Transnational Corporations and the Making of Global Labor Markets: The Case of Foxconn in China and Europe

Scholars have identified borders and obstacles to the freedom of workers to move as central characteristics of capitalism (Anderson, Sharma and Wright, 2009; Gibson and Graham, 1986; Mezzadra, 2010). Accordingly, they have shown how national governments’ immigration policies are guaranteeing the controllability of migrant workforces and how restrictive labour laws create the conditions for the proliferation of illegality and labour exploitation by the employers (Castles 2014; De Genova and Peutz 2010). In the attempt to move away from the focus on borders and their securitization as the primary site for the regulation of migration, the recent ‘migration infrastructure’ approach (Xiang and Lindquist, 2014) posited that migration flows are increasingly mediated, in an interlinked fashion, by technologies, institutions and actors. In this chapter we expand further on this strand of migration scholarship that examines the role of private commercial actors in shaping labour markets, migration flows and labour regimes. We do so by focusing on transnational corporations (TNCs) and suggesting that transnational mobility of capital is developing a global labor migration regime. We examine international expansion and the labor control regime of Foxconn, the world’s largest contract manufacturer. Although the firm is Taiwanese-owned, its manufacturing headquarters as well as the bulk of its factories are located in mainland China. In early 2000, Foxconn expanded its production from China to Europe in order to be in proximity to its Western European markets. It set up two factories in Czech Republic and one in Slovakia, Hungary, and Turkey respectively. Shifting the perspective from a single workplace towards the transnational relations of production offers a model for thinking simultaneously about a global labor regime as well as diversity within globalization. By tracking the expansion of Foxconn from China to Europe, we aim to make visible how the current transnationalization of capital reveals the inadequacy of established oppositional topographies whereby China in particular, as inferred by the label “Made in China,” is perceived as opposite to Europe and synonymous with low wages, excessive overtime, and exploitative working conditions.