Pandemic Precarity and the Livelihoods of Migrant Workers in China and Cambodia - Transcript

Transcript Nordic Asia Podcast:

Pandemic precarity and the livelihoods of migrant workers in China and Cambodia: A discussion with Dennis Arnold and Thomas Sætre Jacobsen.

 

Opener  (00.00:02) 

This is the Nordic Asia podcast.

 

Arve Hansen  (00.00:09)  

Welcome to the Nordic Asia podcast, a collaboration sharing expertise in Asia across the Nordic Region. My name is Arve Hansen. I'm researcher at Center for Development and the Environment at University of Oslo, and I'm a leader of the Norwegian Network for Asian Studies. And I'm here today with Dennis Arnold, geographical political economist from the University of Amsterdam, and Thomas Sætre Jakobsen, geographer affiliated with the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. They both have long experience doing research on labor and migration in Asia. Dennis in Southeast Asia, including in Cambodia, Myanmar, Thailand, and Vietnam, and Thomas in China. Today, they join us to help us understand precarious labor in Asia, focusing particularly on the quite different cases of China and Cambodia, we will give particular attention to the impacts of the covid 19 pandemic on migrant workers. Welcome Dennis, and Thomas. And thank you for taking the time to join us from Amsterdam and Trondheim. So let's start with some of the basics here. Creating jobs and providing decent employment is central to global development agendas. Indeed, Sustainable Development Goal eight targets nothing less than decent work for all by 2030. Yet the precarization of work is seen as a defining feature of late capitalism. Can you help us understand what this mean, and what it means in China and Cambodia? Thomas, let's start in China.

 

Thomas Sætre Jacobsen  (00.01:31)  

Well, let's begin with some basic framework for understanding precarization in China, there are about 280 million rural migrant workers in China, people who have left the countryside to work in more urban areas, or in other industries located closer to the countryside, but still urban or wage work. And in total, there are about 770 million workers in China. So 280 million workers is quite a huge number. And of the 770 million workers, there are quite a few working in rural areas with farm work. So, to say something about precarious work in China, a lot has been done in terms of legal measures to secure that work in urban areas is not precarious. That people have working contracts, that they have set working hours, maternity leave, vacation and so forth. However, compliance is very low. So a lot of workers basically don't have a working contract, they don't have a set working hour, and so forth. So it's a lot of precarious or insecure work in urban areas. Rural migrant workers typically find work in urban industries. You know, the face of the rural migrant workforce in China are these workers in the garment industry, for the apparel industries working along the assembly lines, and they constitute major productive force in China and are about 30% of the total urban or rural migrant worker demographic. However, a lot of workers are also working in other more small scale petty commodity workplaces, where there are few workers, there is a owner with small scale capital. These are particular restaurants, hair, saloons, and other service industries, which are important in servicing the urban communities. And there you will typically find a lot of rural migrant workers working in quite difficult situation. What is interesting, I mean, just to give a backdrop of the Chinese case, is to know that this rural migrant workers when they enter the city, they normally don't have a legal status in urban areas, meaning their government registration is in rural areas where they are born, and they have been socialized, and I grew up before moving to the city. So in terms of social protection, it's difficult for them to access it in the city. And here I'm thinking of things like unemployment insurance, I'm thinking of healthcare, and if you get pregnant, turn into health care and so forth, but also for the children of migrant workers, the case often that they leave their children back in the villages when they move to the city. Because urban governments have ways to make these parents pay extra fees, and the school they have these separate schools for migrant worker children, which are very poor standard and so forth. So there's a lot of barriers to bring children to the city. And there's also another barrier which is the high costs of living in urban areas. So this kind of hukou system, it's called in China where workers are registered in their place of birth, makes a difference to the precarious nature of work for the rural migrant workers who then are less able to access urban public goods. So this also means that these workers are to a large extent, and this is what I've been focusing on a lot in my work, reliant upon agriculture and rural land for survival. Particularly if you look at people's trajectory over time, you will see that whenever they get sick, or unemployed, or pregnant, they return to the village to their hometown, to recuperate or to live off the land for some time. And just to wrap up this introduction, I think it's also important to say something briefly about the changes in land and agricultural relations during the last decade or so in China. As this role, migrant workers are so dependent upon land for their long term survival and social protection. During the last decade or so since largely around 2008, the Chinese government had tried to make land in rural areas, which hands more easily, there is no full scale privatization going on. But it's easier now to rent land from neighbors. And also for external parties like this larger agri businesses or mid scale, I would say entrepreneurs to leased land from farmers or land holders in rural areas. So there is the kind of scaling up of agriculture going on, which is very much promoted in rural development overseas in China. So this makes in a way people are more dependent upon way to work. Another force, which is making people more dependent upon wage work is the fact that a lot of land has been expropriated and privatized into this more large scale construction projects going on, particularly in the outskirts of cities. And so a lot of farmers are former farmers have lost their land became full scale workers or proletarian eyes forcefully, you can say. So, in a way, just to sum up this introduction, the urban labor market becomes more important for the social reproduction of these workers. So this precarious nature of the work really impinges upon their situation. I'm not saying workers are powerless, but I'm saying that due to the weak implementation of the legal code, and the we are lack of, I would say, to some extent, an active community among workers in urban areas, partly because of this circular, rural urban migration of this workers. And also because of the hukou system, it's very difficult for workers to become this very strong collective force to change the broad scale working conditions in China.

