The end of cheap labour? Industrial transformation and “social upgrading” in China. By Florian BUTOLLO

• Date: 01 September 2015
• Author: Alexander SCHRÖEDER
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1564-913X.2015.00247.x
• Published date: 01 September 2015

Copyright © The authors 2015

Journal compilation © International Labour Organization 2015

BOOK REVIEWS

International Labour Review, Vol. 154 (2015), No. 3

The end of cheap labour? Industrial transformation and “social upgrading” in China.

By Florian BUTOLLO. Frankfurt, Campus, 2014. 400 pp. ISBN 978-3-593-50177-2.

China’s economic model based on low wages and cheap export products has come

up against certain limitations. Further “upgrading” of China’s workforce seems inevit-

able. But is this process really happening? In The end of cheap labour?, German sociolo-

gist Florian Butollo of Jena University attempts to answer this question by analysing the

relationship between “industrial upgrading” and “social upgrading” through case studies

of various enterprises in the textile and garment industries and in the LED industries of

China’s Pearl River Delta (PRD).1

Butollo’s starting point is that an enterprise’s industrial modernization does not

necessarily translate into the social upgrading of its workers. Indeed, his study shows

that there is no predestined positive correlation between the two forms of upgrading.

Butollo even demonstrates that technological upgrading often leads to an extension of

cheap production, job losses and longer hours of work. All of the enterprises he exam-

ines display dramatic polarization in regard to wage gains, training and working condi-

tions. Though both the textile and the LED industries in the PRD are in need of better

trained workers and professionals – “who can often earn very high wages” (p. 348) and

whose working conditions are relatively good – only a small minority of the workforce

benets from industrial and social upgrading. The mostly higher qualied white-collar

workers or professionals typically come from urban areas, whereas the majority of the

workforce – blue-collar, low-skilled and low-income – consists of migrants from rural

regions who have few opportunities for social upgrading.

The book is divided into eight chapters. Chapter 1 introduces the relevance of the

research topic as well as the academic discussion about it. Here, Butollo also explains

why concrete examination of real-life enterprises is necessary if any conclusions are to

be reached on successful social upgrading as a result of industrial upgrading. Indeed, the

existing literature naïvely suggests an automatic link between the two forms of upgrad-

ing. “What is needed therefore is an approach that combines the merits of research on

global production networks, which discusses the preconditions for industrial upgrading

on enterprise level, on the one hand, and concrete tools developed by industrial soci-

ologists, by which the impact of industrial change on the workforce can be assessed, on

the other hand” (p. 18). Chapters 2 and 3 are dedicated to China’s growth model and the

1 For a broader international inquiry into the workings of that relationship in the textile and garment

industry, see the article by Céline Gimet, Bernard Guilhon and Nathalie Roux in this issue of the International

Labour Review.