translocal migrants face greater household demands for cash incomes to cover immediate needs in a much more commodified context of social reproduction (see also Dong, 2023). The new labour mobility patterns induced by industrial relocation thus does not reverse the disembedding of labour from its social reproduction base as expected. Labour law and social policy, meanwhile, have hardly addressed the disjuncture between production and reproduction in the lives of today’s factory workers.
Statutory working time and social protection
Post-reform restructuring repeatedly led to widespread labour disputes and discontent. Yet, if the angry retrenched socialist workers demanded recognition of their contributions through pensions (Frazier, 2010), the post-reform migrant workers were more concerned with long working hours, poor remuneration and other employment conditions (Chan and Siu, 2012; Chan et al, 2013; Tran, 2013; Becker, 2014). Long hours of repetitive assembly tasks were partly behind the waves of suicide at Foxconn in the early 2010s (Pun and Chan, 2012; Chan et al, 2020). General discontent with factory conditions prompted the Chinese and Vietnamese governments to introduce new labour laws to regulate the conflicts, often with a view to warding off the threat of social unrest.
There exist unambiguous legislations of overtime work. Under the Vietnamese Labour Code (introduced in 1994, revised in 2019), regular working hours should not exceed 8 hours per day and 48 hours per week, overtime work should not exceed 300 hours per year, or 25 hours per month. The Chinese Labour Law (introduced in 1995, amended in 2018) rules that extra work time shall not exceed 3 hours per day, 36 hours a month. Problems with implementation and enforcement aside (Friedman and Lee, 2010; Siu, 2020; Siu and Unger, 2020), the restrictions do not align with the interest of the workers who are keen to work overtime since their basic wages are not enough to survive on and fail to meet the growing household costs of education, health and access to public goods. In Vietnam, the minimum wage per month is consistently kept at the rate that is impossible to live on, from 3.35 million VND (134 EUR) to 4.68 million VND (187 EUR)2 depending on the region. According to a Vietnamese NGO worker we interviewed, the minimum wage is ‘frozen’ by the government to attract foreign investors; minimal yearly adjustments barely catch up with inflation and rising living costs. In turn, the employers often determine a basic salary that is slightly higher, thus perfectly legal, and yet not much better than the minimum wage. Whereas the Vietnamese minimum wage applies nationally, the Chinese minimum wage is set by the provinces, often with further variations between rural and urban areas. In China, the minimum wage has been rising, albeit much faster in richer coastal provinces. The variation is often attributed to differences in living costs, but inland provinces deliberately keep the minimum wage low to attract/retain foreign investment. By March 2020, the lowest minimum wage per month of Anhui province was 1180 CNY (160 EUR, similar to that of Vietnam) compared to 1410 CNY (195 EUR) in Guangdong, 1700 CNY (235 EUR) in Chongqing and 2480 CNY (340 EUR) in Shanghai.3 It is thus no coincidence that global industries are relocating to Vietnam and poorer Chinese regions where the level of minimum wages is similar.
In both countries, meanwhile, social insurance contributions (see Table 1) are calculated on the basic wage, rather than the actual income including overtime payment. Even so, it is not uncommon for employers to refuse to pay contributions,4 partly because of the high level of both employer and employee contributions to the system (Table 1), generating further worker mistrust. The system requires continuous contributions (over 15 years in China and 20 years in Vietnam), while pension payments only start at the statutory retirement age (56.4 for women and 61 for men in Vietnam; 55 for women and 60 for men in China, adding three years for both in the years to come). Modelled on the long-term tenure of state employment, these requirements do not consider the short and discontinuous durations of employment and the tendency to employ younger people by the industries (until their mid-30s in Vietnam and mid-40s in China). In Vietnam, many take a lump-sum payment at the end of their work contracts (Nguyen, T.P., 2019). Lump-sum payment is not an option in China, except for the workers’ own contributions to the housing provident fund, with which the state facilitates workers’ participation in the financialised housing market. The future uncertainties and the visible risks in the system thus lead people to prioritise securing as much disposable income as possible from their labour while they can.
