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Labor scholars have highlighted the predicament of “precarization” besetting the working class everywhere in the twenty-first century. Beneath the “proletariat” now stands the “precariat,” for whom exploitation seems like a privilege compared to constant exclusion from the labor market. Amidst worldwide employment informalization and decimation of workers’ collective capacity, media reports and academic writings on Chinese workers in the past several years have singularly sustained a curious discourse of worker empowerment. Strikes in some foreign-invested factories have inspired claims of rising working-class power. Finding little empirical support for the empowerment thesis, this article spotlights the Chinese peculiarity of the global phenomenon of precarization and the dynamics of recent strikes, suggesting the need for Chinese labor studies to rebalance its prevailing voluntarism and optimism with more attention to institutional and political-economic conditions.

Many scholars of gender and migration assume that migration increases women's household bargaining power, but this article argues that migration recreates and relies on patriarchal expectations that women return to household domestic labor. It draws on 16 months of ethnographic fieldwork with migrant factory women in China's export processing zones as well as one migrant-sending community in China. Based on this fieldwork, I argue that despite young women's desires to continue migrating for factory jobs, older generations perpetuate gendered views of female migration as licentious and risky, in opposition to a dominant paradigm of proper femininity that relegates young women to household labor. They do this because migration creates an intergenerational dependence in migrant origin sites. Older women, unemployable in factories and deprived of state welfare support at home, rely on wage remittances from high-earning migrant sons and sons-in-law for subsistence. To ensure they receive remittances, they encourage daughters to marry higher-earning migrant men, then pressure these daughters to cease migrating in order to perform household domestic labor in support of migrant husbands. This finding reflects constraints on the opportunities that migration delivers to women: Not all women can migrate, and those who cannot must vie for control over migrant remittances.

From 1965 to 1975 the legendary Silicon Valley company Fairchild Semiconductor operated a state-of-the-art integrated circuit manufacturing plant in Shiprock, New Mexico on Navajo land. In the face of concerns about high-tech pollution, increasingly empowered labor organizations, and a newly politicized and visible American Indian civil rights movement, indigenous electronic workers at Shiprock were pressed into service as examples of the peaceful coexistence and integration of the past and the future, the primitive and the modern, creativity and capitalism. Navajo women workers were described as ideal predigital digital workers, uniquely suited to the job by temperament, culture, and gender. Their labor as platform builders was cited as evidence that digital work—the work of the hand and its digits—could be painlessly transferred from the indigenous cultural context into the world of technological commercial innovation, benefiting both in the process.

In this study, we argue that the specific process of the proletarianization of Chinese migrant workers contributes to the recent rise of labour protests. Most of the collective actions involve workers' conflict with management at the point of production, while simultaneously entailing labour organizing in dormitories and communities. The type of living space, including workers' dormitories and migrant communities, facilitates collective actions organized not only on bases of locality, ethnicity, gender and peer alliance in a single workplace, but also on attempts to nurture workers' solidarity in a broader sense of a labour oppositional force moving beyond exclusive networks and ties, sometimes even involving cross-factory strike tactics. These collective actions are mostly interest-based, accompanied by a strong anti-foreign capital sentiment and a discourse of workers' rights. By providing detailed cases of workers' strikes in 2004 and 2007, we suggest that the making of a new working class is increasingly conscious of and participating in interest-based or class-oriented labour protests.

As a result of its open-door policies and 30 years of reform, China has become the \"world's factory\" and given rise to a new working class of rural migrant workers. This process has underlain a path of (semi-)proletarianization of Chinese peasant-workers: now the second generation is experiencing dagong, working for a boss, in industrialized towns and cities. What is the process of proletarianization of peasant-workers in China today? In what way does the path of proletarianization shape the new Chinese working class? Drawing on workers' narratives and our ethnographic studies in Shenzhen and Dongguan between 2005 and 2008, this study focuses on the subjective experiences of the second generation of dagongmei/zai, female migrant workers/male migrant workers, who have developed new forms of power and resistance unknown to the previous generation of workers. Did the pain and trauma experienced by the first generation of dagong subjects gradually evolve into the anger and resentment that has conditioned the labor strikes and class actions of the second generation? In short, what continuity and change can we observe in the life struggles of this new working class? Is the second generation of dagong subjects compelled to take action as a result of long-endured pain and anger? Self, anger, and collective action among the new working class propel the narrative described in this article.

