Preliminary Programme

Who are the interns? How are they recruited and managed at the workplace? In the summer of 2010, Taiwanese-based Foxconn Technology Group—the world’s largest electronics manufacturer and biggest supplier of Apple—utilized the labor of 150,000 student interns from vocational schools at its facilities all over China. Foxconn, through direct deals with government departments, has outsourced recruitment to vocational schools to obtain a new source of student workers (aged 16-18) at below minimum wages. The goals and timing of internships are set not by student educational or training priorities but by the demand for products dictated by companies.

Based on fieldwork in China between 2011 and 2012 and follow-up interviews in 2014, as well as government documentary analysis, I find that the “student labor regime” has become integral to the capital-state relationship as a means to assure a lower cost and flexible labor supply for Foxconn and others. In contrast to a conventional social science approach (see for example Lu Zhang 2015), which does not distinguish between interning students and agency workers in the categorization of “temporary workers”, I aim to understand the distinctive character of student interns in China’s contemporary political economy.

Companies have continued to exploit the internal contradictions of the state to maximize their gains, and local states have bent education and labor rules to attract businesses. Notwithstanding significant Chinese legal reforms to date, there remains a deep-seated conflict between state legitimation and local accumulation, with the result that teenage student workers’ rights and interests are sacrificed.This is one important facet of China’s “state capitalism.” (Show less)

With globalisation and economic liberalisation in India since the 1990s, and with the expansion of the private corporate sector and the consumer economy, new kinds of contract cleaning work, called "house-keeping", have emerged as a major generator of employment. Cleaning is being developed as a professionalised, modern and technologically-oriented form of labour, seemingly dissociated from older, traditional forms of occupational subordination based on the ritual distinction of caste and untouchability. At the same time, new forms of subservience and servility come into play that are still reminiscent of master-servant relations or domestic service, but these are now linked to an ethos of customer service and consumer care, thus shaping the experience of workers in contradictory ways. This paper will examine how this changing nature of work shapes workers' political subjectivity.
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