Official social insurance contribution share from wages in China and Vietnam
| Social insurance | China | Vietnam | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Worker (%) | Employer (%) | Worker (%) | Employer (%) | |
| Pension | 8 | 14 | 8 | 14 |
| Medical (Maternity inc.) | 2 | 6.35 | 1.5 | 6 |
| Unemployment | 0.2 | 0.32–0.8 | 1 | 1 |
| Work-related injury | – | 0.1–0.7 | – | 0.5 |
| Total | 10.2 | 20.77–21.85 | 10.5 | 21.5 |
Source: Lin and Nguyen, 2021.
Thus, while labour activists usually advocate for enforcing the overtime hour limit (Hauf, 2015; Franceschini et al, 2016), workers value the possibility to work overtime, even if it is detrimental to them. The 2019 public debate around the Labour Code amendment among Vietnamese policy makers highlights the conundrum (Luong and Nguyen, 2024). The legislators representing the corporate sector in fact aligned with the workers’ preference when they supported increasing the overtime limit, which, according to them, would improve Vietnam’s competitiveness. The pro-worker delegates did the opposite when arguing that raising the overtime limit would be detrimental to their work-life balance. When they called for recognition of the workers’ contribution to the national economy and compassion for their sacrifices, these policy makers demonstrated genuine interest in improving workers’ welfare. Their appeal for overtime work to be limited, which moved the public, won the debate because it seemed to bring justice for the workers. Yet, the pro-business camp drew on the same repertoire of socialist reasonings as the pro-worker legislators did when they claimed that the workers’ interests could not be separated from those of the nation, whose development relied on the sacrifices of citizens. Such contestations among the legislators themselves reflect the contradictions in social policy making, and by extension the market socialist welfare regimes, where the goal of decommodifying labour is emphasised and the commodification of labour is played down (Lin and Nguyen, 2021). These contradictory goals can also be observed in the variegated social protection between state and SOE employees and FDI workers (Duckett, 2020). Indeed, the standards of better protected state employment are used by social policy making that barely addresses the needs of FDI workers and those in the private sector more generally, whose labour is subjected to much greater market insecurity and the power of capitalist employers. The next section discusses how this power is subtly exercised through distributional and incentive mechanisms that construct overtime hours as a scarcity to be distributed to worthy workers, thereby disguising their coerciveness and discipline.
The invention of overtime hours as a scarcity
Company policies regarding overtime work follow legal standards of compensation. At U-Tech, core workers should not work more than 12 hours per day, while overtime work should not exceed 40 hours per month and 300 hours per year. Workers are not permitted to work for more than 60 hours per week in total and on seven continuous days. The hourly rate for weekends is 200 per cent of the weekday rate for day shifts and 270 per cent for night shifts. The hourly rate for holidays is 300 per cent for day shifts and 390 per cent for night shifts. On weekdays, overtime work is calculated by minutes and paid at 150 per cent of the normal rate for day shifts and 200 per cent for the night shifts. On the Saturdays of high seasons, if the workers work for eight hours, four of these will be counted as overtime; if they work for 12 hours, 8 hours will be counted as overtime, and the remaining 4 hours considered regular work time, although they do not normally work overtime on Saturdays during low seasons. These policies at U-Tech follow the requirements of the Labour Code, even exceeding the standard of Saturdays counting as normal working days in manufacturing. The same applies to X-Smart, which adheres to the Chinese legal requirements for compensation: 150 per cent of the worker’s regular rate for a workday, 200 per cent at weekends and 300 per cent on public holidays.
We can refuse to work overtime if we do not want to. We just need to inform them so they can arrange other people. We need to sign an overtime agreement and register to work overtime. From Monday to Tuesday every week, we need to swipe our cards for registration to work overtime. If not, we will not be on the list for the overtime the week after. We all know my company pays the highest wages here. We also know that our contract might not be extended in the next due period and we might have to return home or work for vendor [sub-contracting] companies. (Fieldnotes, Ngoc Luong)
Global factories turn overtime work into scarce goods to distribute to worthy workers, and worthy workers are those who accumulate the most overtime hours, as recognised by the emulative measures or token awards presented at public events (see later). Apart from the impending possibility of the company moving production elsewhere, of which workers are made explicitly aware (along with the fear of imminent redundancy), the construction of overtime hours as a scarcity is reproduced by several features of the productive system.
