Baigou Migrant Worker Night School

Through the in-depth analysis of the features of Huabei rural industrialization, the unique factory regime in Baigou, Hebei and the resulting special workers, this paper reveals two dilemmas the migrant workers in Baigou and larger Hubei area face: due to the interpersonal network of labor market, personalized trade, familial labor process and patrimonial management, the workers are unable to become industrial working class or citizens. Facing this special group of workers, we still believe in their power of self-liberation. Drawing on Touraine's action sociology and sociological intervention, Burawoy's public sociology as well as praxis-oriented research, we modify the"sociological intervention"according to the reality of Chinese society and propose the methodology of"strong sociological intervention"whose vehicle is"Baigou Migrant Worker Night School". First we took the opportunity of"toxic benzene event"and used medical examination as pre-intervention to get into Baigou factories guarded by village and family, offering free physical examination and labor law dissemination to build relations with workers. Then we set up the Baigou Migrant Worker Night School and provided workers with courses of labor law, English and computer based on their actual needs. Labor law is the core to evoke the self-consciousness of the workers while English and computer classes are the icing of labor law which reduce the pressure of disseminating it and help workers increase their market competence. Through communications in night school and workers'real living circumstances, we collected their true information and treated it as the source of sociological knowledge. After three sessions of night school training, workers showed changes in skills, social and psychological aspects, laying a foundation for the growth of self-consciousness. Now the night school's main problems lie in the instability of the workers, negativity of using government power, dissidence of the bosses and the inconsistence of the intervention. Therefore, we learned from the US worker centers to combine service and empowerment and planned to build an intervention model of night school education, library, and health clinic, transforming night school to a worker center. In practice, we summarized four basic features of"strong sociological intervention": unification of practice and knowledge; unification of empowerment and service; unification of implantation education and enlightenment education; and unification of external service and internal reflection. By empowering and striking a conversation with the workers, we try to seek ways of workers'self-liberation, reconstruct sociological knowledge and society in the field, and enrich the theoretical and practical scope of a civil society.