 

Arve Hansen  (00.08:09) 

Thank you very much for that excellent overview, Thomas. So Dennis, what about you? What does precarious work mean to you? And how does it resonate with the research that you've been doing on migrant workers in Cambodia?

 

Dennis Arnold  (00.08:23) 

Sure, first of all, I'd like to talk about Cambodia's position so to speak in the global division of labor. It's not an advantageous position, its a position of structural weakness. Cambodia is a very small country in comparison to China, with a population of only 15 million. It was only in the early 1990s that Cambodia emerged from over two decades of conflict, pulled into the US wars in Indochina, of course, and leading to the Khmer Rouge takeover of the country, which is a very familiar story. But essentially, in the 1990s, Cambodia emerged with this aerated state and an economy that was in shambles. So it really started from a poor starting point, shall we say. Going forward to today, the country still lacks economic diversification, therefore, so called economic growth pillars in the country, which are construction, agro industry, tourism and garments. We'll come back to later on with the COVID discussion. Two of them are really quite devastated for over a year. And it's a rapidly urbanizing economy, similar to China, there have been very big changes in terms of land tenure and ownership and a lot of both landless people and more so land poor people migrating to urban areas, but also migrating internationally, especially to Thailand. Across the board, I would say that work is quite precarious in this context. Importantly, that there are limited opportunities I would say for Cambodia to upgrade, so to speak, its position in the global economy. Basically, the country really struggles to maintain a position in lower value added segments of the global apparel industry. For example, there's really no significant diversification in terms of industry going on into electronics or auto or other sectors of that sort, which you find in Vietnam, of course. So zooming in a bit more to the garment sector, which is the sector I know the most, it's the one I've been studying for quite some time. Work in this sector it remains highly precarious. There have been very significant wage increases over the past seven, eight years. And these were led by workers protests and struggles, and these were a victory for Cambodia's labor movement. But these wages started from an exceptionally low starting point. So they're basically just getting back to where it should have been to adjust to inflation over the 10 year period or so. Despite these wage increases, there's still very far removed from the living wage. So garment work is define the general parameters of it to feminized industry in Cambodia, as it is globally. So roughly 85-90% of the workers in the sector are female, who is about 900,000 employed in the sector, 90 plus percent, I would say are others that are migrants from rural areas, very typical partial proletarians, I got one foot in the land and one foot in the urban areas, and really important in the context of Cambodia. And it's I think quite similar in Vietnam and other countries in the region is that work in industry in the urban or Peri urban industrial zones, remains highly precarious in terms of pay and the duration that one may expect to be able to work in this sector. So this means that individuals and families are not in a position to fully let go of the land, they need to hold on to land a few Hector's even as a form of individual or family oriented social. This is their form of social insurance, so to speak. At the same time, the land holdings are so small that families are not able to make a sufficient living from the land. So they're stuck in neither one or the other, and are trying to maintain both precarious work in urban areas as well as precarious small scale land holdings in rural areas. And it's a cycle that few are able to get out of. And what you find increasingly in Cambodia is a debt that has really made a huge presence throughout the country. According to many sources. Cambodia is the country with the highest penetration of microfinance in the world. Average individual amounts of debt are astronomical in relation to the kinds of wages that people are making. So in relation to this precarious landholdings, and precarious forms of work that people have, are increasingly taking out loans in order to subsidize effectively their participation in the labor market or for schooling, healthcare and various other things of that sort.