Firstly, how these companies operate resonates with the core-periphery model of labour division that Harvey (1992) uses to characterise global production under flexible accumulation. Yet we observe a growing tendency towards shrinking their core workforce and outsourcing many of the tasks previously performed by core workers to temporary workers. The outsourcing network ranges from foreign invested companies, often called vendors in Vietnam, to local companies and labour intermediaries, called dispatching companies in China. These offer varying remunerations and benefits; the hourly pay might be higher than that for core workers, but the terms of work are much more precarious. By 2019, about a third of the workforce at X-Smart in China were on permanent contracts; the rest either seasonal or hourly workers supplied by labour dispatching companies (Tian, 2024). When assigning extra working hours, line managers at X-Smart would start with core workers, then move on to longer-term dispatched workers before considering the hourly workers. This hierarchical treatment is further consolidated by the practice of distributing overtime hours based on workers’ positions in the production line. Workers in coordinating roles receive a weekly/monthly plan for overtime hours so that they can plan their time, whereas line workers do not – they are only informed at the beginning of each workday, and sometimes at the end of the previous day. At U-Tech in Vietnam, the number of permanent contracts fell from 70,000 to over 40,000 within several years – the laid-off workers go on to do the same tasks as employed by the vendors, in many cases at the same workplace, for lower pay and less social protection. Since overtime payment is tagged to the basic salary, core workers get a higher and more desirable rate for their extra hours than those who work for vendors (Tables 2 and 3). According to Vietnamese NGO workers, U-Tech can influence how its vendors set their wages and overtime payments at lower rates than for its core workers. Yet, while the core workers are allocated more overtime hours during the normal workdays, the outsourced workers clock up more overtime hours on national holidays, when the pay should be higher (Table 2). In either case, the distribution of overtime hours based on the hierarchy of workers confirms their place in the system.
Examples of overtime accounting at U-Tech (difference between low and high seasons)
| No | Samples of payslips(sent by SMS to workers by the company) | Translation |
|---|---|---|
| No 1 | Luong CB+TC: 5,312,182; OT: 2,783,978; Li Xi Tet: 0;;QT thue 2020 (Hoan lai):42,849; Thuong Tet am:0; Khau tru:647, 100; Thuc linh: 7,491,909. |
Basic salary and allowance: 5,312,182 VND Overtime (OT): 2,783,978 VND New Year Lucky money: 0 VND 2020 tax refund: 42,849 VND Lunar New Year bonus: 0 Deduction (social insurance and tax): 647,100 Actual received: 7,491,909 |
| No 2 | Luong CB+TC: 6,984,302;OT: 4,528,509; Khau tru: 691,100; Thuc linh: 10,821, 711. Chi tiet |
Basic salary and allowance: 6,984,302 Overtime (OT): 4,528,509 Deduction (social insurance and tax): 691,100 Actual received: 10,821,711 |
| No 3 | Luong CB+TC: 7,460,038,;OT: 5,625,609; Khau tru: 632,100; Thuc linh: 12,453,547. Chi tiet |
Basic salary and allowance: 7,460,038 Overtime (OT): 5,460,038 Deduction (social insurance and tax): 632,100 Actual received: 12,453,547 |
Notes: The first payslip is not uncommon during the low period, normally from March to July each year, when there are fewer orders and overtime payment is equal to around 53 per cent of the basic salary. In the second payslip, the workers receive a large allowance for monthly performance bonus and nightshift allowance, and the overtime payment is equal to 87 per cent of their basic salary. The third payslip is considered by workers as ‘the happy month’ payment when they receive a big allowance and their overtime payment is equal to 108 per cent of their basic salary.
Source: Fieldwork, Ngoc Luong.
