Recruitment: Segmenting Class

Abstract

The recruitment of wage labour is essential to the main objective of the capitalist enterprise: that is, the production of profit. According to the managers and workers of the case study enterprises, that global objective is of paramount importance to the reworking of China’s proletariat. However, there are a number of factors that affect the recruitment process in China which have important implications for the ways in which contract and temporary workers conceptualise themselves and their position relative to employers, and which thereby inform their understandings of capitalist production processes and the associated formation of collective social identities. State policies regarding different types of workers and jobs, prejudices about rurality and particular places of origin, and informal networking practices are all integral to recruitment and the capital-wage labour nexus in China. Workers’ understandings are mediated by their experience of these factors not only in their search for work, but also in the organisation of the work place. Throughout this section, I shall seek to demonstrate that these same factors shape the images workers form of themselves and their employers as sometimes overlapping cross-class groups, rather than as two groups set in opposition by relations of ownership and employment.