I need help on reading the 3 articles and highlighting the entire articles also coming up with question. I. need to show some kind of annotation the 3 articles
The Feminization and Racialization of
Labour in the Colombian Fresh-cut Flower Industry
Olga Sanmiguel-Valderrama
University of Cincinnati
ABSTRACT
This article examines the basic features of the working and living conditions of
the mostly female labour force of the Colombian flower industry. It argues that
in this export industry, critical feminist thought on neo-liberal international trade
and the feminization of labour is valid only for workers in the lowest ranks of the
industry, the majority of whom are racialized women from low-income, peasant,
indigenous, or mixed-race rural backgrounds who face precarious forms of labour.
Meanwhile, an elite group of women from urban-middle and upper classes with
Western education and European or mixed-race backgrounds work in management,
participate in the growers’ associations and oversee the exploitative conditions
and health risks that flower production creates for their racialized lower class
‘sisters’. This case emphasizes the importance of considering the intersections of
socio-economic status and race, together with gender and other structures, in order
to determine who benefits and loses from production for the global market. The
article also introduces the concept of ‘racialization of labour’, arguing that the jobs
created in the industry are not only feminized but racialized.
Keywords: feminization of labour, racialization of labour, Colombian flower
industry
Introduction
Since the beginning of the 1990s a growing feminist literature has critically
engaged the neo-liberal international trade regime. This literature highlights the andocentric and patriarchal nature of this system, which has
affirmed the primacy – practically and conceptually – of the paid economy
over the unpaid one, of business goals over people’s needs, and over women’s
needs in particular. Global capitalist forms of production disregard the process of social reproduction, neglecting the biological and unpaid social
reproductive work of women that creates and maintains the labour force
Copyright © 2007 SAGE Publications www.sagepublications.com
(Los Angeles, London, New Delhi and Singapore)
Vol 23(1–2): 71–88. DOI: 10.1177/0169796X0602300205
72
Journal of Developing Societies 23, 1–2 (2007): 71–88
(bearing babies, feeding, educating and socializing children; the endless
tasks required to carry on a household, such as shopping, cooking and
cleaning; and community and volunteer work).1
Additionally, feminist scholars specializing in political economy have
posited the ‘feminization of labour theory’, claiming that the types of jobs
created by the global economy are ‘feminized’ (Armstrong, 1996; Bakker,
1996; Vosko, 2000). By feminized, these scholars mean the gendered nature
of the types of jobs created by export-led production to the global market,
referring first to the notable rise of female labour-force participation in
the paid economy and second, the devaluation or feminization of many
jobs traditionally held by men. The theory argues that the feminization
of labour does not mean that the position of most women has improved;
instead, it means that the position of some men in the labour market and
labour conditions in the workplace have deteriorated, becoming more
like those experienced traditionally by women.
According to this literature, currently most of the jobs in the labour market look like the jobs traditionally held by women, which are characterized
by instability (part-time, short term), reduced union representation, little
opportunity for promotion or skills development (dead-end jobs), low
wages, precarious job environment conditions, and more unemployment,
underemployment, and informality. A policy to promote lower or more
precarious work standards aims to facilitate the liberalization and restructuring of the economies of the global south so that they can produce cheap
products for international markets.2
However, the different situations and locations of different groups of
women make it impossible to generalize the possible outcomes of the process of trade liberalization. The impact of this process may differ if a woman
is, for instance, an aboriginal living in a mining exploration zone; a white
woman executive of an oil company; a mestizo peasant working in an
export-led agro industry; a production line worker; or a woman of colour
working in the informal sector. As a result, neo-liberal trade liberalization
has different impacts on women’s lives by virtue of their class, race or ethnicity, geographic location, and location within other social structures.
Moreover, among the same group of women, the effects may be contradictory, depending on the role that a woman is performing. For example,
a woman may gain from trade liberalization by accessing a job. However,
she may lose as a mother or caregiver, as a result of the lack of sufficient
time and energy, or insufficient funds to access health, education or other
Sanmiguel-Valderrama: Feminization and Racialization of Labour
73
services for caregiving because public services are non-existent or they
have been privatized. Hence, neo-liberal trade affects differently women’s
lives and their roles as workers, mothers, caregivers, home managers,
consumers, and political activists.
Since it is impossible to generalize about the impacts of trade liberalization for all women, this article presents the basic empirical results of
a case study that serves to problematize general feminist claims on trade
liberalization and the feminization of labour thesis. I focus on the particular outcome of neo-liberal free trade for women working in an exportled industry in Latin America: the Colombian fresh-cut flower industry
(CFI). The research presented here forms part of the results of fieldwork conducted in 1999, which included participatory direct observation,
12 in-depth interviews with key members of the industry, and since the
year 2000, short visits to community sites and continuing conversation and
electronic communication with NGOs, unions, and workers of the CFI.
Specifically, the article presents basic features of the labour and living
conditions of the CFI workforce while highlighting the class, gender, and
race underpinnings of the social relations within plantations, as well as the
health risks associated with working on the plantations. It also examines
the conflicts created in the lives of women workers due to their dual roles
as mothers and home managers in the private sphere and as workers in
the plantations. While the article describes the general features of the
CFI labour force, it is important to note that labour practices vary from
plantation to plantation, and some sites maintain better labour practices
than others.
The main argument of this article is that the CFI is a case that confirms
partly the critical evaluation of trade liberalization in the feminist literature.
Although female and male workers in the flowers export industry have
access to paid jobs, the types of jobs created by the industry resemble
‘female jobs’, which are characterized by their short-term, unstable, and
precarious conditions. However, within the CFI, the above argument is
chiefly valid for racialized, low-income women and men from peasant,
indigenous, and mestizo backgrounds who work at the lower ranks of the
CFI. These types of jobs also resemble the historical precarious labour
conditions in which most of the racialized peoples of Colombia have worked;
that is, the jobs created in the industry are also ‘racialized’ jobs. In contrast,
the men and women working in management, who are mostly of European
or mixed descent and from upper- or middle-class backgrounds, have
actually benefited from trade liberalization in the CFI.
Journal of Developing Societies 23, 1–2 (2007): 71–88
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Journal of Developing Societies 23, 1–2 (2007): 71–88
A Profile of the Labour Force in the CFI
Colombia’s flower exports started in 1968 with a value of less than $1 million
a year and included only carnations. By 2004, flower exports amounted to
more than US$703 million a year (Banco de la República de Colombia,
2005) and included more than 75 different types of flowers, each in a
multiplicity of varieties and colours (Asocolflores [1]). Today, Colombian
flower exports are second only to the Netherlands (Asocolflores [2]).
According to the Association of Colombian Flower Growers (Asocolflores),
labour represents 50 per cent of production costs (Aflonordes and Sena,
1996). Human labour is used not only for cultivation but also for selection
and packing of flowers and manufacturing of bouquets. Without the productive power of the workers, technology, capital, transportation, and
international distribution, networks would not be able to deliver flowers
to their ultimate recipients: mostly women honoured on Valentine’s day,
Mothers’ Day, or weddings, or men and women to mark various religious
and civil celebrations in North America and Europe. Workers’ skills and
labour power have been the key to the growth of the CFI. Yet, excluding
upper and middle-level management workers, the salaries of the great
majority of CFI workers, even after receiving payment for overtime work
in shifts of up to 12–15 hours, are below the poverty line.
Wages
The son of a British engineer established the first export-oriented plantations in the early 1960s, followed by a group of four Californian men in
1969, who created ‘Floramerica’ Inc., owned today by Dole Food Company,
Inc (DOLE) (Asocolflores, 1992). The availability of a socio-economically
vulnerable female labour force in Colombia, accustomed to work for
significantly lower wages than workers in the USA was one of the main
attractions for capital to establish flower plantations in Colombia in the
1960s. In 1966, the daily minimum wage in Colombia was US$0.82 while
a daily wage in horticulture in California was US$16.03 (Mendez, 1991).
At the end of the 1960s the difference in daily wages between Colombia
and the United States was a ratio of 1:19.