 

Arve Hansen  (00.13:22) 

Thank you very much, Dennis, for that excellent overview. Now, as you touched upon, the covid 19 pandemic obviously had severe impacts on the lives and livelihoods of workers, around the world really. In Asia, the hardships of the many Indian migrant workers who walked a long way home after lockdown was imposed in the country gave the topic some brief international attention. Relatively little attention has been given to the situation of workers in East and Southeast Asia during the pandemic. Now, how has the pandemic influenced their lives and how do they cope during lockdown? Thomas, let's start in China again.

 

Thomas Sætre Jacobsen  (00.13:56) 

Well, regarding the lockdown, I think it's interesting to take the Chinese particulars into consideration because lockdown started around the Chinese New Year celebrations around January 2020. And a lot of rural migrant workers, we are focused on that population, had gone home to their villages to celebrate. And what's interesting about the situation or the impact of the COVID is that a lot of people then chose or could not return to their workplaces in more urban areas. So again, this kind of demonstrates the importance of this situation for most of rural migrant workers, one foot on the land and one in the city. So a lot of them didn't receive their wages or didn't have any wage work to fall back upon. So a lot of them went unemployed and return to the land. And similarly to the situation in Cambodia, in the area where I've been doing most work in southwestern China, the situation for most rural households is that they have very small plots of land. And they're basically not able to live off the land, so to speak alone, but they are in need of this way to working opportunities. But to say a bit more about which groups are most affected, it's, of course, a lot of the service economy workers who deliver food who are working in food production and other services, hairdressers and beautification salons and all that kind of small scale wage work, which is in urban areas. And a lot of that was closed down, particularly to begin with. As the pandemic and the response to it moved on, it, of course, also hit the more central parts of the economy, the manufacturing sector, where a lot of workers lost their jobs, as global demand started slumping. And a lot of these workers also then returned home to their villages. And in a way this situation is similar to what happened in 2008, when you had the financial crash, a lot of workers returning home, back then it was 20 million migrant workers who were returned home. I have to say it's quite difficult to get very, very good overview of what's going on, it's easier to say something about what kind of policies the Chinese government is trying to implement to combat the more large scale unemployment it is witnessing. And they have been rolling out this vocational training programs, which they were big on also before the pandemic, where workers are trained to learn and master a profession. And they also open up more educational opportunities. So there's more people in higher education. But these possibilities are mainly not open for rural migrant workers who are not able to afford or don't have the urban hukou registration, which I mentioned, which is often a requirement for these programs. So yeah, it's difficult to say more than that without getting on thin ice. But it's definitely a kind of a situation that illustrates again, this importance of rural urban mobility and reliance that so many urban workers have on rural land for their long term social protection. I think it kind of opens up a rift in the normalcy of precariousness. And it shows kind of this situation very starkly. I'll leave it there.

 

Arve Hansen  (00.17:27)  

Thank you for these insights, Thomas. Now, Dennis, if we've heard little about the situation of workers in China during the pandemic we've heard close to nothing about the situation for workers in Cambodia. Or that is the rest of us at least, I know you've heard quite a bit. So what can you tell us about the situation in Cambodia?

 

Dennis Arnold  (00.17:46) 

