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

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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

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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

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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 becoming the empire of logistics. These are not mutually exclusive developments. In fact, the growing domestic consumption of China’s manufactured commodities depends on an ever more com- plex and expanded logistics system to facilitate their circulation. This process of logistics expansion intensified particularly after the Great Recession of 2007–8. The constraining capacity of North American and European consumer markets to import Chinese manufactured goods compelled the Chi- nese economy to reduce dependency on the overseas market and focus more on boosting domestic consumption, as well as expanding other developing countries’ markets for Chinese goods as a new basis of sustained long-term economic growth. The result is the rise of China’s logistics infrastructure, a development that is nothing short of astonishing in terms of the volume of investment and the speed of its construction. The state-facilitated fixed infrastructural development of transportation, such as highways and railways, has been foundational to China’s capitalist development. This underpins the fast expansion of a commercial logistics sector to meet the needs of e-commerce companies, the likes of which have risen to be some of the largest corpora-

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tions in China and globally. China’s e-commerce, with a national logistics network crucial to its operation, has further raised domestic consumption of Chinese manufacturing. It also shows no sign of slowing down. In response to e-commerce demands, China is planning even more investment in its high-speed rail freight network (Ho 2020). China’s rapidly consolidating and concentrating logistics industry is closely integrated with massive manufacturing industry and e-commerce. China simultaneously has the world’s largest manufacturing facilities and capacities, one of the largest consumer markets, some of the largest e-commerce companies that facilitate consumption, and a logistics sector that has seen extraordinary expansion and concentration. These are the conditions in which the logistics companies achieved monopolistic status rapidly. Its high level of concentration is made possible through corporate takeovers and mergers of logistics companies. In the delivery service sector, e-commerce companies, such as Meituan, JD Logistics, and Alibaba’s delivery service, Cainiao, dominate the market, and their consolidation is growing apace during the COVID-19 pandemic (Ho 2020; Hu 2020). As noted, in the long-haul transportation sector, a handful of companies such as Manbang have been leading. We conceptualize the present politico-economic formation in China as infrastructural capitalism. By infrastructural capitalism, we refer to a form of capitalism that is built on the production and expansion of intersecting physical and digital infrastructures, either spearheaded by or aided signifi- cantly by the Chinese state, which transforms labor processes and labor relations in the process. This concept encompasses the concrete infrastructures of roads, cities, high-speed rail, and logistics transportation—itself linked to extractive capital in China and overseas—and their intersections with digital infrastructures of e-commerce and platform economy that increasingly take advantage of the physical as well as human infrastructures. At stake in infrastructural capitalism is the material base of all other forms of materiality of capitalism, namely extractive capitalism (Mezzadra and Neilson 2019), monopoly capitalism (Braverman 1974), and digital or platform capitalism (Fuchs and Mosco 2015; Srnicek 2017). In this context, the logistics chain has emerged as a new locus of migrant workers’ struggles. This is not to claim all these struggles, while taking place in new sectors, are entirely new in fundamental aspects. Many of these new struggles spring out of preexisting patterns of rural labor migration and conditions. The logistics sector has taken advantage of readily available migrant workers, many of whom are previously employed in the manufacturing or construction sectors. Here the Chinese experience diverges

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from neoliberal economies in which manufacturing jobs were all but gone prior to the advent of platform economy. In China, the manufacturing sector remains key to generating and maintaining industrial employment for migrant workers. Nevertheless, under infrastructural capitalism, the Chi- nese state has incentivized the transition from labor-intensive manufacturing to high-tech industry, e-commence and logistic employment, and migrant workers have been adapting to this development. This transition, however, merely shifts migrant workers from one form of precarious employment to another. The conditions of precarity have not only remained but might have worsened in some respects. The precarious nature of manufacturing jobs with short-term contracts and unstable employment security is replaced by another form of independent contracting faced by logistics workers, which is arguably worse given the lack of labor protec- tion. China’s labor laws, formulated primarily for industrial employment, are ill-equipped to protect workers in the logistics sector. There also seems to be little political will, and not yet enough pressure from workers, to revise the labor laws to better protect new types of workers. Underlying the conditions of precarity is the same mode of rural/urban spatial social reproduction: from one form of dormitory regime to another (Pun and Chan 2013). This fact con- tinues to constitute the basis of migrant labor struggles in China today.

Whither Migrant Labor Struggle in China The Chinese working class has been constantly made and remade as Chi- nese capitalism transforms itself, and workers’ struggles too have not ceased but taken different forms. In just a five-year period between 2014 and 2019, around 1,400 transport worker protests were recorded by China Labour Bul- letin’s Strike Map (China Labor Bulletin 2019). It uses a broader definition of transport workers to include taxi and bus drivers, as well as truck drivers and delivery drivers, reflecting the overall increase in the struggles of transport workers. The COVID-19 pandemic in China has led to the loss of employment in the formal sectors and an increase in the logistics sector as a result of the boom in e-commerce and delivery. While it is generally assumed that service sector workers are harder to organize—especially at a moment when labor organizing in China is harshly suppressed—logistics workers have explored and demonstrated their own methods and forms of worker organizing against tremendous odds. Although worker organizing based on the concentration and dense social relationships in a workplace was shattered, a new basis of workers’

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power may arise from their positions alongside the global value chain (Pun et al. 2020). Against the integration of logistics infrastructure in both its physical and digital forms, these disparate workers are brought into more and more similar conditions and connections with one another. The geo- graphical dispersion of the struggles could become their strength against easy containment, and their positions in the supply chain represent potential “choking points” of production and circulation, and of capitalist economy (Alimahomed-Wilson and Ness 2018). Today, the struggle of the global proletariat is facing an even more complicated world in which capital and the state have monopolized physical and digital infrastructure, resulting in further commodification and exploitation of working lives. With the assault on labor arising from a rapid slide toward right-wing populism and authoritarianism worldwide, there is widespread pessimism about labor organizing and its importance, com- pared to other social forces and alliances, as a means to challenge capitalism. At a time when the global labor movement is on the defensive, self-organized protests and strikes by migrant workers in China and elsewhere are a testa- ment to the enduring power of workers. These struggles in China, still uneven and emerging, foretell the remaking of the Chinese working class at a moment of turbulent global capitalism (Pun 2019).

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