Currently, the difference in minimum wages between workers in
Colombia and the USA is in a ratio of 1:15. By 2005, a worker in Colombia
who cared for flowers and created bouquets got paid US$0.48 per hour
(the minimum state-regulated wage), while a worker in Miami who
Sanmiguel-Valderrama: Feminization and Racialization of Labour
75
unloaded boxes of flowers from an airplane got paid at least US$7 per
hour (approximately the minimum wage). The wage differential explains
not only the reasons for the selection of the production site, but more
important, the differences in the style and standard of living between
the two working-class groups. Social scientists have calculated that in
Colombia, the value of the basic goods and services that make up the
minimum ‘family living basket’ for a low-income family is equal to two and
a half minimum daily wages. Anything less than that is equivalent to the
official poverty line (Escuela Nacional Sindical, 2002). The vast majority
of workers in the CFI earn the minimum wage and many are sole heads
of households.
Number of Workers and Socio-economic Background
According to Asocolflores, there are close to 88,000 people in the CFI
around Bogotá, Medellín, and Cali. At least 65 per cent to 70 per cent of
the labour force are women who are either sole or main earners of the
household income or supplement their family income. Although young
women from Bogotá work for the CFI in increasing numbers, most of
the workers in the plantations are either peasant women migrants from
the countryside or peasant women who grew up around, and live close
to, plantations (Silva, 1982). Workers are from indigenous or mestizo origins, and they come from different sites around the country where the
stagnation of traditional agricultural markets has eroded their capacity
to make a living. Labour also consists of internally displaced peasants,
who fled violent conflicts in the countryside, a result of the internal violence generated by the ongoing civil war since the 1950s.3 The growing
availability of jobs in the greenhouses of the CFI is an opportunity for
women to earn a living, even if wages are low and working conditions are
precarious.
Hierarchies and Job Segmentation by Class, Race and Gender
Work on the plantations is divided into three ranks: management, supervision and manual labour (Silva, 1982). Class, but also gender and race
determine the division of labour within plantations. There is a clear division of labour between men and women, in line with gender stereotypes.
Women are ghettoized in jobs involving detail and obedience to directions
in the production and care of flowers (seeding, planting, building a structure of thread that supports and separates plants, weeding, pruning of
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Journal of Developing Societies 23, 1–2 (2007): 71–88
knots from stalks, removing damaged petals or unwanted buds, tying stems
and plants with strings to a structure made of thread, manual irrigation,
cutting and sorting of flowers, making bouquets and packing them). In
addition, they hold low-level administrative positions (e.g. secretary,
payroll clerk, and social worker). Meanwhile men are concentrated in
decision-making positions (management of the plantation, greenhouse
supervision, agronomists, manager of storage rooms of inputs, and technical assistance in water management, use of pesticides, and the overall
well-being of the harvest). Also, men hold jobs considered heavy and hard
(soil preparation, fumigation, construction of greenhouses and sorting
rooms, transportation of plants, fresh-cut flowers, garbage, and boxes to
cold storage and trucks) (Medrano, 1982; Silva, 1982). The owners and
managers of plantations are almost exclusively men.
Sexism limits women’s employment opportunities, particularly if we
consider that some of the ‘men’s jobs’, considered to involve greater responsibilities, are better paid than the ‘delicate’ jobs that are reserved for
women. Gender stereotypes also form the groundwork that can be used
to punish and degrade women. Various workers interviewed pointed out
that, as punishment, management assigned women to work in jobs that
are considered extremely harsh and degrading for women and which are
normally reserved for men.
However, occupational segmentation by sex is not an entirely clear-cut
matter once race,class and socio-economic status are considered:men as well as
women occupy the lowest levels of the hierarchy (between 30 to 40 per
cent of the labour force in the CFI are men), but in different occupations.
Most female and male workers at the lowest level of the hierarchy (manual
labour), are either mix-raced mestizos, descendants of aboriginal people,
or of African heritage. In contrast, men but also women in management,
who are urban, Western educated, and of European descent or mix-raced,
support, supervise, benefit and oversee the precarious working conditions
and health risks that this type of production creates for their lower-classes
‘sisters’ and ‘brothers’. Upper-class women actually participate in the
ownership and management of some plantations and have directed and
participated actively in Asocolflores.4 Similarly, middle-class women work
in supervisory/administrative divisions. In other words, without doubt,
gender plays a significant role in the allocation of work, but cannot be
isolated from class and race as determiners of where in the hierarchy a
person works. Hence, the benefits and disadvantages of trade and exports
promotion vary accordingly to class, race and gender.
Sanmiguel-Valderrama: Feminization and Racialization of Labour
77
Occupational Hazards
With regards to occupational hazards, the heavy use of chemicals in the
greenhouses and after-harvest operations is one of the major causes of
health problems among both women and men working in the plantations.
Pesticides widely used in the CFI, particularly organophosphates, have
been proven to provoke higher incidence of miscarriages, stillbirths, and
delayed pregnancy among female agricultural workers and the wives of
men employed in pesticide mixing and spraying in open-field agricultural
sites (Fuortes et al., 1997). These health problems increase when one works
in an enclosed environment, such as a greenhouse. Specific research on
the CFI has shown such negative health consequences (Guarin-Muñoz
et al., 1999; Restrepo et al., 1990a; Restrepo et al., 1990b).
In greenhouses, extreme temperatures combined with low levels of clean
air-circulation, high humidity, and in some instances, no drinking water,
create a harsh work environment. Women also face physical problems
due to the body posture in which they have to work, and physical as well as
psychological problems due to long hours, extreme pressure from management to be more productive, verbal abuse by supervisors, and in some
instances, sexual harassment by male co-workers. Despite legislation
aimed to protect workers from these occupational hazards, the reality is
that in many instances this legislation is ignored or bypassed (Corporación
CACTUS, 1999).
The participation of women in paid work becomes further complicated
during pregnancy and nursing time. Since there are no safety nets to protect women who need to withdraw from hazardous work environments
to protect their health and that of their foetuses, women have to continue
working out of economic necessity. This happens in spite of the harmful health effects resulting from pesticide exposure, demonstrating the
hardships that women face in the CFI and their courageous efforts to
manage the demands of earning a living and social reproduction (SanmiguelValderrama, 2004).
With reference to exposure to pesticides and other chemicals, the CFI has
argued that, through its Code of Conduct ‘Flor Verde’, the use of pesticides
has improved. A management chosen corporation has certified some
plantations as ‘green’. However, at the end of 2003, on one important flower
plantation, ‘Aposentos’, more than 300 workers experienced acute poisoning on the same day. Additionally, a 1999 study by a public hospital in
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Journal of Developing Societies 23, 1–2 (2007): 71–88
one of the municipalities where floriculture takes place (Suba) found that
30 percent of floriculture workers have reported symptoms that correspond
to acute and chronic poisoning (Guarin-Muñoz et al., 1999). The study
also found that preventive practices against pesticide exposure did not
follow legal prescriptions at the plantation sites where the research was
conducted. These examples demonstrate the precarious way in which the
threat of poisoning is still handled at such sites. Women and men from
upper and middle classes working in management and in administrative
positions do not face any of these occupational hazards.
Paid and Unpaid Work
Although racialized rural women have entered the labour market in
unprecedented numbers, they have not abandoned those ‘additional
shifts’ that provide the use values necessary to maintain and reproduce
the labour force. Employers in flower plantations impose long shifts on
workers, which in high-picking seasons can reach 15 consecutive hours,
ignoring and competing with the time and energy necessary for women
workers’ duties in the private sphere. Additionally, a lack of or precariously
public-funded social services such as daycare, education and health services compound the problems of conflicting and overlapping women’s
responsibilities in the public and private spheres. Contrary to women in
management, women in the low ranks of the CFI cannot afford private
services due to their below poverty-line wages, despite their enormous
efforts to work hard to make a living, and the continuous sacrifices that they
endure both physically and psychologically. Under these circumstances,
women rely on their oldest children (mainly their daughters), or if possible,
other women relatives and neighbours (or daycare under neighbourhood
community-mother programmes), and, if available, on daycare centres
on the plantations or close by, established by the government agency in
charge of children’s welfare (Samiguel-Valderrama, 2004).