Well, first of all, I'll qualify this, I've not been to Cambodia throughout the pandemic. I have not left Amsterdam, in fact, it's about two years since I was there. So there are limitations to what I know, of course, about the situation there. I did do a desk based study for a trade union, the CMB, which was published earlier this year. So in that process, I was in touch with a lot of stakeholders from the trade unions, employers association, and ILO and others of that sort. So much of the knowledge I have is from that, and then other media reports and kind of informal conversations with colleagues there. So what I can say very briefly in terms of the COVID impacts, and in 2020, there were very limited number of cases in Cambodia. So there weren't widespread lockdowns. That changed this year. But in 2020, that wasn't the case. But certain sectors of the economy were very much impacted. Tourism, I mentioned earlier is essential to the Cambodian economy. And of course, there were no tourists going to Cambodia throughout the pandemic. So that had a massive impact on thousands of workers livelihoods. Garment manufacturing, which is the one that I studied was impacted not as dramatically as we may have expected in terms of the level of production and export. The country definitely took a hit on the whole due to decreased demand from European and North American markets, but it wasn't as dramatic as we could have expected. Still, if we look at it in terms of precarity, and the livelihoods of workers, it had dramatic consequences. Even these relatively minor decreases and exports, it meant that some factories were closed for a few weeks here and there some closed permanently, not a huge number of them. More significantly, from what I understand slowdowns, a fewer number of orders, so workers doing eight hours a day rather than 10 or 12, which is the norm. And those overtime hours are really essential instruction into the wage, for them to be able to get by they have to be working really excessive amounts of overtime, which is a another story. But anyway COVID impacted workers capacity to do that. And so in the process, basically, a lot of workers were short on money taking out increasing numbers of loans. As I mentioned, before workers starting to sacrifice sufficiently nutritious food, which was a practice that was very common around 2010/2013. Before there were wage increases, which I mentioned before. So the impacts have been widespread in 2020. In those terms, at the factory floor, from what I understand issues around collective bargaining or sufficiently transparent wage payments and maternity leave. And these kinds of issues, which are always an uphill battle in a context like Cambodia have really been put to decide. And it's just about do we have work or don't we have work. And so people are focusing on really much more basic survival kinds of issues, and these others which are critical, of course, gets pushed to the side for the moment. So that's one major issue and that may have lasting effects and may take a long time in order to get those issues back onto the agenda. 2021, the situation has changed for the worse in terms of COVID there have been outbreaks in April in May, in so called red zones. So many parts of Phnom Penh and other areas have been in complete lockdown. This led to many factory closures. And there have been some ad hoc state led initiatives to help people out during this time like a partial wage subsidy for garment to select other formal sector workers in the country of which our view, the garment industry is really, by far the biggest formal sector employer in the country. There have also been monthly cash transfers to the so called identified poor, these are poorest of the poor, not somebody who is employed. Someone who is employed is not in that category. And more recently, some one off cash transfers and food provisions and things of that sort in urban areas. But from what I understand these have been ad hoc and insufficient. And again, people are sacrificing sufficiently nutritious food and in all kinds of devastating consequences. So the current phase of the pandemic is wreaking much more havoc, I would say. And that's sort of where things are at the moment. Cambodia does have a vaccination program and is rolling it out, as I understand about 15% of the population have been vaccinated. And that's relatively high. If you think Japan is only at, I think 13% or something like that, if I've got the numbers, right. And interestingly, this is because of the close geopolitical relations with China. Cambodia is one of China's key geopolitical allies in the Southeast Asia region. And so you see this vaccine diplomacy playing out in the case of Cambodia in relations with China.

 

Arve Hansen  (00.23:05) 

Thank you very much Dennis. I'm learning a lot from listening to both of you. And my final questions are rather big. If we go back to the beginning, when I said that we're supposed just nine years from now, to have decent work for all to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals. Now, what do you think these cases, China and Cambodia, tell us about labor and work in late capitalism? And what kind of long term impacts do you think the pandemic will have? What are the prospects for decent work in these countries? Thomas, let's start with you.

 

Thomas Sætre Jacobsen  (00.23:40) 

It's a good question. And something to ponder upon for the coming years, I'm sure. I guess I'm not very optimistic regarding the goal of getting to those 2030 goals. Particularly, I think the pandemic and things that Dennis touched upon regarding issues that were important for workers, including maternity leave and paid vacation. Stuff like that have kind of fallen down the list of priorities. So yeah, I'm not that optimistic. I think it's interesting, if you look at more long term developments in China, to think about labor demand and labor supply, and what this does to precarious work. Because what you have seen since 2008, you have seen when you had the financial crisis that hit China, then in autumn 2008, you saw that a lot of workers became unemployed, returned back to their villages. And there was also some labor militancy in the years coming afterwards where workers demanded high wages particularly, and actually in the industry, they had a shortage of labor, and they had quite substantial wage increases after 2012/2013. But what's going on then is you have more and more automation and workers being made redundant by machine. And again, we don't have the full image there. But my worry is that if we do this, and at the same time people lose their access to land. I mentioned earlier, a lot of farmers have lost their access to land. You will see more and more difficult situations arising for these workers. So I guess that's that. But of course, I'm always hoping and looking for glimmers of collective action. And what we have seen during the pandemic is that, and this is quite interesting and novel in the Chinese case at least, is that small scale business owners and migrant workers have joined forces to protest the government and local landlords and calling for rent cuts. So they want to get their accommodation at a lower price. And this is, of course, related to the fact that they are short on money and that the money supply and the wages are more disconnected or not so easily to access. So this is some glimmer of hope. Maybe small scale, business owners and migrant workers will, at least in urban areas more often, in the future join forces. We'll see, it's an interesting landscape to follow.

