Tag: labour force

Strangers in the City: Migrant Workers in Indian and Chinese Cities

While political systems, level of State capacity and trajectory of development may vary, cities in China and India have retained many common threads of socio-spatial exclusion of migrant workers

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P.K. Anand, Research Associate, ICS

The ‘visibility’ of the migrant workers is the biggest urban predicament that is being witnessed during the nation-wide lockdown, which has now crossed 50 days. The images of their ‘reverse migration’ — whether entirely by foot, or through modes of transportation that are heart-wrenching — lay bare the desperations and anxieties emerging from the loss of livelihood and security.

Not that many of these journeys have happy endings — deaths due to exhaustion, or accidents leave behind more than just a trail of dead bodies. It is equally significant that since the lockdown started on March 25, there also exists a long list of casualties that cannot be pinned on the virus per se — including those related to mental health, often left at the periphery.

The brutal social experiment that is the pandemic has only reinforced and exacerbated the systemic exclusion and dispossession of circular/seasonal migrant workers/footloose workers, who inhabit Indian cities. A report titled Unlocking the Urban, released by Aajeevika Bureau —a non-profit organisation working among seasonal migrants in western India — released on May 1, highlighted the longstanding vulnerabilities of rural-urban migrants in cities. They often receive less than minimum wages, are engaged in manual work which last for long hours, which, are often even dangerous.

They remain unaccounted for by national statistics and are invisible to city-level administrations; precarity undergirds their working and living spaces, rendering them ineligible for social schemes and welfare programmes. These further lead to them being denied access to urban residence and governance; their survival in the cities is dependent on daily negotiations with informal actors, ranging from petty contractors to security guards, and even landlords.

The socio-spatial exclusion of migrants from Indian cities, and their statelessness in some ways, mirrors the nongmin gong (peasant workers) in China’s urban spaces, pejoratively called ‘floating population’; though the Chinese state has changed the terminology to xin shimin (new city residents) in order to fully ‘integrate’ them into urban centres, the desired results have not followed.

China’s Rural-Urban Dichotomy

The demarcation of citizenship in China into rural and urban is a legacy of socialist planning. In 1958, the hukou(registered residence permits), was introduced to regulate the flow of resources, especially labour, and sustain an agrarian countryside, while the State subsidised urban living. The economic reforms of the 1980s led to easing of rural-to-urban mobility, which, in turn, kick-started the long journey of labourers from the rural areas to the industries and companies in coastal provinces. The migrant workers have been crucial in the growth of many megacities in China today.

However, this infrastructural and economic growth of Chinese cities happened even as the migrant workers remained peripheral in China’s urbanity. The urban hukou — the foundation for a well-entrenched city life with access to public services, healthcare and education — is highly stratified and segregated, with eligibility based on the level of education, skills and status. The hukoucreates a division between privileged and entitled urban residents and the migrant workers. Though the migrant workers are tagged as ‘essential’, in reality they are ‘placeless’ and unable to make claims for a ‘right to the city’. The constant fear of eviction from their informal neighbourhoods and being at the receiving end of law enforcement’s brutal high-handedness, mirror the story of their Indian counterparts. Furthermore, the marginalisation of migrants in city spaces has also impacted the lives of their children in claiming access to healthcare and education.

Urban Citizenship

While the high level of decentralisation in China’s political-administrative system give the local governments significant decision-making powers, city governments — especially those in the megacities — remain intransigent in reforming the hukousystem. Beijing has repeatedly mentioned the need to reform the system but it more or less remains on paper. While small and medium sized cities have experimented with various models and pilot programmes, there remains reluctance from the big cities. It highlights the skewed nature of China’s tax and revenue systems favouring the central government, while the local governments bear the fiscal responsibilities. Thus, the big cities are resistant to reforms that add to their burden.

By the same count, with laws and regulations largely divided between the Union government and the state governments in India, local bodies (such as municipalities) are rendered powerless, without significant responsibilities. Such disempowerment of cities create constraints in developing specific and contextual regulations (for instance, in many cities migrant workers are not even enumerated).