Types of Labour Contracts
As for the types of labour contracts, workers labour mostly under direct
short-term contracts, or subcontracting short contracts with the temporary
help industry (Rangel et al., 1996). Non-permanent labour contracts
simply allow for flexibility in contracting meaning that employers have
the real power to grant or withdraw an extension of a labour contract at
will. In the eyes of a plantation owner, a worker becomes ‘problematic’
Sanmiguel-Valderrama: Feminization and Racialization of Labour
79
when, for instance, s/he tries to organize or unionize, complains before
governmental authorities, his/her medical tests show inadequate levels of
cholinesterase due to exposure to pesticides, requires repetitive sick leave,
or requires paid maternity leave. The prerogative enjoyed by employers
of not renewing contracts for workers who in fact labour in permanent
positions not only undermines the stability of employment, but it creates
a sense of insecurity and fear which disempowers workers from exercising
basic labour rights associated with fair labour practices, such as freedom
of association and access to authorities and the judicial system without
reprisals. Instability, and the accompanying fear of not being granted a
renewal of a contract, has been identified as one of the major obstacles to
organizing workers into a solid movement to demand better labour standards and conditions.
Unionization and Workers’ Organizations
Regarding unionization in the industry, during the late 1970s, 1980s and
1990s various worker’s organizations and unions were formed on different plantations. However, the CFI management, for the most part,
has successfully undermined the struggles to unionize independently
and destroyed many independent unions (Rueda-Cifuentes, 2003). The
plantations have used practices such as: creating a management-controlled
federation of unions – Utracun; offering better contracts (collective pacts)
to non-unionized workers through Utracun rather than negotiating collective contracts with independent unionized workers; refusing to bargain
with independent unions; illegally locking-out and dismissing unionized
workers and hiring scabs, abandoning and declaring the bankruptcy of
plantations; using of the mass media to vilify unions, arguing falsely that
workers’ organizations are connected with illegal leftist armed forces or
that unions would bankrupt the plantations (Rueda-Cifuentes, 2003). It
has also been argued that some plantations have even moved to another
country to avoid collective bargaining and fair labour relations (Korovkin,
2003; Noel, 1998).
Up to 2001, after dozens of attempts to unionize, the only independent
union that has been able to survive is a small one called Sintrafloaramerica,
a plantation-based union of no more than 25 workers. Their members
have put up with open discrimination and lower labour benefits than those
workers who are not independently unionized and whose benefits are
Journal of Developing Societies 23, 1–2 (2007): 71–88
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governed by a management-formed and controlled labour pact. However,
in May 2001, against all odds, a stronger independent union was able to
consolidate: UNTRAFLORES. Later, at the end of 2004, another independent union, SINTRASPLENDOR, was formed in a plantation owned
by DOLE. These two unions have affiliated workers from different plantations and it is a hope for a strong worker’s movement that may permit
negotiations for collective agreements in the CFI.
Conclusions
The CFI has provided alternative sources of employment for mostly rural
women and men of limited socio-economic means, as well as few positions
for men and women of urban upper- and middle-class backgrounds. For
women and men in the low ranks of the industry, working conditions are
precarious and do not comply with minimum legal international labour
standards.5 Additionally, the work is underpaid and unstable, places their
health at risk, and does not provide for minimum economic security for
themselves and their families. Nor does the industry recognize or accommodate women’s roles in the private sphere. Consequently, while the
people who make the creation of perfect flowers possible are living and
working in precarious and super-exploitative conditions, the owners of
plantations not only accumulate profits but are able to sell the flowers at
very low prices. This, in turn, permits distribution networks in consumer
countries to be highly profitable, as they sell flowers to consumers at a price
significantly lower than if the commodity were produced under consumer
countries’ wage conditions.
The CFI provides women and men with a certain income, and many
women feel proud to be wage-earners and therefore more independent
from their families; however, the precarious wages and instability of the
work do not make it a career from which they can advance their own or
their children’s socio-economic status. Some literature has argued that
women’s wage-earning capacity is empowering and contributes to their
independence from the patriarchal setting at a family level.6 Although
women’s participation in the paid labour force is a step towards their
emancipation from authoritarian and patriarchal family settings, women’s
emancipation is relative since, as workers, they have to face similar forms
of domination: women’s labour conditions replicate patriarchal relations and women’s lives are harshly subordinated to the needs of the
plantations. Forms of subordination and subjugation are recreated,
Sanmiguel-Valderrama: Feminization and Racialization of Labour
81
based on class, gender and race. This manifests itself not only in the types
of jobs assigned to women but also in women’s interactions with management and supervisors that resemble the authoritarian and patriarchal
settings in households, as well as racist and classist oppressive structures
of Colombian society at large. Moreover, their job threatens the health
upon which they depend to make a living and, due to their continuous
exposure to pesticides, also the health of their foetuses and children.
Additionally, since many women are forcibly displaced from their place
of origin, in most instances they lose the proximity and solidarity of their
families and communities, which in Colombia are very important as a
social network on which people depend. Collaboration is present in
communities and extended families (between siblings, mothers-daughters,
cousins, uncles, aunts, and grandparents; and between ‘comadres/compadres’), and this trust, solidarity and collaboration are not easily replaceable. Trust and collaboration, in particular, are not found in the setting of
the workplace in the CFI, where unhealthy competition between workers is promoted. Let us remember that the break-up of rural families in
Colombia is often linked to forced displacement and poverty, and not
the consequence of a free choice to abandon communities and the family
settings. The rural communities and family settings provide a complex set
of social relations where, as Diane Elson has argued, not only authoritative
but also collaborative relations exist.7
Additionally, while women’s increasing participation rate in the labour
force is an important facet of their independence, what is equally significant is women’s double or triple shift (Tiano, 1994; Ward 1990). Women
continue to hold their unpaid jobs (i.e. the daily and generational maintenance of the labour supply), sometimes engage in community and political work, and in addition take jobs that pay wages. Women’s workload
gets intensified and worsens when state support systems are absent or
downsized in both the unpaid and paid spheres (i.e. daycare, schooling,
health care, transportation). Also, the hard work at the plantations leaves
women little time, not only to take care of themselves and their children
but also to participate in the community as social or political beings.
The CFI is a case that confirms, in part, the critical evaluation argued by
the gender and trade liberalization feminist literature. This literature has
argued that the global production plant has relied on women’s underpaid
and unpaid work, and that it is successful due to the over-exploitation
of women. It has also argued that the type of jobs created by export-led
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Journal of Developing Societies 23, 1–2 (2007): 71–88
industries resemble ‘female jobs’, which are characterized by their shortterm, unstable and precarious conditions. The participation of women in
the CFI resembles similar production sites where thousands of women
participate in export industries around the world (Ward, 1990).
However, the research on the CFI qualifies some of the arguments
of the feminist literature on gender and trade liberalization. Not every
woman loses due to neo-liberal trade. Rather, it is mostly racialized rural
women (indigenous, African and mix-raced) from low socio-economic
backgrounds, who lose. Women from urban upper and middles classes with
Western education, and from European or mix-raced descent, who access
jobs in the export-led industries do not face the same precarious labour
conditions that places their health at risk or compels them to live under
the poverty line. They do not face the same dilemmas of conflicting roles
in the private and public spheres, since they can afford to pay for private
services and to hire racialized lower class women and men to fulfill their
gendered roles in the private sphere.
However, in addition to the gendered relations in plantations of the CFI,
there are racist and classist discriminatory relations. In fact, in Colombia,
women of limited economic means have not been the only ones who have
experienced precarious labour relations. There is an enduring historical
link since colonial times between bad jobs or precarious forms of labour
and racialized men, women and children from non-European descent
or those who are of mixed race. Therefore, besides the ‘feminization’ of
labour theory positioned by feminists, current labour relations in the CFI
plantations resemble the ‘racialization’ of labour relations, since the great
majority of the jobs experienced by women and men workers in the low
ranks of the industry look like the jobs traditionally held by racialized
peoples in Colombia: these labour relations have been historically characterized by instability (part-time, short term), underemployment, informality, reduced or lack of union representation, little opportunity for
promotion or skills development (dead-end jobs), low wages, precarious
job environment conditions, and unemployment.