Preston, D. L., Pierce, D. A., Shimizu, Y., Cullings, H. M., Fujita, S., Funamoto, S. and Kodama, K. Effect of Recent Changes in Atomic Bomb Survivor Dosimetry on Cancer Mortality Risk Estimates. Radiat. Res. 162, 377–389 (2004). The Radiation Effects Research Foundation has recently implemented a new dosimetry system, DS02, to replace the previous system, DS86. This paper assesses the effect of the change on risk estimates for radiation-related solid cancer and leukemia mortality. The changes in dose estimates were smaller than many had anticipated, with the primary systematic change being an increase of about 10% in γ-ray estimates for both cities. In particular, an anticipated large increase of the neutron component in Hiroshima for low-dose survivors did not materialize. However, DS02 improves on DS86 in many details, including the specifics of the radiation released by the bombs and the effects of shielding by structures and terrain. The data used here extend the last reported follow-up for solid cancers by 3 years, with a total of 10,085 deaths, and extends the follow-up for leukemia by 10 years, with a total of 296 deaths. For both solid cancer and leukemia, estimated age–time patterns and sex difference are virtually unchanged by the dosimetry revision. The estimates of solid-cancer radiation risk per sievert and the curvilinear dose response for leukemia are both decreased by about 8% by the dosimetry revision, due to the increase in the γ-ray dose estimates. The apparent shape of the dose response is virtually unchanged by the dosimetry revision, but for solid cancers, the additional 3 years of follow-up has some effect. In particular, there is for the first time a statistically significant upward curvature for solid cancer on the restricted dose range 0–2 Sv. However, the low-dose slope of a linear-quadratic fit to that dose range should probably not be relied on for risk estimation, since that is substantially smaller than the linear slopes on ranges 0–1 Sv, 0–0.5 Sv, and 0– 0.25 Sv. Although it was anticipated that the new dosimetry system might reduce some apparent dose overestimates for Nagasaki factory workers, this did not materialize, and factory workers have significantly lower risk estimates. Whether or not one makes allowance for this, there is no statistically significant city difference in the estimated cancer risk.

According to the “standard model” of accountability, holding another actor accountable entails sanctioning that actor if it fails to fulfill its obligations without a justification or excuse. Less powerful actors therefore cannot hold more powerful actors accountable, because they cannot sanction more powerful actors. Because inequality appears unlikely to disappear soon, there is a pressing need for “second-best” forms of accountability: forms that are feasible under conditions of inequality, but deliver as many of the benefits of standard accountability as possible. This article describes a model of second-best accountability that fits this description, which I call “surrogate accountability.” I argue that surrogate accountability can provide some of the benefits of standard accountability, but not others, that it should be evaluated according to different normative criteria than standard accountability, and that, while surrogate accountability has some benefits that standard accountability lacks, it is usually normatively inferior to standard accountability.

In this article I examine the new forms of citizenship that have resulted from the connections between the emergence of new corporate ethics (including fair trade) and outsourcing. The process I call “supply-chain citizenship” is based on a collection of long-distance promises of care that are economically and politically backed by transnational corporations. I analyze the trend toward what theNew York Timesrecently called “activi[st]-capitalism” and how this move is changing relationships between corporations and consumers and consumers and people working along global corporate supply chains. This study builds on my previous research on workers’ bodies, citizenship, and sovereignty, now examined along global corporate supply axes. I observe the kinds of political mobilization that are coming into being as the result of links between corporate governance, negotiations between corporate and nation-state sovereignty, and the related setting and enforcement of global labor and environmental standards. In my investigation, I trace ethnical production from design houses to factory floors, from showrooms to department stores, and from NGO monitoring agencies to consumer protest networks.

How have Chinese migrant workers’ patterns of everyday life changed over the past two decades, and what has not changed? Have their personal and career aspirations shifted over time? What changes have occurred in how they maintain social relationships within and across factories? What are the implications for migrant workers, local governance and factory managements? Based on workers’ letters and ethnographic research in Shenzhen, this article argues that migrant workers encounter very different circumstances today in their housing, food, time scheduling, aspirations and ways of maintaining social relationships. yet young migrant workers still invoke social relationships steeped in links to family and village to cope with daily difficulties. I examine the workers’ greater control over their time, local governments’ growing need to accommodate migrant workers’ requirements in order to maintain social stability, and the increasing pressure on factory managements to consider workers’ work/leisure arrangements, especially during peak industrial seasons.