Making labour count: digital traces and the boundary of working-time recognition in China, 2014–2023

This article reads publicly available first-instance judgments in Chinese labour disputes from 2014 to 2023 as an institutional archive of historically contested working time. It examines how digital traces are used to record and substantiate claims about labour time in disputes between workers and employers, and how work already performed comes to be recognised as working time through judicial decisions. From more than one million searchable judgments, stratified random sampling by year and full-text screening yield 311 cases and 683 units of claim, evidence and judicial determination. The findings show that digital technologies have given workers greater opportunities to preserve and submit records of their working time without giving them corresponding authority to define what officially counts as working time. This disparity between expanded opportunities to document work and the authority to define working time is described here as ‘asymmetric empowerment’. It brings into view a ‘boundary of recognition’ within the working day: struggles over working time concern not only the limits workers seek to place on capital’s command over their time, but also whether labour already performed receives formal recognition. Digital records can establish when an activity occurred, yet its status as working time remains subject to institutional judgment.