NOTES
1. See Beneria (1995); Beneria and Lind (1995); Buss (1997); Buss and Manji
(2005); Charlesworth and Chinkin (2000); Charlesworth, Chinkin, and Wright
(1996); Elson (1990, 1994); Orford (1997, 1998, 2005); Otto (1993, 1999); Rittich
(2000, 2003); Sadasivam (1997); Schuler (1995); Waring (1990); among others.
Sanmiguel-Valderrama: Feminization and Racialization of Labour
83
2. See Beneria and Feldman (1992); Beneria and Roldán (1987); Bustos and
Palacios (1994); El-Sanabary (1983); Elson (1990); Joekes (1995); Ward(1990);
among others.
3. Just during the past decade more than three million peasants have been
displaced from their lands due to political violence in the countryside (United
Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, 2006: 353–54.
4. In fact, most of these women move around from jobs in the private, public,
and political upper-class spaces. For instance, the Director of Asocolflores for
a number of years was María Isabel Patiño, who was appointed at the end
of the 1990s to a governmental position in Bogotá city. Similarly, the former
General Manager of Asocolflores, Angela Maria Orozco was appointed
Vice-minister of international trade during the Pastrana presidency. All of
the Directors of the regional offices of Asocolflores are women (e.g. Martha
Cecilia Moreno from Aflonordes).
5. According to the ILO,‘International labour standards have been used for the past
75 years as the benchmark – the only universally accepted benchmark – by
which the rights and conditions of human beings at work have been meas-ured’.
‘International Labour Standards and Human Rights’ Available at: [http://
www.ilo.org/ public/english/standards/norm/] accessed 31 March 2004.
6. For instance, Friedemann-Sanchez (2001) argues that ‘flowers say more than
love. Next week, Americans by the millions will buy fresh cut-flowers for that
special someone, unaware that they are helping women to bloom in Colombian
society. … [women] working in the industry, making a steady income and having a community that affirms them as women has allowed them to see how
they’re not appreciated at home. Some leave their husbands and children temporarily, using their knowledge of child rearing and house administration as a
weapon to gain more equity…Men have no idea what has hit them. Although
the flower industry has a big profit margin and uses a lot of water, pesticide
and fertilizers, it enforces labour regulations to protect workers. Also, it makes
no sense to try to apply European labour standards to this industry…’.
Available at: [http://www1.umn.edu/urelate/tips/020902.html] accessed
10 December 2002. See also by the same Colombian author: ‘Global Assembly
Line in Colombia: a Challenge to Patriarchy’ (Mimeo, 2000).
7. Cooperative conflicts are situations in which individuals do stand to make gains
from cooperating, but have different and conflicting interests in the distribution of benefits. See Elson (1994: 37). Elson deploys the bargaining model
analysis of Amartya Sen, A. Z. ‘Gender and Cooperative Conflicts’. See also
Tinker, I. (1990), cited by Beneria, L. (1995).
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ADDITIONAL READING
Brassel, F. and Rangel, C.E. (2001) International Social Standards for the
International Flower Industry. Bonn: Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, Food First
Information and Action Network-FIAN, and the International Union of Food,
Agricultural, Hotel, Restaurant, Catering, Tobacco and Allied Workers – IUF,
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Ministerio de Trabajo y Seguridad Social y el Instituto de Seguridad Social (1996)
Desde la Siembra, Voces de Mujeres: Condiciones de Trabajo y Salud de las
Mujeres en la Agroindustria de las Flores, Banano, Algodón y Café. Bogotá:
Ministerio de Trabajo y Seguridad Social.
Olga Sanmiguel-Valderrama is Assistant Professor in the Women’s Studies Department, University of Cincinnati, Ohio. She holds a PhD from
Osgoode Hall Law School, York University, Canada. Focusing on the
Journal of Developing Societies 23, 1–2 (2007): 71–88
88
Journal of Developing Societies 23, 1–2 (2007): 71–88
case of Colombia and the experiences of Latinos/as in North America,
her areas of research and expertise include the contradictions between
the promotion of continental neo-liberal international trade, and the
respect for individual and collective human rights – particularly labour,
environmental, and the rights of women and racial minorities. Address:
Department of Women’s Studies, University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati.
[email: sanmigo@email.uc.edu]
ETHNIC AND RACIAL STUDIES, 2016
VOL. 39, NO. 12, 2149–2168
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2016.1139156
The discourse of racialization of labour and Chinese
enterprises in Africa
Barry Sautmana and Yan Hairongb
a
Division of Social Science, Hong Kong University of Science & Technology, Kowloon, Hong
Kong; bDepartment of Applied Social Science, Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Kowloon,
Hong Kong
ABSTRACT
A ‘race’ and labour conjunction has been theorized based on Global North
investment in the Global South. Chinese enterprising in Africa allows us to
analyse it in a South-South setting. Contrary to dominant discourses, Chinese
employers are not the sole racializers of the African/Chinese interface. Chinese
and Africans, employers and employees, as well as Western actors, coconstitute racialization, with varied consequences for each. Rhetorical
racialization of African employees by some Chinese employers and African
employee and politicians’ racialization of Chinese, show that South-South
racializations of labour markedly differ from the North-South exemplar.
ARTICLE HISTORY Received 7 March 2015; Accepted 15 December 2015
KEYWORDS Racialization; labour; China; Chinese; Africa; Africans
Introduction
Chinese ‘going out’ (走出 去) to invest in Africa is discursively constructed by
Western sources as ‘a Manichean binary – “predator or partner”, “friend or
foe”, “comrade or colonizer”’ (Wasserman 2012). In titles of Western books
on China/Africa, ‘Africa is subordinate, China is the predator’ (Prashad 2013).
In problematizing Chinese investment in Africa, mainstream discourse attributes key issues to Chinese racialization of Africans (French 2014).
Racialized ideas of difference and hierarchy do affect Chinese enterprises in
Africa, though not mainly as set out in Western-derived discourse. They theoretically situate questions such as: why, how, and from who does difference
and hierarchy emerge to make ‘race’ a category at Chinese firms in Africa?
What consequences flow for sources of racialization? How does racialization
figure in politicians’ and media imaginings of ‘Chinese neocolonialism’
(Obama 2013) and in Chinese exasperation at being singled out for criticism
over their presence in Africa? (Reuters 2013).
CONTACT Barry Sautman
sobarrys@ust.hk
© 2016 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
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We examine the sources, manifestations and consequences of this discourse in the African–Chinese labour relationship. Our findings augment
those of scholars who analyse racialization in developed countries and racializations of labour at Western firms in developing states. We conclude that
another mode exists, in which employers and employees from developing
countries racialize each other.
The concept of racialization
Racialization extends racial meaning to social practices or groups, designates
groups to be subjected to unequal treatment, and socio-culturally constructs
hierarchy (Omi and Winant 1994, 14; Song 2004). A British ethnicity specialist
has observed that
The belief that humans belong in races was an invention of the Anglo-Saxon Protestant West that has been spread wherever it had influence. In this sense, Westerners have made races … The contemporary mode of racialization is a way of
claiming that the relative privilege and disprivilege of such groups derives in part
from earlier misrepresentations of their biological distinctiveness. (Banton 2005)
Sociologist Robert Miles, analysed white reactions to post-war New Commonwealth migrants to Britain. He found that UK elites legitimated a discourse of supposed intellectual incapacity and irresponsibility that upheld
menial, super-low wage employment for Pakastani and Caribbean workers
(Miles 1982, 167–169). Racialization was use of physical and cultural characteristics to justify adverse reactions to migrants and super-exploit their labour
(Kemp 2004). It was not natural, but ‘structurally determined, politically organized, and ideologically inflected … within relations of domination and subordination’ (Green and Carter 1988).