Clearly, while political systems, level of State capacity and trajectory of development may vary, cities in China and India have retained many common threads of socio-spatial exclusion of migrant workers.

Originally Published as ‘Urban Spaces | Migrant workers remains invisible in India and China’ in Moneycontrol.com, 21 May 2020

Eye on Labour amidst Lockdown: Taking a China lens

The images of migrants on roads across India should perhaps help us re-evaluate the often romanticised images of the massive movement of workers annually in China

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P.K. Anand, Research Associate, ICS

The nationwide 21-day lockdown announced by Prime Minister Narendra Modi to contain the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic in India has completed 10 days. Being the second-most populous country in the world, India’s lockdown has been a massive exercise involving stopping all forms of public transport, closing down educational institutions, and recreational facilities, and all other avenues of gatherings/congregations across the vast territorial swathes of the country.

The lockdown has generated considerable debate not only on its viability and necessity, but also on its implementation and the resulting effects.

The incrementalism adopted in India’s approach ever since the outbreak in China occupied news space in mid-January — from airport screenings, to visa restrictions and later tracing of contacts and travels of infected people — has also been subjected to scrutiny by public health scholars and experts. The reasons for reluctance of the government to scale up testing at a mass level, even as cases spiked across India, appears to be twin-fold — to avoid a panic and chaos on one hand, and reckoning with the reality of a creaky health infrastructure, amplified by the lack of requisite resources, personnel and equipment, on the other. Even now calls for mass testing than just mere lockdown continues to go unheeded.

Even though Italy was the first country to impose a nation-wide lockdown, the playbook has emerged from China in its complete shutdown of Hubei province (while allowing other provincial and sub-provincial administrations to calibrate measures as deemed necessary in their jurisdictional regions). However, there has been enough reams and ink spent on explaining the impossibility of replication of the Chinese model — which has been undergirded by the authoritarian one-party state system that is decentralised, possessing extensive reach and high-organisational capacity — in democratic, diverse political systems. Further, the party-state massively employed technology to ensure social and political discipline. The party-state’s efforts to ramp up testing and large-scale mobilisation of resources have acted as force multipliers in its combat against the contagion even though the initial cover up, censorship and failure to track it in the first place have come in for criticism.

Nowhere has the planning and viability of the lockdown been questioned than by the heart-wrenching images of displaced migrant workers and their families, fleeing cities to their native places in the Indian hinterland on foot, riven with fears and anxieties of lost livelihoods and absent State support. In fact, these images and stories have generated significant traction to the argument of privileging the middle classes and urban elite in India, who have the wherewithal and space to practice social distancing as well as be able to exercise the option of work from home. Unlike them, the poor and daily wage, low-paid workers who constitute the informal sector and are at the frontlines in keeping essential services thriving, have a hand-to-mouth existence.

The images of migrants on the road also engages us to perhaps re-evaluate the often romanticised images of the massive movement of workers annually in China, for Chunyun, or the 40-day period with the onset of the Lunar New Year holiday, cramping through trains and other public transport (incidentally that movement this year was termed to have accentuated the spread of the virus).

That China’s migrant workers, often termed as floating population, have to traverse great distances to work in manufacturing and services, mostly in coastal regions or bigger cities, reflects the failure to develop viable regional economies. This is line with the high level of inequality prevalent in China, both regional and income related. The obduracy and rigidity of the country’s urban registration system — or, Hukou — that excludes the low-paid migrants from accessing rights and services in Chinese cities, also finds echoes in how ‘invisible’ the migrant workers have become in Indian scenario.

While democracy versus one-party state value judgements have often tended to dominate India-China comparatives, ideally the metric to test the State has to be State capacity; the ability of the State to provide goods and services to its citizens, especially during times of crises and distress. Herein, in spite of its authoritarian State system, with censorship and restrictions on freedom, China has a higher State capacity compared to India. That in turn, means a more formalised economy, with even social protections built into employment contracts (even if the implementation on the ground has been tardy).

Rome was not built in a day, and that applies for State capacity as well. Perhaps this pandemic and the lockdown, and the stark images left in its wake, will finally activate the Indian State to unlearn and learn, and reshape itself as a provider than remain only as an enforcer.

