Abstract
This chapter provides a comparative context for the broad economic processes underway on the south China coast, by focusing on Hong Kong’s changing positions in global garment production. To compare the circumstances of Chinese workers in the 1990s and today, I relate the stories of two Hong Kong female garment workers and review their life cycles and work histories during Hong Kong’s transition from manufacturing boom to bust. This transition witnessed a proliferation of subcontracting practices in the garment industry and the rise of patron–client and labor–management relationships up until the mid-1990s. By the end of the 1990s, Hong Kong factory management had abandoned their Hong Kong workforce, resulting in “deskilling” as many garment workers left the industry and entered the low-pay service sector.
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Notes
- 1.
For an ethnographic description of Hong Kong’s factory districts in the 1970s, see Salaff (1995, pp. 46–47).
- 2.
There is a great deal of literature on women’s productive and reproductive labor. Participation by female workers in formal employment sectors is discussed, e.g., in Chapkis and Enloe (1983), and Nash and Fernandez-Kelly (1983). For women’s participation in informal employment sectors, see Beneria and Roldan (1987), Mies (1986). For women’s economic participation in destinations of global capital relocation, see Ong (2010).
- 3.
Research has shown that women as salaried employees, self-employed workers, homeworkers, and unpaid workers in family enterprises have divergent differences in terms of wage, work hours, and work scheduling. See Ngo (1992).
- 4.
See also Roos (1981, pp. 195–224).
- 5.
See Siu (2011).
- 6.
Siu-kai Lau (1982) argued that Hong Kong’s economic development contributed to the maintenance of familism, the nature of which is coined “utilitarian familism” (pp. 67–87). Agreeing with Lau, Janet Salaff (1995) suggested that the particular form of Chinese familism was adapted to Hong Kong’s colonial condition, which provided opportunities for young female workers to enter into the public sphere of work, for many of them were forced by the obligation to help earn a living for their families or pay education expenses of their brothers (p. 258).
- 7.
Lee (1993) conceptualized these lenient policies in the workplaces as “familial hegemony” and argued that, through these lenient policies, employers could make matron workers’ interests align with theirs, and thus a workplace hegemony was established (pp. 137–159).
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Siu, K. (2020). Hong Kong Female Garment Workers and China’s Open Door. In: Chinese Migrant Workers and Employer Domination. Series in Asian Labor and Welfare Policies. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-32-9123-2_2
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