Labor exportation, transnational production politics, and the formation of exploitation relationships—a case study of Chinese migrant workers in Japan

Abstract

In the context of globalization, the exporting of labor from developing countries to developed countries has shaped a relationship of exploitation between employers and employees. This study presents the case of Chinese migrant workers’ overtime pay in Japan and explores the formation mechanisms of exploitation using the analytical framework of “transnational production politics”. Transnational migrant workers often see overtime as an indispensable opportunity to generate extra income to support families back home. This need is being taken advantage of by employers who habitually reduce overtime pay or do not pay for overtime at all. Overtime pay often becomes a focal point of labor conflict. Because of the limited protections for migrant workers in the labor laws of host countries, the power granted to employers by the host country's labor system, competition from migrant workers of other nationalities, and the selective involvement of transnational intermediaries, Chinese migrants suffer a dilemma of either surrendering to low overtime pay or losing overtime work, or even their job altogether. Whether to resist or surrender, it seems that the outcome is all the same for migrant workers: they lose and employers win. This “transnational production” polity exercises its market authoritarianism. Elements such as the constraints of the foreign labor system, loopholes in the system used by employers, the global surplus labor supply, and the separation of the processes of labor maintenance and labor renewal in the mode of labor reproduction typical to migrant labor reflect the transnational production politics peculiar to international contract labor mobility. This becomes an important mechanism for the re-emergence of the forced exploitation of capital in developed capitalist countries. Unlike the exploitative relationship between local workers and employers in developed countries, the exploitation between migrant workers and employers is born out of imbalanced development between countries. Migrant workers not only have no access to protections afforded by the host country's welfare system, but also are controlled by strict laws regarding foreign labor and are threatened by competition from other migrant workers. All this has put employers in a strongly advantageous position in labor conflicts.