Ownership, Management, and Labor Discipline

This chapter examines Huawei’s ownership structure and its controversial managerial and labor policies. Huawei’s experiments in designing its employee-shareholding ownership structure can be viewed a result of an organizational innovation in the context of China’s corporatization and ownership diversification reforms. To capture the complicated process of class restructuring and labor relations in a transnationalized production system, this chapter also provides an analysis of Huawei’s labor practices, including its procurement practices, training systems, hierarchical job structure, divisive salary regime, and “soft management” skills. The relentless practices and coercive modes of labor control reveal the capital-labor tensions.