ABSTRACT
This chapter is a prelude to the next chapter, which illustrates the development of labour conflict in the Sun factory. Drawing from the perspective of new labour history, which emphasises the role of community life in the formation of workers’ class-consciousness alongside the workplace structure, this chapter sheds light on migrant workers’ social and cultural life in one of their villages (Mingong Cun) and its impact on the labour process in the Sun factory. It is argued that the bases of power domination and subordination in community and workplace are reinforced by, rather than separate from, each other. The politics of locality, gender, age and skill are exploited as mechanisms of oppression, as well as being, as will be shown in the next chapter, a starting point of solidarity. This argument is complementary to both contemporary ethnography on the role of place and gender in the formation of women migrant workers’ subjectivity (Lee, 1998; Sargeson, 1999; Pun, 2005c) and the function of gender, skill and place-of-originorientated gangs in the rise of manufacturing workers’ struggles in the 1920s (Hershatter, 1986; Honig, 1986; Perry, 1993). My departure from their positions comes in the attention paid to labour market and community dynamics (Hodson, 2001).
