Kevin Lin and Pun Ngai Mobilizing Truck Drivers in China: New

AGAINST the DAY Kevin Lin and Pun Ngai Mobilizing Truck Drivers in China: New Migrant Struggle and the Emergence of Infrastructural Capitalism “ We can’t take it anymore. We have no choice but to stand together! We definitely won’t survive with the ridiculously low transport fees we’re being paid,” wrote a group of Chinese truck drivers, overwhelmingly made up of rural migrant workers who staged strikes across China in June 2018 (China Labour Bulletin 2018). Migrant workers have been leading strike actions in China’s rapidly industrializing economy. This particular case gar- nered wide public and activist interest because it represents one of the rarer, large cross-regional strike actions that suggest coordination by workers in multiple locations to leverage their collective power. Also, importantly, the strike wave intersects with two other emerging phenomena: the rising employment in the logistics industry and the expanding platform-based economy taking over new and traditional sectors. Understanding the nature and implications of their organizing can shed light on China’s ever-evolving labor movement. A myriad of factors precipitated the strike wave. Truck drivers were angered by the low transport fees set by the logistics companies. As the logistics companies rely on platform apps to organize work for their independent contractors or employees, the drivers find themselves at the mercy of the apps squeezing their incomes. Moreover, growing operating costs neces- sary for their work have been transferred from the companies to the truck drivers themselves. The rising fuel costs as a result of a significant hike in international petroleum prices in 2018, the expensive highway tolls, and the The South Atlantic Quarterly 120:3, July 2021 doi 10.1215/00382876-9155337 © 2021 Duke University Press Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/south-atlantic-quarterly/article-pdf/120/3/647/934793/1200647.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021 648 The South Atlantic Quarterly • Against the Day • July 2021 arbitrary application of traffic fines charged by the local government authori- ties are feeding their sense of grievance. As independent contractors, they find these rising costs and lowering incomes unbearable, especially for those who purchased their own trucks and thus faced the additional pressure of debt repayment. In China as elsewhere in the world, new platform-based companies have been taking over traditional economic activities, including logistics, and restructuring labor relations and the labor processes (Srnicek 2017). Migrant workers are particularly vulnerable to such changes, but they are also finding ways to push back against and challenge this new reality. The condition of migrant labor is integral to the story of truck drivers’ strikes. Rural migrant workers account for the overwhelming majority of long-haul truck drivers in China. According to one estimate, about 80 percent of China’s thirty million truck drivers are rural migrant workers (Chinese Truck Drivers Research Group 2018). In spite of four decades of rural-to-urban migration, and after at least two or three generations of migrant workers, hundreds of millions of Chinese workers remain migrant laborers in the sense that their social reproduction still takes place between city and the coun- tryside. The near normalization of constant migration from one place to another for work, and the diminishing chances of settling down in cities, with growing but insufficient wages to settle and raise urban families, make migrant workers the ideal candidates for employment in the logistics sector. The hypercirculation of commodities in China is thus underpinned by the exploitation of a highly mobile migrant labor force excluded from fixed social reproduction in cities. From the perspective of labor, however, the very advan- tages that the logistics industry has taken of the migrant workers could at times create the basis of new forms of struggles that are also not fixed in place. The work of long-haul truck drivers is hard, and it is increasingly shaped by the platform economy. On average, they drive eight to twelve hours per day. To avoid traffic and road restrictions, they often start driving in the early morning and at the most extreme can drive up to seventeen to eighteen hours per day. But the already harsh work conditions have been exacerbated by the intrusion of the platform economy. The “platformization of transport services,” coined to describe the car hailing services in the cities, is increasingly applicable to long-haul truck drivers (Chen and Qiu 2019). This has both incentivized and compelled millions of truckers to use such apps to take orders. Driven by China’s booming e-commerce that heavily relies on long-haul transportation by road, the sector has expanded signifi- cantly in recent years alongside the development of transportation infrastructure. It has not escaped from being dominated and monopolized by Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/south-atlantic-quarterly/article-pdf/120/3/647/934793/1200647.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021 Lin and Ngai • Mobilizing Truck Drivers in China 649 new transportation platform apps. Venture capital found this as a new investment opportunity, and the result is the emergence of mega platform apps like Yun Man Man, which matches millions of truck drivers, mostly independent contractors, with shippers. The growing monopolistic and exploitative practices of the platform apps have been squeezing truckers’ incomes and further contributing to workers’ mobilization. Yun Man Man, which merged with another app, Huo Che Bang, and has been described as China’s “Uber for trucks,” is owned by the Manbang Group. Manbang, which raised $1.9 billion from SoftBank Group Corp. and Alphabet Inc. only a few months prior to the strikes, imple- mented a policy to prevent truck drivers and customers from contacting each other directly to ensure that transactions and haulage rates could only be set via the app (Reuters Staff 2018). The apps could then pit truck drivers against one another into bidding for orders by lowering the transport fees they earn. The protests in at least a dozen locations across China reflected the dire conditions confronting truck drivers being squeezed from multiple fronts, as well as the near uniformity of their conditions under the platform economy that made the wider mobilization possible. The truckers’ struggles, which are able to coordinate collective actions across regions, can be understood in relation to their own mobility and their common working conditions under similar platform apps. Shared grievances contributed to the materiality of empowerment and organizing. A charitable foundation and researchers from a top Chinese university have jointly produced two reports on Chinese truck drivers, with the second report published in 2019, following the strikes, with a focus on the myriad ways in which truckers have increasingly become self-organized since 2014 (Chinese Truck Drivers Research Group 2019). This report pointed to the organic emergence of numerous formal and informal organizations ini- tiated autonomously by truckers. While varying in size, some of the largest groups are capable of reaching out to hundreds of thousands of drivers. Although most of these organizations are loosely structured and connected mainly through Wechat groups on their smart phones, which have emerged as powerful networking and organizing tools (Qiu 2018), there are also in-person gatherings especially for regional-based groups. It is not a surprise that many of these organizations primarily come together and serve the functions of sharing information, socializing, and mutual aid. But these are undoubtedly the foundations of worker solidarity where workers bond together and mobilize to demand delayed or unpaid fees and negotiate or stop work collectively for higher fees, among other shared grievances. The Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/south-atlantic-quarterly/article-pdf/120/3/647/934793/1200647.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021 650 The South Atlantic Quarterly • Against the Day • July 2021 government-aligned All-China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU), whose structure is regional rather than sectoral, had little understanding and no foothold in the sector, and was caught by surprise by the strike wave. Although the ACFTU has now started pilot projects to recruit truck drivers since 2018, the sector remains mostly unorganized by the ACFTU. The truck drivers are not alone in their collective actions in the logistics sector. Car-sharing and delivery drivers have conducted actions regularly over fees, safety, and working conditions (Chen 2017; Aspinwall 2019), and dock workers have also occasionally staged strikes (Pringle and Meng 2018). Does this represent a shift in labor struggle from manufacturing to service and logistics? These struggles have not reached the level of migrant labor struggles in the manufacturing sector at the peak of struggles in the late 2000s and early 2010s. But these still limited and seemingly disparate struggles do represent the gradual emergence of new sites of migrant labor organizing in the context of the rise of China’s logistics infrastructure and its platformization. It is against this development of Chinese capitalism that we can best analyze the nature of these migrant labor struggles, their power, and their prospects. The Rise of Infrastructural Capitalism While China has been known as the workshop of the world for much of the last thirty years, it is also fast

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