Examples of overtime accounting at X-Smart (difference between a dispatched worker and a worker on a permanent contract)
| Yingying (Temporary Contract) | Shuoma (Permanent Contract) | |
|---|---|---|
| Normal work days | 21.75 days | 21.75 days |
| Basic wage | 1900 CNY | 2100 CNY |
| Workday overtime | 9 hours | 30 hours |
| Workday overtime wage | 147.41 CNY | 543.09 CNY |
| Weekend overtime | 27 hours | 20.5 hours |
| Weekend overtime wage | 589.66 CNY | 494.82 CNY |
| National holiday overtime | 16 hours | 0 hours |
| National holiday overtime wage | 524.14 CNY | 0 CNY |
| National holiday working bonus | 2200 CNY | 0 CNY |
| Total | 5361.21 CNY | 3137.91 CNY |
Source: Fieldwork, Yueran Tian.
Secondly, these factories’ cycle of production requires variable labour time inputs, and at certain periods, they do not require additional labour time to the statutory work time. Usually before the release of a product/range of products in September, X-Smart will recruit new workers and create more working hours from July every year. The busy season lasts until January of the following year. After the Chinese New Year around early February, X-Smart will have a down season, and production will speed up again with the new cycle from May onwards. For December and January, X-Smart recruits a large number of college students during their winter break. They join the production teams as temporary contract workers, (usually for 90 workdays – see Tian (2024) for the terms of this highly flexible form of labour). Student workers are also employed in June and July during their summer vacation. Similarly, there are high and low seasons at U-Tech, with highly variable overtime hours and eventual incomes (see Table 2). This yearly fluctuation generates the perception that overtime work is exceptional rather than built into the system.
Thirdly, the performance assessment of these companies centres on the workers’ availability and readiness to work overtime. Rewards, bonuses and disciplining measures are largely administered on this basis. At X-Smart, reducing or not assigning workers with overtime slots are common disciplining measures. At U-Tech, on top of the (fixed) basic salary of around 5.100.000–5.300.000 VND per month (196–203 EUR/month), there are (variable) allowances and bonuses (see Table 4). U-Tech’s performance bonus, which factors in work readiness and the frequency of errors, is paid according to three grades, A to C – one worker claimed that repeated downgrading could lead to non-renewal of contract. Performance is also assessed based on whether a unit fulfils daily production quotas, which can be increased very quickly. When they cannot meet the ever-higher requirements during normal working hours, a common occurrence, workers have to put in additional unpaid time at the end of the day to finish it in order to retain their bonus; again, all this is done without being explicitly enforced by managers.
U-Tech’s additional allowances and bonuses
| Type | Amount | Conditions |
|---|---|---|
| Diligence payment | 400,000 VND/month = 15 EUR | Max. 1 day leave per month |
| Living allowance | 400,000 VND/month = 15 EUR | |
| Skill bonus | 300,000 VND/month = 11.5 EUR | After probation |
| Nightshift hardship | 100,000 VND/night = 3.8 EUR | For nightshifts |
| Menstruation/non-leave compensation | 120,000 VND/month = 4.6 EUR | For women only |
| Monthly performance bonus | 300,000–600,000 VND/month = 11.5–23 EUR |
Dependent on performance ranking |
Source: Fieldwork, Ngoc Luong.
According to a female worker at U-Tech, therefore, ‘one cannot last long at this company without being well-behaved (ngoan)’; to be ngoan, she explains, means to be diligent and have a pleasant attitude, not to steal, not to talk much while working, and not to try to take a nap during working hours (Fieldnotes, Minh Nguyen). At X-Smart, college educated young workers feel pressured into working overtime. As they explained to Yueran Tian, their managers use overtime as an implicit criterion to evaluate their performance; even when they finish their assigned tasks during standard working hours, they are expected to stay longer to show their dedication. As such, the performance measurement system views overtime not only as something of economic value, but also as morally and socially valuable.
