Power behind the seams: A gendered analysis of labour and control in China’s garment industry

This article investigates the organisation of the labour process among precariously employed female workers in the garment industry. Drawing on multi-sited fieldwork in seven export-oriented garment factories in China, this article examines how gender relations become consequential for labour control. It argues that factories do not simply reproduce existing gender divisions. Rather, gender relations shaped through social reproduction are reorganised through arrangements governing the allocation and valuation of work, labour effort, and labour availability. Gendered assumptions shape the allocation and valuation of work; piece-rate systems translate household economic obligations into self-regulated labour effort; and reproductive responsibilities and temporal constraints are managed through working time, retention, and recall arrangements that organise labour availability. By specifying how gender relations formed beyond the workplace shape through everyday production practices, this article identifies the organisational mechanisms connecting social reproduction to labour control. It shows that gendered labour control under flexible production is produced through the organisational translation of socially constituted gender relations into concrete arrangements of allocation, remuneration, and workforce management.