| This is a study of "undocumented" migrant workers in the informal sector of China's construction industry. It is about the informal economy, undocumented (illegal) migration and the gendered nature of the global labor market. It starts by "opening the black box" of the informal labor market uncovering significant variance in these workers' experiences. Based on intensive ethnographic observation of illegal migrant labor in the construction industry in China, this dissertation analyses the interconnected patterns of labor markets and employment relations experienced by these workers in two cities, Beijing and Guangzhou. I identify three such patterns, which I refer to as "modes of employment": embedded, mediated, and individualized. In embedded employment, mechanisms such as social capital, bounded solidarity, enforceable trust, and the reciprocity of social networks in migrant enclaves shape both access to jobs and employment relations on the job. In mediated employment, workers get jobs through labor contractors who also play a key role in regulating employment relations in various ways. In individualized employment, workers find employment through unregulated spot markets. Workers are inserted into employment relations as separate individuals rather than as members of a migrant enclave social network or as dependants of a labor contractor, and as a result they are particularly vulnerable to despotic and extremely exploitative treatment. This micro level analysis maps out the variance and shows how these how "modes of employment" shape the ways these migrants are inserted spatially into the city, the labor process, regimes of control, gender, migratory patterns and the ways in which these migrants experience their "illegal" status.;The study also offers a macro analysis which nuances our understandings of how the state shapes the informal labor. Most studies focus on how more or less regulation and enforcement impact the size of the informal sector. In a comparison between Beijing and Guangzhou, this study shifts the focus and shows how different levels of "state tolerance" impact labor market configurations. Specifically, it shows how increased or decreased regulation reconfigures the informal labor market by shifting workers into different "modes of employment" or sectors of the informal market. |
