Industrial Automation and Workers’ Reaction in South China

Whether automation technologies are labour-substituting or labour-augmenting has sustained academic interests for decades. Arguing against the notion of technological determinism, previous researches have demonstrated how workers’ action played an instrumental role in helping them gain a larger share of the benefits associated with technological upgrading. Based on fieldwork in the Pearl River Delta of Guangdong, China, this talk focuses on how industrial automation affect migrant workers and how the latter react to the process. We have found an overwhelmingly labor-substituting effect on all workers, but frontline workers and skilled workers manifested different attitudes. Frontline workers, due to their high mobility and exit path to service industry, tended to be less proactive in response to substitution. In contrast, skilled workers, given their seniority and stronger base of solidarity, did occasionally organize collective actions to voice their concerns. However, these were rather ‘defensive’ actions as skilled workers’ bargaining power has been largely reduced by robots’ deskilling effect. Still, the ‘failure’ of these cases speaks less to the futility of collective action, but more to the necessity of building up wider solidarity to regain workers’ control.