As Tables 2 and 3 show, both the core and the outsourced workers clock about 2.5 additional hours every day, but it is common for both types of workers to work 12 hours a day, six days a week, sometimes on Sundays. There are extended periods in which many work successive weekends and nightshifts. The appearance of scarcity cultivated by the companies, therefore, sometimes makes workers compete with each other for overtime hours and turns it into an instrument of self-discipline. In effect, the seemingly higher wages paid for overtime hours are practically the same as regular wages for normal working hours plus the social insurance contributions the company would otherwise has to pay. By communicating to the worker that it is their choice whether they want to work additional hours, the companies evoke freedom as the basis of the labour contract. This freedom, however, is rendered fictional by the payment and incentive/disincentive structures that isolate overtime hours as a cash transaction beyond the labour contract. The high level of labour commodification is made possible by labour laws that keep the minimum wage at an unrealistic level and other state incentives to attract FDI investment. In the next section, the disjuncture between work time and social reproductive time arising from the changing context of social reproduction induced by industrial relocation further reveals that the seeming choice is indeed an imperative, given its consequences for family life.
Only so much time: between the times and places of work and life
While the spatial separation of work from social reproduction through reduced distance may have lessened, the temporal disjuncture in people’s lives has increased. This not only arises from the imperative to maximise the use of labour time in the present for fear of future layoff, but also the need to balance care responsibilities in a much more commodified context with the factory’s more sophisticated time discipline.
U-Tech is lauded by the state media as one of the best-paying companies in Vietnam, and has the carefully curated public image of a caring corporation that provides the best company welfare (that is, for the shrinking number of its core workers). Let us consider how the workers fare on their variable incomes with or without overtime work. If they are translocal migrants, half of their basic salary of around 190 EUR/month (in 2020) goes on food, rent and utilities, which they try to limit as much as possible. The remainder barely covers other individual needs and money sent home for household needs, including the costs of children’s schooling and maintaining social relations. Thus, without any overtime earnings, it would make more sense to return to their home place.
Lei lives with his parents and wife in a village 30 minutes away from the factory by scooter. He feels that he has lost most of his free time on the road with overtime work. If he gets off work at 20:00 and then it takes at least 30 minutes to change his clothes and walk out of his section to the factory gate then another 30 minutes on the way back home. Because he has to start working at 8:00 in the morning the next day, he needs to get up at 6:30 [at] the latest and has to go to bed around 23:00 or earlier. It only gives him maximum two hours at night to spend with his wife. He is usually very tired by the end of the day. If he has a night shift, the only day off, Sunday, is reserved for sleeping. With these hours, he feels trapped and tired at all times. (Fieldnotes, Yueran Tian)
Huyen, 35 years old, lived about 7 km from the factory with her mother-in-law, her husband and two sons, 13 and 17 years old. She drove the motorbike to work every day. Her family used to make bricks to sell, until brick making was banned. Her husband provided occasional food purchasing and cooking services for weddings and traded in agricultural produce. Huyen said: ‘The reason I have decided to become a factory worker is to have [a] more regular and stable income since we have enough rice and vegetable but very little cash. My work at the factory brings us more cash for other needs.’ (Fieldnotes, Ngoc Luong)
Living in a village close by the factory, Lingling had been given an apartment in a high-rise building as compensation for her expropriated land, a room of which she rents out. She decided to quit working as a saleswoman at a local cosmetic shop to work for X-Smart because of income fluctuations in the former. Yet, she finds it difficult to get used to the long hours and the night shifts at X-Smart. Once her son’s schoolteacher called and blamed her for being a bad parent, which she finds unfair because she works so hard in order to provide for her son. With overtime and nightshift, it is impossible to spend time with him, let alone helping him with homework. She thus sends her son to an afterschool care centre. She describes her day: ‘If it’s the day shift, I get up at 6:30 in the morning, prepare breakfast for my son and myself, then before he gets up, I have to go to work. His grandma brings him to school or he can walk on his own. When I get back from work, it is usually close to nine in the evening, my son has already gone to bed. I don’t talk to him at all. There is no time.’ (Fieldnotes, Yueran Tian)
