ABSTRACT
When I interviewed a twenty-year-old professional college graduate from Hu Bei province who worked on the shop floor in the Sun factory’s new plant in Hui Zhou, his views on strike leadership were as illuminating as industrial sociologist Gouldner’s ideas. I was reminded of the powerful relationship between the sociological account of industrial conflict and the day-to-day experience of industrial workers. Previous chapters have outlined how workers were divided by gender, place of origin, age, skill level and gangs. This chapter will explore the potential and limitations of multifaceted, non-class identities in the rise of workers’ strikes and other forms of collective protest. By providing an account of the cause, process, consequence and impact of a strike in the Sun factory in 2004, this chapter focuses on the economic, cultural and organisational resources that underlie a workers’ strike.
