The privilege of being exploited? Overtime work in global factories of market socialist China and Vietnam

Despite policy interventions to limit overtime work, workers in China’s and Vietnam’s global factories often articulate a preference for working overtime, even viewing it as a form of welfare. Based on comparative social policy and ethnographic analyses, this article examines how political economic and social policy processes interact with temporal mechanisms of labour governance employed by the factories to produce this preference. At the point of production, capitalist employers construct overtime hours as scarce goods to be distributed among worthy workers, the withholding of which is seen as a form of punishment or discipline. At the point of reproduction, the workers struggle with an increasingly commodified context through land restructuring and the quasi-privatisation of public goods and services that compels them to prioritise their immediate household needs. At the social policy making level, there are unresolvable contradictions between the goals of commodifying and decommodifying labour and the failure to account for the temporal disjuncture between factory work and the workers’ social reproductive context. The contradictions give rise to institutional frameworks simultaneously protecting labour via laws and social policies and cheapening it for the sake of capital expansion via policies to regulate population mobility and labour markets. In short, the workers’ preference for overtime work results from a combination of employers’ construction of overtime hours as a scarcity, the disembedding of labour power from the time and place of its social reproduction, and social policy contexts that facilitate the commodification of labour.