Another commuter I met was Hau, who lived around 20 km from the factory. With her first child being in second grade, she was on maternity leave for the second. She told me how she managed her time when working: ‘In the morning I drive my motorbike to the pick-up station in the city at around 6.30am, the bus arrives at around 7am. I leave the company around 6pm and come home around 7pm. Every day I spend two hours on commuting, which takes away a lot of my time for the kid. My husband or my mother-in-law often picks my son from school since I come home late. Travelling takes a lot time, and that is why I have been thinking about quitting the company for some time. I prefer to find a work closer to my home although the salary might be less. I have looked at a vendor company producing earphones for U-Tech closer to my home but COVID[-19] happened, then I was pregnant so I have postponed it.’ (Fieldnotes, Ngoc Luong)
Xuan is mother of a nine-year-old and a four-year-old. She told me about her experience working with small children: ‘Then, I worked in blocks [meaning 4 days of 12 working hours and 2 days off] while my husband was working in Hanoi. I paid my neighbour two and a half million a month [about 100 EUR] so she could help with picking up the kids after school and feeding them until I came back at 8pm. In 2017, our first daughter started her primary school and with both of them in public school, it became less of an act. Since my husband came to join us, we have been trying to work in opposite shifts, but it does not always work out, or we have to work overtime. We need to pay our landlord to look after our children. The kids are a bit older now, and they have been looking after each other at night. I give them the phone and asked them to lock the door … I have been very worried about this.’ (Fieldnotes, Ngoc Luong)
If migrant workers used to travel trans-regionally to the factory sites, having to take long-distance trains between coastal cities and inland villages, my informants often take buses or drive themselves for home visits within the province. Most of them visit their children during the holidays and some go home more often if driving distance is within two hours. Although the translocal arrangement gives them some free time after work, visiting periods can be extremely busy. A typical day at home according to Xixi is like at war. She takes her two children to the market and has to finish all the laundry in one day. With all the running around and chores, she has to go back to work the next day. ‘They told me it is how one maximizes one’s non-working hours.’ (Fieldnotes, Yueran Tian)
These accounts indicate how work time and social reproductive time are both interdependent and in conflict with each other (Elias, 2007). This conflict is intensified by the production regimes that force the workers to prioritise work time over social reproductive time, at the cost of their social and family lives. This prioritisation leads to the tyranny of the present in the lives of the workers, placing their immediate social reproductive demands above those of the future. In the absence of meaningful and reliable social protection systems, the tyranny of the present will shape the future welfare of both the commuters and the translocal migrants and their families, albeit in different ways. If the commuters now enjoy a certain advantage with their homeplace being close to the factory, they can no longer access the welfare function of farmland. Despite their access to agricultural land, the trade-offs that translocal workers face in ensuring adequate care, schooling and time for their children will have implications for the future of the household. The tension workers face between work time and social reproductive time thus is at heart a disjuncture between their present and future, between their working day and their working life, and between their labour time and their lifetime. The necessity to accumulate overtime hours is thus predetermined by the social reproductive context of their lives, and their preference for working overtime is an ad-hoc reaction to this disjuncture rather than a willingness to self-exploit.
Conclusion
It must be clear by now why workers in global factories have a strong preference for working overtime despite the problems it causes in their lives. Robinson’s (1964 [1962]) remark that under capitalism, one can ill afford not to be exploited rings equally true here. In these market socialist economies, the production regimes of global factories interact with the social reproductive contexts of labour to generate the imperative on workers to accumulate overtime hours. The overtime work regime reveals an advanced level of value extraction that takes place thanks to policy frameworks that fail to take into account the temporal disjuncture in workers’ present and future needs for protection while ensuring capital’s access to cheap labour. The state’s facilitation of labour commodification undercuts its constitutional goal of ensuring broad-based wellbeing for its citizens, a goal that finds its realisation in thin layers of social protection backed by discourses of self-responsibility to maintain the image of care. Given these inherently contradictory goals (Lin and Nguyen, 2021), capitalist employers can appear socially responsible and law-abiding even as they optimise value extraction from labour.
