A New Practice of Labor Organizing: Community-based Organization of Migrant Women Workers in South China

With China’s access to World Trade Organization in November 2001, global competitions and local just-in-time productions became even more intense. Millions of migrant workers, in particular the young girls, are recruited by the transnational corporations in urban cities to race against the time of increasingly short turnover between the placement of orders and shipment. By 2001, it was estimated that a predominant 82.7% of the over 7 million population in Shenzhen alone of the Guangdong province were peasant migrants from countryside, of which about 80% were female. How do migrant women workers collectively understand their working lives as dagongmei? Can they be organized as a new worker-subject newly emerged in post-socialist China? At the crossroads of China’s incorporation into global capitalism, what are the new forms of labor organizing and women empowerment? This article attempts to address the above issues. We will, first, provide an analysis of the making of the new female worker-subject, Chinese dagongmei within the contexts of state-led economic reform and China turning itself into a “world factory” in the new millennium. Based on eight-year practices, we provide a critical view whether the frontline projects of the Chinese Working Women Network (CWWN) can provide membership- based and community-based labor organizing in China.