This book provides a comparative analysis of the social, economic, industrial and migration dynamics that structure women’s paid work and unpaid care work experience in the Asia-Pacific region. Each country-focused chapter examines the formal and informal ways in which work and care are managed, the changing institutional landscape, gender relations and fertility concerns, employer and trade union responses and the challenges policy makers face and the consequences of their decisions for working women. By covering the entire region, including Australia and New Zealand, the book highlights the way different national work and care regimes are linked through migration, with wealthier countries looking to their poorer neighbours for alternative sources of labour. In addition, the book contributes to debates about the barriers to women’s participation in the workforce, the valuation of unpaid care, the gender wage gap, social protection and labour regulation for migrant workers and gender relations in developing Asia.

As China has evolved into an industrial powerhouse over the past two decades, a new class of workers has developed: the dagongmei, or working girls. The dagongmei are women in their late teens and early twenties who move from rural areas to urban centers to work in factories. Because of state laws dictating that those born in the countryside cannot permanently leave their villages, and familial pressure for young women to marry by their late twenties, the dagongmei are transient labor. They undertake physically exhausting work in urban factories for an average of four or five years before returning home. The young women are not coerced to work in the factories; they know about the twelve-hour shifts and the hardships of industrial labor. Yet they are still eager to leave home. Made in China is a compelling look at the lives of these women, workers caught between the competing demands of global capitalism, the socialist state, and the patriarchal family. Pun Ngai conducted ethnographic work at an electronics factory in southern China’s Guangdong province, in the Shenzhen special economic zone where foreign-owned factories are proliferating. For eight months she slept in the employee dormitories and worked on the shop floor alongside the women whose lives she chronicles. Pun illuminates the workers’ perspectives and experiences, describing the lure of consumer desire and especially the minutiae of factory life. She looks at acts of resistance and transgression in the workplace, positing that the chronic pains—such as backaches and headaches—that many of the women experience are as indicative of resistance to oppressive working conditions as they are of defeat. Pun suggests that a silent social revolution is underway in China and that these young migrant workers are its agents.

Providing a full account of the role of women in union activism in Asia, covering all the major economies of the region, this book successfully challenges the prevailing conception of women workers in Asia as passive and uninterested in industrial issues.

First published in 1995. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This collection contributes to key theoretical debates about women workers in Asia and breaks new ground by focussing on issues that have been little documented in other studies in the area. It provides new information and insights into labour systems associated with labour intensive export manufactures and state-labour relations in a comparative context. The contributors present a range of unique and varied perspectives from which they consider aspects of the increasing integration of Asian economies, exploring implications for their labour markets.