On another level, these cases indicate the mutual constitution of production as the realm of paid work and social reproduction as the work of reproducing the worker (Federici, 2020; Mezzadri and Majumder, 2022). Social reproduction goes far beyond the immediate processes of maintaining the labour force (Burawoy, 1976) to include, among others, welfare regimes, labour laws, provision of public goods, possibilities for social and family life (Bhattacharya and Vogel, 2017), all of which have implications for the degree of labour commodification. The social reproductive contexts in which factory workers in Vietnam and China operate are characterised by the domination of both the state and the market over working people who are as overworked as they are overburdened with self-responsibilities. Despite policies aimed at the decommodification of labour, such as social insurances or labour legislations, the deepening commodification of both labour and public goods (Lin and Nguyen, 2021) not only renders them ineffective but also enables subtler forms of labour exploitation. Without explicit imposition, they take place via the consent produced through the hierarchical division of labour, sophisticated labour governing regimes and by the construction of overtime as a scarcity. The blend of old and new mechanisms of ‘manufacturing consent’ (Burawoy, 1982) and the disembedding of labour power from the time and place of its social reproduction makes state decommodification measures largely irrelevant for the life of the workers. These social and political economic dynamics around overtime work point to the irreconcilable contradictions between the constitutional mandate of liberating working people from alienated labour of these Communist party states and the imperative of capital expansion they concurrently endorse.
Notes
See also media coverage at https://e.vnexpress.net/news/companies/overtime-sole-option-to-make-ends-meet-vietnamese-workers-4442507.html; https://vnexpress.net/tang-ca-lua-chon-cua-cong-nhan-4441457.html (Overtime as the workers’ choice); https://laodong.vn/cong-doan/tang-ca-la-lua-chon-duy-nhat-hien-nay-de-cong-nhan-co-them-thu-nhap-1026683.ldo (Overtime is currently the only choice for workers to obtain more income), accessed on 9 January 2023. A news article at https://e.vnexpress.net/news/economy/workers-dilemma-as-vietnam-considers-increase-in-overtime-cap-4418344.html cites the result of a survey by the Vietnam Confederation of Labour Union in 2021, whereby 80 per cent of the workers interviewed expressed a preference for working overtime.
See https://www.statista.com/statistics/233839/monthly-minimum-wage-in-china-by-city-and-province/.
See for example media coverage at: https://vneconomy.vn/vi-sao-chua-doanh-nghiep-nao-bi-xu-ly-hinh-su-ve-tron-dong-bao-hiem.htm (why no enterprises have ever been prosecuted for evading social insurance contributions); or https://www.qdnd.vn/xa-hoi/chinh-sach/doanh-nghiep-tron-dong-bao-hiem-xa-hoi-gay-nhieu-he-luy-che-tai-nao-xu-ly-735611 (Enterprises’ evasion of social insurance contribution creates many social consequences – what legal means are there against it?).
Funding
This article is based on empirical research and conceptual work carried out by WelfareStruggles, a project that received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon research and innovation programme (Grant agreement No 803614).
Author biographies
Minh T.N. Nguyen is Professor of Social Anthropology at Bielefeld University, Germany. She is the author of Vietnam’s Socialist Servants: Domesticity, Gender, Class and Identity (Routledge, 2014, paperback in 2017) and Waste and Wealth: An Ethnography of Labour, Value and Morality in a Vietnamese Recycling Economy (OUP, 2018, Society for the Anthropology of Work Book Prize 2019).
Ngoc Luong is a PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology at Bielefeld University, Germany and researcher in the ERC-funded project WelfareStruggles. She has published in the Journal of Social and Cultural Anthropology and won the Graduate Student Paper Prize of the Vietnam Studies Group in 2022 for her paper ‘Betting on the Future: Financial Activities of Vietnamese Factory Workers’.
Yueran Tian is a PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology at Bielefeld University, Germany and researcher in the ERC-funded project WelfareStruggles. Using an ethnographic approach, her research interests include urban transformation in Chinese cities, migrant labour and welfare states.
Jake Lin is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Texas. His current research explores labour migration and social policy reconfigurations in China and Vietnam. He is the author of Chinese Politics and Labor Movements (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019). He is also co-editor for two special issues of positions: asia critique, and Journal of Labor and Society.
Conflict of interest
The authors declare that there is no conflict of interest.
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