Tensions Between Workers, Society, and the Market.

There exists in East Asia a generational gap in attitudes toward precarious labor. 

Economically, precarious youth are identified as a site of social and economic panic. Driscoll’s economic analysis of Japan post-bubble burst includes the group engaging in “delinquent work habits” alongside groups profiled to be prone to casual and unprotected sex. One older business executive even goes as far as saying, “The precariat is a dangerous class that is capable of being mobilized by different groups for various ends, not all of them progressive.” ¹ Enjo kosai is the convergence of delinquent work habits and ‘delinquent’ sexual behaviors and can be explored in much more detail here. The uniting factor between sexual delinquents and youth who practice delinquent work habits is the precarious state of the youth who earn a living under these categorizations made by the older, more traditional generation. Whether the ‘delinquency’ is sexual, habitual in the workplace, or both as would be considered the case in enjo kosai, the youth that inhabit these groups are united by anger, despair, anxiety, and alienation. ¹. From the other perspective, what unites East Asian precarious labor is the neoliberal ideology used by employers and societies where precarious labor is prominent in order to limit collective organization and to suppress any kind of unity in workers.

A look at precarious labor around the world has shown that if the disconnect between the worth that the precarious desire through their bodily labor and the worth acknowledged by society and the market prevails for too long, social movements and push-back against these systems of oppression are likely. Movements such as the Occupy movement, los indignados in Spain, Freeters in Japan have all resulted from tensions between temporary or migrant workers and the systems that employ and manipulate them. ². More recently, “in South Korea, non-regular workers have formed their own unions… in China the lack of an effective mechanism through which workers’ interests are adequately represented has channeled protests against work via ‘mass incidents’. In Taiwan, there have been strong protests against the treatment of precarious workers” The failure of the market and society to acknowledge the social and economic worth of the labor of precarious workers can have extreme consequences. For example, in 2010 the Foxconn worker suicides provided a very clear message to the market and to the state – ‘We are significant, we exist’. ⁴. The Foxconn suicides while certainly the most high profile suicides of the last decade, by no means the only suicides to have occurred as a symbol of protest. ³ 

Chang discusses how at the core, the Foxconn suicides were a symbol of protest against the extremely poor working conditions that workers were subjected to. 3 What is actually known as the Foxconn suicides were a series of 13 suicides in May 2010 that ranged from people jumping off of high ledges to self-poisoning using pesticides. The way that Foxconn reacted to the tragedies, explained below, that occurred in May 2010 served as a harsh reminder that in precarious labor managed by neoliberal ideology, the responsibilities of the job shift from employer to the employee. Following the suicides, Foxconn raised minimum wage by a couple hundred of Yuan – roughly the equivalent of $40 –from below the legal minimum wage of  $145 or 900 Yuan allowed by labor laws in China, to just above this minimum.

Foxconn employees experience long hours of repetitive work for very low income. They submit to management scrutiny on the job, and their low income and limited free time restricts their options outside of work. Many young men and women workers rarely stop working except to eat and sleep, simply to make ends meet. “The result is a community of people under intense stress with few resources, a situation conducive to depression.” 3 

In an attempt to stop suicides after the 13th attempted suicide on May 27th 2010, Foxconn began to install 3,000,000 square meters of safety nets between dormitory buildings to prevent employees from killing themselves by jumping off the rooftops. 3  While ignoring that sub-par work conditions and a lack of stability and benefits in the workplace might have led workers to voice their discontent in such an extreme manner, Foxconn chose to use millions of dollars to physically stop people from dying after they had made the choice to end their lives as a symbol of rebellion in the workplace. Nothing was done about the factors that led these 13 workers to choose death over continued precarity in a factory that produces the gadgets that we use everyday. 

1.)Driscoll, Mark - "Debt and denunciation in post-bubble Japan: on the two
freeters." Cultural Critique 65.1 (2007): 164-187 
2.)Kalleberg, Arne L., and Kevin Hewison - "Precarious work and the challenge for Asia." American Behavioral Scientist 57.3 (2013): 271-288.
3.)Chan, Jenny, and Ngai Pun - "Suicide as protest for the new generation of Chinese migrant workers: Foxconn,global capital, and the state." The Asia-Pacific Journal 37.2 (2010): 1-50.

4.)Hansen, Anders Sybrandt -  "Learning the knacks of actually existing capitalism: Young Beijing migrants and the problem of value." Critique of Anthropology32.4 (2012): 415-434.