Originally Published as ‘Labour, lockdown and the State’s predicament’ in Moneycontrol.com, 3 April 2020

Situating Labour in a Pandemic: Corona Virus Outbreak’s Social Costs

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P.K. Anand, Research Associate, ICS

As the Chinese pick the pieces of the outbreak of the novel Coronavirus, COVID -19, and the much-vaunted State capacity becoming frail, the pandemic has left more than a trail of dead in its wake. The direct or indirect impact on various segments of the polity, economy and society are being seriously felt and some of the cascading and ripple effects may be in the long-term.

The economic ill-health has significant bearing for not just China, but also for the rest of the world; in fact, the slowdown of the economy predates the outbreak with surge in inflation, and structural factors complicated by the trade war with the United States. While the Chinese had scaled down from high- to medium-term growth in early 2015, with reference to the term ‘New Normal’, the slowdown reflected that things had veered away from the expectations.

Much before the National Day last year, the surging prices of pork (a staple ingredient in Chinese food), along with other red flags on the economic front, had signalled life becoming harder in China. In fact, the pork prices have continued to rise amid shortages during the lockdown.

The ‘manufacturing centre of the world’ tag has taken a hit, as factories, enterprises and production units across China are either still closed or yet to restart completely, with cases of even an extension of the Lunar New Year holiday. Being the centre of automobile production in China, Wuhan has borne the maximum impact. Further, the ripple effects have in effect ceased production in automobile factories in South Korea and Japan, as closure of factories manufacturing auto parts in China.

The prospects of an extension of the economic recession also carry social costs, with significant consequences for labour in China. The travel of migrant workers — the fulcrum of the Chinese urban manufacturing story — at the onset of the new year from cities to their home provinces was often visually showcased with fascination over the years. While this masks the weaknesses of the regional economies within China by illustrating the inequalities between coastal and inland provinces, the movement also causes apprehension of spread of the virus.

The workers are also confronted with a dilemma while making decisions on returning to the workplaces — the need to make income by selling their labour versus (in)adequacies of health safety. More often than not, circumstances condition the workers to choose the former. The more days the things remain in limbo and cause disruptions including non-availability of transport for workers to reach workplaces, the more rise in workers’ anxieties.

The workers in manufacturing enterprises and their significance have always dominated the discourse on labour in China, and therefore, their absence through closure of workplaces and dilemmas do command news space. However, of equal, if not more, importance are the workers in the services sector — those in essential services such as sanitation workers, security guards, drivers and those on the low-end, not only in China but also in Hong Kong.

Along with them, hundreds of workers employed to power the platform/gig economy are also on the frontlines, especially food delivery workers. Even though extra precautions are exercised through usage of safety equipment, reporting the body temperature of employees to customers and quality checks, the food delivery workers are under added pressure in addition to the need to make deliveries in time, even though heralded as lifeline during the pandemic, and valourised for their selfless service.

However, dig a little deep, and the rosy picture starts turning bleak — workers for platform services are among the most vulnerable and precarious workforces in China without adequate workplace protection, or entitlements, and are also victims of accidents in the rush to ensure speedy deliveries and for customer satisfaction. Moreover, the rating-driven ecosystem where a high number of deliveries become the benchmark for evaluation, frustrations and alienation also set in.

Avowedly, China has national laws to regulate work contracts and to implement social security, but the translation of the same into action on the ground remains lopsided and inadequate. Precarity is intermingled within the system, as tough urban registration system called hukou, that segments and stratifies residents, renders migrant workers in the services sector to the margins, without access to services in the city where they reside.

The (in)capacity of the local-state to come up with problem-solving solutions to properly integrate the workers in the services sector also has echoes in India; even though there is cognisance of the prevalence of informal workforce in the urban system, adequate legal/formal inclusive measures are few and far between. This leaves them exposed to the vagaries of the market, which leads to the glorifying of their ‘resilience’ bringing forth a low-level equilibrium.

Undoubtedly, the social costs of a pandemic are in the long-term and therefore, the need to learn and unlearn.

