The Privilege of Being Exploited? Overtime Work in Global Factories
Despite policy interventions to limit overtime work, workers in China’s and Vietnam’s global factories often articulate a preference for working overtime, even viewing it as a form of welfare. Based on comparative social policy and ethnographic analyses, this article examines how political economic and social policy processes interact with temporal mechanisms of labour governance employed by the factories to produce this preference.
At the point of production, capitalist employers construct overtime hours as scarce goods to be distributed among worthy workers, the withholding of which is seen as a form of punishment or discipline. At the point of reproduction, the workers struggle with an increasingly commodified context through land restructuring and the quasi-privatisation of public goods and services that compels them to prioritise their immediate household needs.
At the social policy making level, there are unresolvable contradictions between the goals of commodifying and decommodifying labour and the failure to account for the temporal disjuncture between factory work and the workers’ social reproductive context. The contradictions give rise to institutional frameworks simultaneously protecting labour via laws and social policies and cheapening it for the sake of capital expansion via policies to regulate population mobility and labour markets.
In short, the workers’ preference for overtime work results from a combination of employers’ construction of overtime hours as a scarcity, the disembedding of labour power from the time and place of its social reproduction, and social policy contexts that facilitate the commodification of labour. Despite policy interventions to limit overtime work, workers in China’s and Vietnam’s global factories often articulate a preference for working overtime, even viewing it as a form of welfare.
Overtime Practices in Global Manufacturing
Overtime work has long been a built-in feature of global manufacturing, and it is not uncommon for workers in the Global South to need overtime hours to survive. In Vietnam and China, the situation used to be entrenched by the long-distance rural-urban migration to industrial centres and the household registration that separates labour from its place of social reproduction. The puzzle is how the workers continue to consider overtime work as a form of welfare rather than a negative feature of their employment, despite the reduced commute due to industrial relocation and recent household registration reforms.
At the U-Tech factory in Vietnam, core workers should not work more than 12 hours per day, while overtime work should not exceed 40 hours per month and 300 hours per year. Workers are not permitted to work for more than 60 hours per week in total and on seven continuous days. The hourly rate for weekends is 200% of the weekday rate for day shifts and 270% for night shifts. The hourly rate for holidays is 300% for day shifts and 390% for night shifts. On weekdays, overtime work is calculated by minutes and paid at 150% of the normal rate for day shifts and 200% for the night shifts.
Similarly, X-Smart in China adheres to the legal requirements for compensation: 150% of the worker’s regular rate for a workday, 200% at weekends, and 300% on public holidays. As a worker explained, “We can refuse to work overtime if we do not want to. We just need to inform them so they can arrange other people. We need to sign an overtime agreement and register to work overtime. From Monday to Tuesday every week, we need to swipe our cards for registration to work overtime. If not, we will not be on the list for the overtime the week after.”
Perspectives on Overtime Work
Global factories turn overtime work into scarce goods to distribute to worthy workers, and worthy workers are those who accumulate the most overtime hours, as recognised by the emulative measures or token awards presented at public events. Apart from the impending possibility of the company moving production elsewhere, of which workers are made explicitly aware (along with the fear of imminent redundancy), the construction of overtime hours as a scarcity is reproduced by several features of the productive system.
As a factory worker in North Vietnam mentioned, the number of overtime hours he can work per month and the downturn in the possibility for him and his wife, another worker in the same factory, to achieve this is a key indicator of his welfare. In a get-together, several workers discussed whether they should continue to work for their factory given they had not clocked any overtime hours in the preceding months. One person claimed that the factory no longer wanted them and that was the reason why there were no overtime hours for them. The basic monthly salary of about 4,500,000 VND is barely enough for a hand-to-mouth existence, therefore, what would be the point of working if there was no possibility to earn more money from working overtime, commented another person, to general agreement.
This perspective reflects how overtime work has become intricately linked to the workers’ ability to meet their immediate household needs in a much more commodified context of social reproduction. As Dong’s (2023) research on Foxconn moms has highlighted, the intensification of caring responsibilities for female workers compels them to prioritise overtime work, despite the toll it takes on their work-life balance.
Regulatory Frameworks and Overtime
There exist unambiguous legislations on overtime work in both China and Vietnam. Under the Vietnamese Labour Code (introduced in 1994, revised in 2019), regular working hours should not exceed 8 hours per day and 48 hours per week, overtime work should not exceed 300 hours per year, or 25 hours per month. The Chinese Labour Law (introduced in 1995, amended in 2018) rules that extra work time shall not exceed 3 hours per day, 36 hours a month.
However, problems with implementation and enforcement aside, the restrictions do not align with the interest of the workers who are keen to work overtime since their basic wages are not enough to survive on and fail to meet the growing household costs of education, health, and access to public goods. In Vietnam, the minimum wage per month is consistently kept at a rate that is impossible to live on, from 3.35 million VND (134 EUR) to 4.68 million VND (187 EUR) depending on the region. According to a Vietnamese NGO worker, the minimum wage is ‘frozen’ by the government to attract foreign investors; minimal yearly adjustments barely catch up with inflation and rising living costs.
Similarly, in China, the minimum wage has been rising, albeit much faster in richer coastal provinces. The variation is often attributed to differences in living costs, but inland provinces deliberately keep the minimum wage low to attract/retain foreign investment. By March 2020, the lowest minimum wage per month of Anhui province was 1180 CNY (160 EUR, similar to that of Vietnam) compared to 1410 CNY (195 EUR) in Guangdong, 1700 CNY (235 EUR) in Chongqing, and 2480 CNY (340 EUR) in Shanghai. It is thus no coincidence that global industries are relocating to Vietnam and poorer Chinese regions where the level of minimum wages is similar.
Addressing Overtime Exploitation
While labour activists usually advocate for enforcing the overtime hour limit, workers value the possibility to work overtime, even if it is detrimental to them. The 2019 public debate around the Labour Code amendment among Vietnamese policy makers highlights the conundrum. The legislators representing the corporate sector in fact aligned with the workers’ preference when they supported increasing the overtime limit, which, according to them, would improve Vietnam’s competitiveness. The pro-worker delegates did the opposite when arguing that raising the overtime limit would be detrimental to their work-life balance.
Such contestations among the legislators themselves reflect the contradictions in social policy making, and by extension the market socialist welfare regimes, where the goal of decommodifying labour is emphasised, and the commodification of labour is played down. These contradictory goals can also be observed in the variegated social protection between state and SOE employees and FDI workers, where the standards of better protected state employment are used by social policy making that barely addresses the needs of FDI workers and those in the private sector more generally, whose labour is subjected to much greater market insecurity and the power of capitalist employers.
Ultimately, the workers’ preference for overtime work is not a voluntary choice but a response to the disembeddedness of their labour power from the time and place of its social reproduction, enabled by the institutional frameworks that simultaneously protect labour via laws and social policies and cheapen it for the sake of capital expansion. Addressing this exploitation requires collaborative approaches between workers, unions, NGOs, and policymakers to reform labour laws, strengthen social protection, and promote more family-friendly work cultures in global manufacturing.