The Commodification of Labour and the Disjuncture Between Work Time and Social Reproductive Time
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. 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 that simultaneously protect labour via laws and social policies and cheapen 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. 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.
The Political Economy of Industrial Restructuring and the Commodification of Labour
‘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.
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.
Contradictions in Labour and Welfare Restructuring under Market Socialism
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.
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).
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).
Overtime as a Mechanism of Labour Governance
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 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 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.
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.
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. 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.
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).
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. 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.
As such, the performance measurement system views overtime not only as something of economic value, but also as morally and socially valuable. 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.
The Tyranny of the Present: Work Time vs Social Reproductive Time
If migrant workers used to travel trans-regionally