Originally Published as Coronavirus exposes the brittleness of China’s economic prowess in Moneycontrol.com, 18 February 2020

A Note of Pause on Chinese Manufacturing Dreams in Indian Terrain

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P.K. Anand, Research Associate, ICS

Anticipation mixed caution prevails in the run up to the second informal summit between Chinese President Xi Jinping and Prime Minister Narendra Modi at the south Indian coastal town of Mamallapuram, in Tamil Nadu, this weekend. Given that the jury is still out on whether any substantive and tangible deliverables have been achieved from the first such exercise at Wuhan, in China, in May 2018, such an approach is understandable.

The optics of the meeting between the two leaders is expected to be political and strategic, even though economics looms as signifier for the relations of both countries in the background. Perhaps, it is a good time to analyse the economic capacity of China, especially the role of manufacturing sector, in powering the country and its positioning in the China-India dynamics.

The manufacturing base in China was largely the result of the invigoration of the economy after the 1978 reforms, with the focus on attracting foreign investments, especially in the coastal provinces. Along with the aim of getting foreign capital, the Chinese diaspora along with businesses based in Taiwan and Hong Kong, were also targeted of these investment policies.

Over the years, the rise of the Chinese economy was on the wings of the industrial production and development. While the bulk of heavy industry is under State-Owned Enterprises (SOEs), an increased proportion of manufacturing also falls in light and consumer-oriented firms, which are either private or joint ventures.

With deepening diversification, the industrial pace picked up in 1990s, with the development of automobile, electronics, and semiconductors, along with steel, cement, metallurgy and textiles. A cursory glance through the Indian market is enough to understand why the sobriquet ‘Factory of the World’ fits for China — such is the range of myriad consumer goods tagged as ‘Made in China’. Intricately connected with the global value chains, the manufacturing sector in China has often been considered robust.

This purportedly successful industrial development model has been offset with significant challenges. That the real essence of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) was to find a fix for industrial and infrastructural overcapacities, is a well-acknowledged fact. With the rise of labour costs in the mainland along with the increasing worker protests, mainly in south China — the industrial hub of the country — due to despotic labour regimes in workplaces, manufacturers are grappling with either automating labour-intensive industries or move them to newer locations like Southeast Asia.

Further, the US-China trade war over the last one year has compounded in the slowing of economic growthresulting in the shrinking of the manufacturing sector. In fact, the trade war has also impacted the Made in China 2025 project, at least in terms of its active pronouncements and projections. These need to be contextualised while probing the dynamics and possibilities for China’s manufacturing sector to make forays in India.

There has been a spike in investments by Chinese companies in electronics (mainly mobile phones), home appliances, and automobiles, along with the tech sectors. The lion’s share of Chinese investments in India are private companies, thereby highlighting the reticence towards big ticket SOEs, and dawning the realisation that a good amount of such partnerships take place outside the purview of government-to-government engagements. However, these partnerships and investments are not necessarily the markers for the whole manufacturing sector, as there exist multiple humps on the road for both countries.

The increasing clamour among sections of the Indian business and political elite —enamoured by the glitter of China’s advancement —to ‘transplant’ the Chinese model in Indian settings, is oblivious to the inherent problems on both sides. The avowed ‘win-win’ as often bandied by the Chinese doesn’t translate into reality when it comes to technological transfer or knowledge sharing. Doubts exist in the count on employment creation, as Chinese enterprises abroad mostly seek have technical and supervisory/managerial personnel only from the mainland, thereby hiring local workers only for other routine and auxiliary tasks. This is often justified in the name of ‘work culture’ and ‘efficiency’.

Further, they view the regulative environment, with complex labour laws, discouragingly. The suppression of labour rights, is an inherent part of the ‘Chinese model’, and is even visible in subcontracting firms, as illustrated by developments at this phone manufacturing facility  Delhi NCR; the export of this exploitative model is well documented in Southeast Asia. Clearly, there are enough warts are always cheek by jowl with the gloss.

Even as speculations continue on the enduring nature of China-India relationship amidst the Mamallapuram pit stop, we can be pretty sure that there is still a long way to go and multiple hoops to climb before the Chinese manufacturing sector can both meaningfully and substantively, shake hands with India.