 

Arve Hansen  (00.26:17) 

Thank you very much, Thomas. And thank you also for giving us some glimmer of hope in the end there. Dennis, any glimmers of hope in Cambodia?

 

Dennis Arnold  (00.26:26)  

See, how to address that. First, I want to go back to where I started in terms of recognizing and coming to terms with Cambodia's structural disadvantage in the global economy. It was really limited opportunities for the country to develop economically, socio economically, difficult to move beyond a dependence on low wage, garment assembly and tourism and other sectors of that sort to generate jobs in the country. And we see very clearly that these are low wage, precarious jobs. So it's difficult to get out of that situation. If we look at sectors like garments, you know. It's a situation in which if we look at this in prominent discourses in Europe, which have clearly traveled to Cambodia in other contexts, you mentioned decent work, and along with decent work is that concept or practice of social dialogue, which is a central pillar across Europe these days. So these concepts are meant to bring together so called social partners in a context like Cambodia. And in the garment industry, the social partners, being workers and their representative trade unions, a paternalistic, violent, neoliberal authoritarian state, you know led by a prime minister, Hun Sen. He's been in power for a very long time, I think the third or fourth longest serving Prime Minister in the world, there's effectively no opposition in the country any longer. It's very clearly an electoral authoritarian state. And garment factory owners, managers who are making money, of course, that's why they're still in business, but they're servicing the lower nodes of the global apparel industry. And so effectively, these so called social partners are meant to come around and have discussions around the way in which value or profits are shared. And this is the underlying notion, from my perspective of decent work, and that it is really contingent upon this notion of social dialogue and social partners, but it really flattens disparity in power between these different stakeholders, specifically in the context of Cambodia. And it also flattens disparities in the accumulation of wealth in the global economy more generally. Why is it that Cambodia is servicing Europeans desire for cheap t-shirts and cheap blue jeans and things of this sort. So it's a new form of dependency, if we think of it in the global division of labor, and it's an institutional context in Cambodia, in which it's extremely difficult for these actors to try to come together in any sort of harmonious way as these concepts were described. To really complicate things in the context of Cambodia, you know, workers representatives, the trade union, are prone to co-optation. From the government from the ruling government. They're prone to co-optation from employers. There are some very good independent unions in the country who are genuinely struggling for their members and workers. But they've really become the minority over the years and it's these pro party unions or pro capital unions who have the majority at the most So this is another impediment to workers being able to advance their interests institutionally. So some years past what you get is increasing scale and intensity of strikes from 2010 to 2014, roughly so workers really taking things into their own hands. Since then the Cambodian state has cracked down very hard. They crack down immediately at those protests, with the army stepping in and shooting and killing multiple workers. Shooting them with ak47s. Heavily armed military units going into industrial zones to put down protests. Since then, workers have really not been able to strike. And this is one of the most powerful tool at workers disposal in a context like Cambodia is the strike. So that's effectively been taken away. So, what limited power workers have enjoyed in a sector like garment has really been transformed to their disadvantage. So, I'm sorry to paint such a bleak picture. But perhaps next time you can bring somebody else from one of the Cambodian unions and maybe some workers themselves. And they may have something better to say than me. But sitting here in Amsterdam, it's hard to paint a rosy picture on these things. But I've tried to point out that there have been multiple instances in the past when workers and independent unions have struggled and going on strike and it paid off and to have an improvement. So let's hope that another cycle of struggle will come back in the short term.

 

Arve Hansen  (00.31:34) 

Thank you, Dennis. We'll have to end this highly interesting and important conversation here. Thank you both for sharing these insights with us. Dennis Arnold and Thomas Sætre Jacobsen, thank you for joining us and the best of luck with your important work.

 

Dennis Arnold  (00.31:48)  

Thank you very much for the invitation. It's a pleasure.

 

Thomas Sætre Jacobsen  (00.31:51) 

Thank you so much. It was a pleasure to talk about China.

 

Arve Hansen  (00.31:54) 

My name is Arve Hansen. Thank you for joining the Nordic Asia Podcast, showcasing Nordic collaboration in studying Asia.

 

Closer  (00.32:04) 

You have been listening to the Nordic Asia Podcast