The role of racializers Miles described scarcely applies to Chinese in Africa
however. They are migrants at sufferance, subject to local political and social
forces, and citizens of a country with a non-interference policy. Chinese and
Africans may foreground cultural difference to rhetorically construct racialized
hierarchies but, as a business journal reports, ‘Chinese immigrants in Africa
chuckle at the idea that they could lord it over the locals’ (China SubSaharan 2015). In some 450 interviews of Chinese and African employers
and employees in a dozen countries,1 we found no Chinese and almost no
African who thinks differently. These interviews, surveys of 350 Chinese in
Zambia and 2,000 African university students and faculty in 10 countries,
plus documentary research, are the evidential basis for arguing that the discourse of race among Chinese at enterprises in Africa is generally different
from the one found by others for Global North enterprises in the Global South.
Either whole groups or discrete issues may be racialized. Mexican-Americans have been ‘racialized as a dehumanized and vulnerable out-group’ and
ETHNIC AND RACIAL STUDIES
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‘moved steadily away from their middle position in the economic hierarchy
toward the formation of an underclass’ (Massey 2009). Malaysia has Malay
majority/Chinese minority tensions and Malay Muslims regard contact
with pigs as unclean; their elites’ ‘criticizing the practices of Chinese pig
farmers and their “relation” with pigs [is] a covert way to racialize an
entire community’ (Neo 2012). Health care reform is racialized in the US.
When Bill Clinton proposed it the 1990s, reform had strong support
among whites and blacks, but when Barack Obama associated with it,
support dropped sharply among whites, who then saw it as mainly benefitting blacks (Tesler 2012). On ‘ethnic gang-related incidents’, Australian
media echo the police in racializing African refugees as the ‘problem
group’, even where Africans are victims of racial violence (Windle 2008).
Racialization of Chinese in Africa has proceeded from issues, such as pay
and workplace safety, to Western and local political forces taking up the
cudgels against ‘the Chinese’ as a whole.
Groups can be both racialized and ethnicized. In Chicago, ‘When compared with long-time white residents, Chinese Americans are racialized
as “inassimilable foreigners”. When compared with poor African Americans
and Latinos, however, Chinese Americans are ethnicized as the “model
minority”’(Lan 2006). Many Africans racialize Chinese as more ‘foreign’
than whites and Indians, but some also see Chinese as models of
industriousness.
Employers and not just employees can be racialized. Thus, in Los Angeles,
Employers are not the only ones who hold strong racial-ethnic preferences and
prejudices. Latina domestic workers readily agreed on who were their worst
employers: Armenians, Iranians, Asians, Latinos, Blacks and Jews … Anyone
marked as nonwhite, it seems, is at risk of being denounced as a cheap,
abusive, oppressive employer, to be avoided at all costs.
These immigrant workers absorb US biases of Jews as cheap, Chinese as
bossy, blacks as lazy, etc., and racialize employers from groups seen as not
American or white. Workers who disagree with that view are ‘drowned out
by the louder, frequently blanket condemnations [of] other Latina domestic
workers … ’ (Hondagneu-Sotelo 2001, 57–60). Some Africans also dissent
from racializing Chinese, but local politicians press for a consensus that ‘the
Chinese’ are a problem.
Chinese have a recent, tenuous presence in Africa and lack political power,
determinative influence, or cultural hegemony. They are not positioned to
create a public discourse to inferiorize their African hosts, who can regulate,
racialize or even expel Chinese. They cannot engage in racially disparate treatment without also crossing the Chinese state, which needs African political
support (Sautman 2015). Racialization in the Chinese/African interface thus
differs from racialization within developed states.
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Sources of racialization in the African/Chinese interface
Racialization at Chinese firms in Africa is co-constituted by Chinese employers
and workers in Africa; Chinese in China; Africans at Chinese companies; African
politicians, media, and intellectuals; and their Western counterparts. Their perspectives and actions form ‘overlapping racializations [in which] there are
multiple levels of complexity in interracial relations, which may involve both
confrontation and collaboration’ (Lan 2006, 33).
Western discourse attributes racialization to Chinese employers even before
they have any relations with African employees, as it charges Chinese with an
ethnic nepotistic refusal to hire Africans (McGreal 2014). Most Chinese-owned
firms however have localized workforces, despite skills shortages even in
Africa’s more developed countries (Sautman and Yan 2015). While among
thousands of Chinese employers in Africa, racializers can be found, a US journalist notes that ‘Chinese racism [is] a largely rhetorical phenomenon’. A
Taiwan migrant to apartheid-era South Africa, who now owns a logistics
firm with 1,000 employees (5 of them Chinese), whispered to us about his
black workers that ‘You can take them out of the jungle, but you can’t take
the jungle out of them’. The phrase is common among racists, yet, there is
no indication that his company, which has black managers, practices discrimination (XXX 2014). A textile factory manager in Zambia told us a rhyme about
Africans: ‘On their bodies are three pieces of cloth; their economy relies on aid;
to eat they rely on fruit from trees, and they say work can wait until “tomorrow” (身上三块布, 经济靠援助, 吃饭靠大树, 工作 tomorrow)’. This same boss
however had a structural, non-essentializing explanation of African/Chinese
work culture differences: that Africans live for the moment due to life expectancies cut short by diseases (Che Ming 2008).
Chinese in Africa seldom racialize based on the biological or meta-cultural
notions that Western figures elaborate, such as veteran New York Times
science editor Nicholas Wade’s assertion that Africans’ genes account for ‘variations in their nature, such as their time preference, work ethic and propensity
to violence’ (Mailonline 2014), or French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s claim that
a lack of a future orientation means ‘the African has not fully entered into
history’ (Reuters 2007). Rather, Chinese racialization rests on the concept of
‘quality’ or suzhi (素质), conceived in terms of discipline, honesty, industriousness and skill. It is applied across ethnic lines, but is sometimes generalized to
groups (Yan 2014). For example, Chinese employers may speak of African laziness, but define it in terms of comparative work intensity, apply it also to Europeans, other non-Africans, and Chinese of certain regions, and see it as
mutable (Sautman and Yan 2014a).
Some Chinese workers also racialize Africans, obviating solidarity with
coworkers whose conditions may overlap with their own. Indeed, Chinese
factory workers in Africa are often ‘forced to work excessively long hours
ETHNIC AND RACIAL STUDIES
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… without overtime pay [and have] accommodations that are often dirty,
cramped, and heavily monitored’ (Rogers 2012).
In China itself, official discourse is more positive about Africa than anything
official in the West. President Hu Jintao (2007) stated that ‘The people of China
and Africa have created great and brilliant cultures in the long course of
history and made important contributions to the civilization and progress of
mankind’. Chinese political elites have ‘a sense that China needs Africa’
(Chan 2014) and Chinese Africanists say that ‘China needs Africa more than
Africa needs China’ (Liu and Li 2013). Yet, Western-derived conceptions of Africans and reverberations from experiences of Chinese returned from Africa
also affect attitudes in China towards Africans, producing a spectrum of perspectives – some racializing – that influence Chinese who migrate to Africa
(Bodomo 2012).
African elites, like their Western counterparts historically, may portray
Chinese as alien, unassimilable and low on a status hierarchy that is often
topped by whites (Almaguer 1994, 144–151; Cosmic Yoruba 2012; Sautman
2014). Some Africans, who share language, religion and other cultural
elements with Europeans, see themselves as intermediate between whites
and Chinese. A veteran political figure told us many Zambians
identify with Westerners and take on their prejudices. All these are self-interested. Messages coming out of Washington, London and Paris about the
Chinese presence in Africa have led to cultivation of prejudices against
Chinese among some Africans who identify with the West. This prejudice is
also cultivated by political forces in Zambia. (Lewanika 2007)
African elites may racialize Chinese out of self-regard, to fulfil economic or
electoral purposes, or to boost ties with the West. A Romanian Africanist has
related that
some of the most important businessmen in Tanzania and Kenya are affected by
the Chinese firms operating in this part of Africa. These owners have many political connections and are now pressing the local mass media to write about the
Chinese community in negative terms. Two businessmen told me they actually
ordered inflammatory articles against the Chinese community. (Codrin 2009)
Anti-Chinese agitation by political elites in African states is mostly through
oppositions, but several African officials have done likewise: Zambia’s
(white) Vice President Guy Scott stated that Chinese ‘have a reputation for
being somewhat inhumane … They are terrible managers. You get open conflict quite a bit’ (Bannerman 2012). He did not mention his own party’s years of
anti-Chinese incitement or Zambian workers’ strikes against employers of
varied nationalities.