Originally Published as Entry of Chinese manufacturing in India is a bridge too far in Moneycontrol.com, 9 October 2019

Work and Workplaces in the ‘New Era’: Labour Issues at the 19th Party Congress

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P. K. Anand, PhD, Research Associate, ICS

In the week preceding the beginning of the 19th Party Congress of the Communist Party of China (CPC), state-run media trumpeted the increase in minimum wage levels in 17 regions & cities in China in 2017. Out of these, four major cities namely, Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen and Tianjin, have set the minimum wage levels at 2,000 RMB per month. The increase in the minimum wage levels does not carry a linear narrative, however. Some provinces have expressed reluctance to implement minimum wages, wages are also not commensurate with rising house rents, increasing costs of travel from home to the workplace, etc. On the other hand, the increase in wages also adds to the rising labour costs for investors and enterprise managements. In this scenario, the Party-state has the task of striking a fine balance between maintaining economic growth and encouraging investments, while also increasing the material wealth and ensuring the well-being of the workforce.

Xi Jinping’s political report to the 19th Party Congress is reflective of the apprehensions and disquiet of the Party-state in the need to undertake this balancing act Continue reading “Work and Workplaces in the ‘New Era’: Labour Issues at the 19th Party Congress” →

India’s Uncertain Demographic Dividend

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Jayan Jose Thomas, PhD, Associate Professor of Economics, Indian Institute of Technology Delhi and Member, Planning Board, State Government of Kerala

A version of this article was originally published in Chinese as ‘印度不确定的人口红利’ [Yindu bu queding de renkou hongli], Diyi Caijing, 10 July 2017. This is part of a series by Indian scholars in China’s top business affairs news portal facilitated by the ICS. The English version follows below the Chinese text.

普遍的观点认为，印度将受益于所谓的“人口红利”。据世界银行估计，2010年至2030年间，印度15岁至59岁人口将增加至2亿多人。与此同时，包括中国在内的世界大部分发达地区的适龄劳动人口预计将会下降。也就是说，未来几年，印度会为全球劳动力供给的大幅增长贡献力量。

然而，实现人口红利对印度来说并不容易。首先，获得诺贝尔经济学奖的阿马蒂亚·森(Amartya Sen)指出，在卫生和教育领域，印度面临严峻挑战。2010年，印度的婴儿死亡率是每千名47例，而在中国，这个比例已减少到每千名13例。

对印度政策制定者来说的另一个重大挑战，是为新进入劳动力市场的印度人创造就业机会。事实上，大部分年轻劳动力的增长将来自印度最贫穷的地区，主要包括北方邦和比哈尔邦在内的北部和东部地区。 Continue reading “India’s Uncertain Demographic Dividend” →

Artificial Intelligence and China’s Future

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Shruthi Anup Kumar, Research Intern, ICS

The field of artificial intelligence or AI encompasses a number of possibilities. Ranging from autonomous driving systems and language interpretation to facial recognition and military weapons, AI comprises not only the development of a robot that can move, think and talk like a human being but also includes smart programmes that are built to overcome our shortcomings and make the job easier for a human being.

In 2015, China’s central government launched the ‘Made in China 2025’ policy,[1] whereby the shift in focus from mass producing factory goods to developing high tech manufactured products by the year 2025 was announced. The effect of this policy was especially felt in the AI sector which is expected to grow from an industry of 23.9 billion Yuan (as of 2016) to 38 billion Yuan by the year 2018.[2] Continue reading “Artificial Intelligence and China’s Future” →

Demography in Japan

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Ambassador (retd.) Kishan S Rana, Honorary Fellow, Institute of Chinese Studies.

The word ‘Japanification’ has come to mean a sharp decline in the population and workforce, as a result from a huge secular decline in the birthrate, to a point where it leads to a contraction of the economy, and a huge threat of a burgeoning number of old age dependents, which alters the very structure of life. In 2005, its ‘total fertility rate’ (TFR), i.e. the number of children per woman) fell to 1.26; it has risen slightly since then, but experts estimate this as a change in the timing of birth, and not a long-term change.

Continue reading “Demography in Japan” →