Chinese Journal of Sociology ›› 2024, Vol. 44 ›› Issue (4): 87-116.

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From Farm Dormitory to Village Community:A Case Study of Labor Management in a Chinese-Owned Rubber Farm in Laos

HE Haishi, HAN Jiami   

  • Published:2024-08-15
  • Supported by:
    This research is supported by the National Social Science Fund of China (18CMZ027).

Abstract: This study focuses on the local labor management practice and its underlying behavioral logic of a Chinese-owned rubber farm in Laos. The rubber farm’s recruitment process encountered many challenges when both the first round of recruitment in the surrounding villages and the second cross-provincial recruitment had ended in failure. It was not until the third cross-provincial recruitment that the farm was able to secure a stable labor force. The paper examines the management practice of the third group of workers. The results indicate that the unique orientation of the rubber workers towards the dormitory became the key to labor stability. Through the interaction between the rubber workers and the farm, the farm dormitory was endowed with traditional Lao socio-cultural meanings and transformed into a village community. As a result, the village community and the farm are merged and inter-constructed. The superposition of the two has contributed to the “transfer” of the rubber workers emotional commitment from the village to the employer, thus ensuring a stable and reliable labor force for the farm. At the same time, the farm has also taken advantage of the farm’s village community attributes to innovatively establish a set of effective and flexible labor supervision and management mechanisms to further solidify labor-management relations. In addition, the farm continuously expands its labor force by leveraging the “substitute rubber worker” policy and actively recruiting the second generation of rubber workers, turning the village into a “reservoir” of farm labor. The transformation of farm dormitory into a village community fully demonstrates the strong resilience of traditional family-village social integration among Lao workers. In this case, the rubber workers embedded this traditional social bonding into modern labor-capital relations, leading to a structural adjustment of labor-management on the farm. An in-depth exploration of the social integration mechanism of local labor force can help promote a more positive and stable presence of Chinese enterprises overseas.

Key words: dormitory, social integration, village, Lao, rubber