Agency work before around age 40, formal work after: Labour mobility in gig manufacturing under China’s New Normal

Using the case of Foxconn, this study examines labour mobility bargaining downplayed in the Chinese labour literature and finds the following. To manage labour mobility, Foxconn abuses agency labour and deploys the contract fix, the compensation fix and the technological fix, which are exploited by workers to their advantage through temporal and spatial arbitrage. Workers younger than around 40 choose agency work because of formal work’s deterioration and agency work’s increased compensation enabled by their bargaining power as young workers. Older workers are concentrated in deteriorating formal employment for job security and pensions due to their older age. This article advances the labour mobility literature by showing that hegemonic precarity can result from labour mobility bargaining and age plays a key role in such bargaining, helping de-essentialize and de-victimize precarious workers. It advances the agency labour literature by showing how agency employment helps employers retain labour within given periods.