Many African workers at Chinese enterprises are employed by firms much
less profitable than those owned by non-Chinese (Brooks 2010, 126;
Sautman and Yan 2013). They may react to lower wages or anti-Chinese
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political mobilizations by racializing their employers or Chinese generally
(Sautman and Yan 2014b), obscuring systemic causes of their problems.
‘White-owned’ mines in Zambia have had ‘plenty of poor practice’ (Lungu
and Fraser 2008), but a union chairman at a Chinese-owned mine there told
us ‘Chinese, sorry, are not good investors, but white people are very good
… In China, you have too many people, so if someone dies, you don’t care’
(Mwale 2011). Some African workers call for Chinese to be driven out (AFP
2014); yet, no anti-British campaigns occurred after South African police
killed 34 miners striking UK-owned Lonmin in 2012, even though a Lonmin
director had pushed police to act (News 4 2014). As British Africa/China
scholar Giles Mohan has noted, ‘No one says that the “the British” do this
and the “Americans”; do that, but it is easy to put the Chinese under one
label and say “the Chinese” are all this and that’ (CD 2015).
Westerners antagonistic to China’s political system are also a source of racialization of Chinese. They paint them as generally racist (Anderlini 2014) as
Africa’s worst employers (HRW 2011, 24; but see Shelton and Kabemba
2012, 170–171; Sautman and Yan 2012) and, by ignoring the presence of
Chinese workers in Africa, as a neo-colonial herrenvolk. Thus, Western media
photographic representations show only Chinese as bosses in Africa, standing
arms folded while Africans do hard labour. Chinese workers are often mischaracterized as bosses: when rioting miners murdered a Chinese at Zambia’s
Collum Coal Mine in 2012, Western media turned that worker from a surveyor
into a manager (Sautman and Yan 2014b). Yet, Western politicians and media
also claim ethnocentric Chinese managers constitute their work forces solely
from Chinese (Versi 2014). Illogically then, Chinese in Africa are all bosses, yet
only hire Chinese workers.
Western discourse depicts only Chinese as treating Africans as inferiors. A
New York Times journalist has stated that at Chinese firms, ‘the everyday workplace is riven with accusations of mistreatment of African laborers by Chinese
and accusations of virulent racism that seems to contradict the Chinese image
of discretion and humility’ (Hurt 2009). A UK Sunday Times article put it that at
Chinese firms in Africa there is ‘racism, a total disregard for human rights, and
the sort of indifference to labor conditions that belongs in the Nineteenth
Century’ (Sheridan 2013). Such statements reflect no research by those who
make them, but only writings of other Western journalists (Cardenal and
Araujo 2012; Michel and Beuret 2009). They exemplify what an African
wrote in response to a former UK diplomat’s accusation that Chinese managers in Africa despise and maltreat African workers: ‘Since African and Caribbean countries started turning away from Europe towards China … many
white people keep bleating on about how Chinese might be more racist
than Europeans’ (JesusFan 2009). A detailed, critical examination of labour
relations at Chinese firms in Africa in fact recounts no acts of ‘virulent
racism’ (Baah and Jauch 2009). A study of relations between Chinese
ETHNIC AND RACIAL STUDIES
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traders and their Ghanaian employees concluded that ‘Chinese traders rarely
engage in active racial discrimination. This is demonstrated in their almost
egalitarian behavior towards employees and members of the lower social
strata, such as female head porters’ (Giese 2013).
Scholars allude to Chinese ‘casual racism’ (Brautigam 2013) or ‘harmonious racism’ (Shih 2013, 33–41) without indicating whether other actors
construct race in Africa. Rracialization does however affect many nonChinese workplaces: white-owned South African supermarket chain Shoprite
is ubiquitous in neighbouring states, but senior managers are mainly white
(Miller 2005, 9). Kansanshi and Lumwana, Canadian-owned mines near
Solwezi, Zambia, each have 200–300 expats (FQM 2012; Williams 2012). At
Kansanshi,
The company has built homes, pools, a gymnasium, and even a golf course, but
to the annoyance of workers and Solwezi residents, these are for the use of those
high up on the mine’s organizational structure. Given that there is a degree of
overlap between race and the division of labor at the mine, these words of a
Kansanshi worker are perfectly understandable: ‘This is apartheid … Kansanshi
has created a new Cape Town’. This discursive connection is all the more pertinent because many expatriate managers at Kansanshi are from South Africa.
(Negi 2012, 35)
Zambia’s Minister of Commerce has received complaints that at Kansanshi,
more qualified Zambians ‘perform duties for inexperienced and unqualified
expatriates who get huge salaries at their expense’ (Steel Guru 2011).
Some Western sources directly urge African elites to racialize Chinese in
Africa. A report for US government-funded Freedom House called on Zambia’s
government to single out Chinese for exclusion (Lasner 2011). That approach
accords with US-created notions of strategic rivalry with China that resemble
the sense of ‘racial urgency’ that Western elites advanced in the early and late
twentieth Century vis-à-vis Japan, and with Western racial stereotypes of
Chinese (Kowner 2013).
The causes and consequences of Chinese racialization of Africans, as well as
African and Western racializations of Chinese are thus varied. Our interviews,
surveys and the works of other scholars indicate however that all these actors
participate in racializing the African/Chinese interface.
The concept of racialization of labour
Racialization of labour is
everyday production, reproduction, and contest over racialized meanings and
structures implicated in the production of notions of skill, in employers’ everyday
assessments of good and bad workers, and in a range of institutional practices
that reproduce both the racialized division of labour and racialized job and occupational hierarchies. (Maldonado 2006, 353)
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It aims at ‘exploit[ing] workers at higher rates under worse conditions, usually
for worse pay’. Most seafarers are ‘men of color from the Global South’ who
‘experience unfair treatment due to their race or nationality’, including low
wages, physical abuse, and a bar on contacting unions. Gradients of racialized
exploitation also exist: highly trained Chinese seafarers are paid on average 20
per cent less than Filipinos, the world’s largest contingent of seafarers (Bonacich and Wilson 2008, 170–171) Latino day labourers rebuilding post-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans were subordinated to white and black workers
(Murga 2011). Racialization of labour also occurs when workers demean
those of another ‘race’ by discursive marginalization (Wilson 2008).
Racialization of labour is often framing of racially disparate citizenship
rights and levels of labour exploitation, as employers naturalize workers of
one group as well-suited to a kind of labour, but others as lazy or incompliant
(Maldonado 2009). It can involve societal divisions of labour embedded in political systems. The nineteenth century US’s ‘race-labor hierarchy’ had free
white labour on top, then ‘degraded’ Chinese indentured servitude, black
slavery, and Mexican peonage (Phan 2004). Southern and eastern European
workers were also viewed as inferior compared to northern Europeans (Roediger and Esch 2012, 90). Pre-Second World War productivity differential
studies in France put ethnic groups ‘in a predictable sequence [that] privileged whiteness and proximity to French people’ (Camiscioli 2008, 70–73).
Naturalization of work suitability by ethnicity and citizenship produces
hierarchies. In the early 2000s California food industry, white workers averaged U$14.46 an hour; US-born Latinos earned $10.92. Latinos of diverse
immigration status in California’s tortilla industry earned $8.79 an hour; but
the Mexican citizens of Tiajuana’s tortilla industry got $1.69 (Munoz 2008).
In Colombia’s cut flower industry, workers in 2005 earned $0.48 per hour
and were people of colour labouring at export-oriented plantations owned
locally or by US and other transnational firms. Owners and managers were
from the European-descended middle and upper classes (Sanmiguel-Valderrama 2007).
