Giant manufacturers and mass labor: a comparison of labor-management relations at the world’s largest footwear manufacturer

The restructuring of transnational production processes though global production networks has been accompanied by groups of East Asian ‘tier 1’ manufacturers that have successfully specialized in the organization of predominantly export-oriented, low-skill, low-wage, labour-intensive, and high-volume manufacturing, across a range of industries, including the garment, footwear and electronics sectors. It means that contractors must figure out how to ensure that the workers they hire perform satisfactorily within the context of the workplace; they must also ensure the successful social reproduction of labor power, which is immediately linked to broader social and institutional questions associated with education, child rearing and health. At the same time, however, are never implemented automatically and always encounter both individual and collective worker agency. This can range from micro-struggles covering the work pace to the degree of worker participation in decision-making processes. The ‘frontier of control’, emerges where the two powers confront each other.

This paper discusses management-labour relations at Yue Yuen, which is the world’s largest producer of athletic footwear. This company successfully (i.e., profitably) internalised precisely what companies such as Nike and Adidas sought to externalise: the organisation of the labour-intensive moments of athletic footwear production. It has long internationalized its productive operations from the early 1990s onwards, by relocating production towards PRC, Indonesia and Vietnam. However, when Yue Yuen set up its enormous production sites in China, Vietnam or Indonesia, it is important to recognize that these are not similar locations with a homogeneous labor supply. Rather, using concepts developed by labor geographers and labor process theory, this paper discusses and compares Yue Yuen’s ‘place-based labor control practices’ and the different forms labor agency and struggle takes at these production sites. Based upon fieldwork research at Yue Yuen’s production sites in China, Indonesia and Vietnam, the paper seeks to understand how the frontier of control shifts in these different sociospatial contexts.