Edna Bonacich et al., whose theorization we augment, conceive racialization of labour as whites benefitting by denying rights to peoples of colour.
Primary racialization by employers creates more effective exploitation
through lower wages and worse conditions than those provided white
workers. Secondary racialization results from white workers’ fear of displacement by subordinated workers. The concept is exemplified by US employers
and workers deeming Chinese workers ‘not equal human beings’ and ‘faceless
hordes of working machines’, who gratefully receive low wages, steal US jobs,
lower labour standards, and eschew struggle. Bonacich et al. also posit that
while US workers have imperfect rights, Global South workers ‘lack citizenship
rights in relation to international capital’ by not being allowed to organize.
Even workers at US-outsourced call centers in India, who have better than
ETHNIC AND RACIAL STUDIES
2157
average conditions, are racialized labour, because their wages are a tenth
those of comparable US workers and they are forced to imitate Americans
(Bonacich, Alimahomed, and Wilson 2008).
A South-South racialization of labour?
Chinese racialization at firms in Africa lacks most characteristics set out for
North-South invested enterprises. Even the rhetoric differs. Unlike the Americans Bonacich discusses in relation to workers in China, Chinese in Africa
do not conceive that Africans workers are grateful for low wages or steal
their home country jobs, lower labour standards, or shun struggle. They
view labour standards in some African states as higher than in China (Ke
2011), (Beijing Laodi 2013), Africans as more likely than Chinese to insist on
respect for labour standards (Wong 2013), and some African countries as
having wage requirements higher than in China (Qu 2013). Our interviews
show that unlike Westerners in developing states, Chinese in Africa do not
think they benefit from political or labour rights that Africans lack and that
Chinese firms do not demand African employees conform to Chinese
culture, even as to work ethic.2
Bonacich’s racialization of labour concept involves whites profiting from
racializing non-whites, but not non-whites of one developing country racializing
workers or employers of another one. It does not concern workers in one developing country, employed by firms from another, who have the same or better
rights and wages than workers in the firms’ country of origin. Chinese firms in
Africa may pay Chinese more than locals, due to differences in skill and experience and a need to incentivize work far from home (Baah and Jauch 2009, 70,
115, 151, 181, 194–195, 221, 330). Many however do not pay Africans less than
what comparable workers earn in China. Our 2014 surveys of Chinese-owned
firms’ Zambian copper miners and workers at China’s largest copper mine,
found Zambians out-earned Chinese by US$640–555 a month. At two
Western-owned mines, Zambians averaged $703 a month, yet developed
country miners average much more: US$5,300 in Canada (Caldwell 2014).
Chinese at their companies in Africa do not necessarily earn more than like-qualified Africans at non-Chinese firms. Chinese mining engineers in Zambia in
2011 were paid $10,000 a year (Brautigam 2011, 6), less than Zambian engineers at a major mine owned by a UK-based firm (Servant 2009). In 2007,
‘Chinese engineers in Angola [were] paid only one-sixth of what Angolans
can expect from European [-owned] firms’ (Song 2007). Chinese workers building Angola’s Benguela Railway received $150–250 a month (Grobler 2014),
while Angolan construction workers earn $250–500 a month (Thanh Nien
News 2014), a pay difference inconceivable for Western expatriate workers.
Chinese tend to not concentrate in super-low wage African countries,
except Ethiopia. Perhaps half of Chinese in Africa reside in its largest
2158
B. SAUTMAN AND H. YAN
manufacturer, South Africa (Li 2013), which received 35 per cent of all Chinese
investment in Africa from 2001 to 2012 (Copley 2014). Its 2014 manufacturing
wage averaged US$1,200 – much higher, for example, than Zambia’s average
of $165–200 (Davis 2014) – while China’s was $560 (Hamlin 2014). There are
some 20 whites for each Chinese in South Africa and on average they earn
6 times what blacks do (Laing 2012). In 2011, whites were 12 per cent of economically active South Africans, but 65 per cent of all top managers, 73 per cent
of top private sector managers and 69–72 per cent of senior managers (Commission 2012). Chinese, however, are economically intermediate. With whites
much more numerous and economically dominant than Chinese, socioeconomic differences between blacks and Chinese hardly figure in South
Africa’s racial hierarchy (Huynh, Park, and Chen 2010).
The concept of racialization of labour also does not presently deal with
(mostly) non-self-segregating foreign employers. Some Chinese live in
group accommodations, due to company concern about personal safety
(Kairu 2015) and those who speak only Chinese cannot much interact with
locals. Most Chinese in Africa however do not ‘seal themselves off from the
societies around them as best they can’ (McNamee 2012), as they do not
work for firms with ‘compounds’, but live among and interact with locals
(Giese 2011; Oreglia 2012, 9). Chinese are the second-largest foreign group
in Equatorial Guinea. The largest is Americans, who
live in private compounds far from Equatoguinean towns. Unlike the Americans,
Chinese immigrants live among the Equatoguinean people and have constant
economic interaction with them in different ways, such as providing products
and services for them, working for them, renting business premises and accommodation from them [and] employing them. (Esteban 2009, 682)
Asked by a US reporter about the Chinese community in Congo’s Kinshasa, a
local journalist replied
There is no Chinese community; they live with us. They live right next door to
me. They eat with us, they shop with us … They’re learning Lingala … and,
most importantly, they are not afraid of us … We joke among ourselves that
the Chinese skin is becoming browner and browner to where it’s now black.
(Olander 2010)
A Nigerian blogger, responding to a former US Ambassador’s assertion that
Chinese in Africa segregate themselves, wrote:
Are they less ‘segregated’ from Africans than Westerners? Yes … the Chinese
are more likely to live among and shop in the same markets as Africans … I
have a couple of Chinese neighbors, but almost no Westerner lives on the
Lagos ‘mainland’ … and some Westerners don’t even look through their
windows when being driven around. They live in gilded ghettos for ‘expatriates’
… 99% have no local friends, despise the locals, and minimize interaction with
locals. (MrOkadaman28 2012)
ETHNIC AND RACIAL STUDIES
2159
Well-off Chinese reside in upscale African neighbourhoods, but employers
and workers of modest means live in much poorer areas (AFP 2015; Shinn and
Eisenberg 2012, 222). A Namibian trader in Swokupmund told us that
The Chinese are much better than the Germans or the Boers. The Chinese live,
work, and walk among us, as opposed to the whites, who live only in town in
their big, fancy houses. The local whites warn white tourists to stay out of the
townships; that the Namibians are all thieves … but the Chinese do not look
down on us. They take local taxis; even the wealthier Chinese still take taxis.
(Nzoh 2008)
In Sudan, some firms encourage Chinese employees to learn Arabic (Mao
2008) and a Sudanese manager has said that in his factory
Sudanese … eat from one big plate – while Chinese eat from their individual
bowls. But Chinese have learned to eat with Sudanese in one group … In the
factory, if Chinese are invited to eat with Sudanese in a group, the Chinese do
not refuse to do so. (Mekki 2008)
In Zambia, a leading intellectual has said of Chinese
They’re ready to go deep into all sectors of society where there have been only
Zambians. So they are unlike Westerners … We can say that Chinese have
assimilated in Zambian better than the Europeans, who’ve come here with
raised noses. Chinese have become more easily integrated. (Saasa 2014)
A Zambian political figure averred that ‘Compared to Europeans, Chinese will
do manual work. No white boss complex. Whatever they ask Africans to do,
Chinese themselves also do. There is nothing that’s beneath the Chinese.
This is very refreshing to Africans’ (Lewanika 2008). A Nambian journalist
has written that ‘The Chinese are indeed not living in mansions with an
army of African domestics. They dig, shovel, saw, clear and carry away the
rubble themselves, instead of standing around raving sharp orders to
African workers’ (Akinyi 2008, 85). A Zambian human resources officer at
Chinese-owned Chambishi Copper Smelter said
The Chinese are very simple. At the staff canteen, they even wash their own
dishes. The CEO wears a worksuit. The CEO also goes to staff canteen and
lines up to get his food. In fact, 80% of Chinese wear work suits. I think it’s
good because workers don’t feel so much status. (Kabende 2012)
Zambians who have worked under a succession of Indian, Swiss and
Chinese firms at Luanshya Copper Mine (LCM) have said that Chinese are
more apt than other employers to have friendly relations with them. A
miner told us that ‘Chinese mingle with us. Indians never do that. Nor
would South African Boers’ (Sikapoko 2013). Another recalled that in contrast
to Chinese, ‘Under the [Swiss] owners, there were a lot of Boers working at
LCM who used a lot of abusive curse language that used to cause frictions’
2160
B. SAUTMAN AND H. YAN
(Zulu 2012). The firm’s Zambian Head Geologist recalled that ‘The Boers would
kick you’ and, before that,
The Indian way of management’s approach to other races [was] not OK. They
just command you and sideline you. Chinese are willing to learn, no matter
how many degrees they have … Indian [managers] don’t want to talk to
lower classes. Chinese will sit with you and ask you, if we do this, what do
you think? (Mubita 2013)
The Kenyan programme head of a German NGO in Nairobi told us that
‘Chinese are actually regarded as more flexible employers than either
Indians or whites and even than some black Kenyan employers’ (Gikang’a
2007). A Tanzanian who had studied in Nanjing and worked as a translator
in Dar Es Salaam related that
Chinese tend to live among Africans, while Westerners tend to have their own
enclaves … Chinese live where they work or close to it, while Westerners feel
that where they live should be separate from where they work … those
Chinese who work with Tanzanians on an everyday basis would be forced by circumstances to speak Swahili and to live with local people and conditions.
(Mateza 2006)
Most Chinese have far less cultural overlap with Africans than do Western
expats, yet do not generally display the aloofness that scholars of racialization
of labour note at developed country enterprises in the Global South. Those
Chinese who go further than Western expats in interacting with Africans
may have more modest economic positions or a different sense of ‘race’,
one owing to China’s socialist legacy or to a sense that China is a developing
country.
The public views of elites about how particular ‘races’ labour often differ
from their actual appraisals. Pre-Civil War US Southern white elites crafted
what was, in effect, an official view that blacks were ‘shiftless’. In their writings
on managing slaves however, slaveholders objectively appraised black
workers as more productive than whites (Roediger and Esch 2012). Southern
planters tried replacing freed slaves with white immigrants and Chinese after
the war, but found them not sufficiently hardworking or disciplined and
reverted to African-American labour (Follett 2011). British elites officially
advanced a racialized discourse of inferior ‘Lascar’ (Asian) seamanship, but
UK marine experts held that Lascars were as good sailors as any (Hyslop
2014). China has long officially viewed Africans as hardworking and its
Africa specialists regard African women as particularly so (Liu 2012; Yang
2002; Zhou 2013). It is Chinese managers who hold mixed views of Africans
as workers: some fault their work habits; others are praiseful. A construction
firm boss wrote:
Often our African foremen would outperform the Chinese foremen … . We were
far more wary of our ambitious Chinese staff than the Africans, who were
ETHNIC AND RACIAL STUDIES
2161
generally more consistent … . [O]ur African workers are also hard workers for
our company … . Many of our African staff who have served us well for
decades were nurtured and promoted by the company for displaying that
‘sense of urgency’ on the job, despite their base education. (KF 2013)
Chinese factory bosses in Ethiopia especially appreciate the ‘hardworking and
quick at learning’ women workers (Shen 2013, 20). Chinese factory manager
Lao Yang has said in a 2008 letter to Sudanese managers of Khartoum’s
Anyang Battery Factory, ‘Sudanese are not lazy. You just need good management practices’.
Even Chinese managers not impressed by African work intensity praise
other attributes. A machinery engineering firm manager in Sudan has called
it is a ‘civilized country’ of trustworthy, linguistically talented people (Zhao
2007). A Chinese operations manager at Zambia’s Chambishi Mine has said
local workers there are more polite, more reliable, better at following
orders, and have a higher ‘level of civilization’ than Chinese (Zhou 2008). A
Chinese agriculture machinery firm and chain store owner in Zambia avers
that some local employees are very smart and entrepreneurs hardworking;
Zambians are also more inclined than Chinese to follow rules and procedures,
from which Chinese should learn (Han 2014).
Chinese employers’ view of Africans is not racialized in a general sense and
their practice even less so, while racialization of Chinese by some Africans,
especially politicians, and by Western elites, is not uncommon. That configuration raises the question of whether existing concepts of racialization of
labour, arising from North-South interaction, should be augmented to
account for the markedly different role of ‘race’ at Chinese enterprises in
Africa.
Conclusion: the mitigation of racialization of labour
Why might racialization of labour at Chinese enterprises in Africa differ from
the North-South scenario? Not merely because China is a developing
country: our interviews indicate racialization at Indian and ‘white’ mining
firms in Zambia have many commonalities. More likely it is because the
Chinese government demands that enterprises take into account China’s
relations with African states. Chinese are also more inclined than most
peoples to oppose racial discrimination. A University of Maryland poll in 16
countries found that
The Chinese are among the publics with the greatest support for the importance
of equal treatment for different races and ethnicities, second only to Mexicans
among the publics polled. China also has the second-largest majority rejecting
employers having the right to discriminate based on race or ethnicity, and are
among the largest majorities that favor their government making efforts to
prevent racial and ethnic discrimination. (WorldPublicOpinion.Org. 2008)
2162
B. SAUTMAN AND H. YAN
Chinese firms can thus be made to mitigate the existing, largely rhetorical
racialization of labour and avoid actions perceived as racially tinged. When
a riot-induced shooting by Chinese supervisors occurred at the Collum Coal
Mine in 2010, wounding 13 Zambians, the Chinese Embassy pressured the
mine’s Australian Chinese owner to apologize, pay compensation, and alter
work conditions (Sautman and Yan 2014b). When in 2015 a Chinese restaurant
in Nairobi curtailed nighttime service for some black customers, the Chinese
Embassy condemned it (Capitalfm 2015).
There is a second basis for mitigating the racialization of labour: the failure
of Africa’s most notorious anti-Chinese campaign. After becoming Zambia’s
President, anti-Chinese agitator Michael Sata acknowledged that ‘When we
were campaigning … I promised I will sort the Chinese out. They are also
going to sort me out’ (Sata’s U-turn 2011). Reuter’s Africa bureau chief,
asked after Sata’s death in 2014 about his ‘relationship with the Chinese’,
responded that ‘there was really nothing concrete that emerged from his
rhetoric, in terms of policy toward China’ (Cropley 2014). Sata’s racializing of
Chinese helped bring him to power, but brought little gain to Zambian
workers; he ended up firing striking nurses and imposing hiring and wage
freezes (President Lungu 2015).
Political forces operating from inside and outside the continent will doubtless continue to racialize Chinese in Africa. Africa however is not like Mongolia or Vietnam, where nationalist narratives can focus exclusively on China
(Bille 2015; Two Brothers 2015). Many Africans know that the US and old colonial powers have much greater influence on the continent than China does.
Africans are also not untouched by class-oriented approaches. These are reemerging under conditions of ever-deepening neo-liberalization and
inequality, as the birth of new political forces in South Africa attest (Buccus
2015). Racialization of labour thus exists in the Chinese/African interface,
but whether increasing African/Chinese contact will aggravate or attenuate
it remains to be seen.
Notes
1. Botswana, China, Egypt, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Namibia, South Africa Sudan, Tanzania, Zambia, Zimbabwe. Our interviews and surveys were part of Hong Kong’s
Research Grants Council-funded projects on Chinese investment and localization
of Chinese enterprises in Africa.
2. Compare Wong (1999) (employer demands conformity to Japanese cultural norms
from its Hong Kong employees).
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
ETHNIC AND RACIAL STUDIES
2163
Funding
This work was supported by Hong Kong Research Grants Council [grant number
641113].
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