“时间就是金钱,效率就是生命”：转型中的中国劳动关系[文献翻译]

本科毕业论文（设计）外文翻译题目某公司员工关系问题研究学院商学院专业人力资源管理班级学号学生姓名指导教师外文题目" Time is Money, Efficiency is Life”: The Transformation of Labor Relations in China外文出处Studies in Comparative International Development (SCID) 外文作者Mary E. Gallagher原文："Time is Money, Efficiency is Life”: The Transformationof Labor Relations in ChinaMary E. GallagherThe past twenty-five years of economic reform have seen the transformation of labor relations in China, with the widespread adoption of capitalist labor practices by firms of all ownership types. This transformation has occurred in the absence of both large-scale privatization and political change, but was part of a gradual yet dynamic liberalization and "opening up" to foreign trade and investment that occurred across both regions and across types of firms. The first half of this paper details this process of dynamic liberalization that has spawned competition and change in labor practices, including marked increases in managerial autonomy and labor flexibility.This explanation goes beyond the regional emphasis to also examine changes across types of ownership; the gradual liberalization of labor policies and convergence with capitalist practices can only be understood as part of a more general trend of ownership expansion, through the introduction of new types of firms, and ownership recombination, which is the fusing of the public and non-state sectors through novel forms of organization. The much-needed panacea to this shift to capitalism--a state regulatory and legal regime that is capable of mitigating its excesses and effective organizations to represent labor is not yet well established. The second half of this paper explores two institutions, the labor contract system and the official trade union organization, to show how labor relations have shifted dramatically toward flexibility, insecurity, and managerial control.At the Beijing headquarters of the Chinese Enterprise Managers Association, the representative complained bitterly that the unfair advantages granted to foreign firms made it impossible for state firms to compete. State Finns needed the autonomy to hire workers, fire workers, raise salaries to retain skilled workers, and cut benefits to reduce the social welfare burden. How would Chinese industry survive without a level playing field against the foreign investors.At a state-owned enterprise (SOE) in Tangshan, Hebei Province, a managermade this general concern very specific: "After the Sino-Japanese joint venture opened in Qinhuangdao, we lost a large number of managers who were attracted by the higher salaries of foreign firms. After that we began to pay attention to the problem of retaining talent". This firm's solution was to open up the wage differentials, paying top managers benefits that exceeded ten times the monthly wage of a production worker and guaranteeing housing even as it cut welfare benefits to the vast majority. Another manager in the same firm explained the firm's staff reduction policies this way: "we want to look more and more like foreign firms". A manager at a small rural collective producing DVDs in Hebei had no foreign investment and little likelihood of attracting any. But the absence of foreign investment can sometimes be just as influential as large infusions: "We need to compete with joint ventures and wholly foreign-owned companies, competition is very fierce in this sector and so our management is very strict; for example, wages and bonuses were scrupulously tied to small errors in the workers' performance. He proudly explained how each worker was encouraged to report the mistakes of others in exchange for "bonus points." A sign hung over the shop floor with the admonition,” time is money, efficiency is life." This famous slogan first appeared in the 1980s amid the foreign manufacturing plants of Shenzhen, across the border from Hong Kong. Now, more than fifteen years later, it reappeared in a small, rural factory in central China.A harried manager in an urban collective in Tianjin, a city with a long legacy of state ownership and a growing unemployment problem, talked about the collective's attempt to get rid of its many small enterprises: "We contract the enterprises out to managers or when possible try to find an overseas Chinese investor to turn these companies around”. When asked how management and labor changes af ter these kinds of changes, he shrugged and said：If the manager takes over, we still make sure that they abide by certain regulations regarding wages and benefits. We let them reduce the staff but we take the laid-off workers back. Then they wait for more work. With foreigners, we give over complete management autonomy. We figure that they must know how to do things right to turn the company around. And we take the workers that they don't want.In the past twenty-five years of economic reform, labor relations in China have been transformed, with the widespread adoption of capitalist labor practices by firms of all ownership types. This transformation has occurred in the absence of large-scale privatization and with the continued existence of large public and collective sectors, particularly if measured by number of employees. In most analyses of transitional economies, these characteristics are usually associated with a lack of reform, continued soft budget constraints, and barriers to efficiency and productivity. Just as with economic growth, a successful transformation of labor relations from socialist "traditionalism" to capitalism is usually associated with radical changes in property rights and political control. Yet China's transformation, in defiance of the standard knowledge on transition, has come under the steady, uninterrupted rule of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).The distinction between public and private firms in labor practices has blurred in tandem with continuous economic deregulation, increased competition within the domestic economy, and China's continued economic integration with the global economy. Public ownership as a core characteristic of socialism is increasingly irrelevant for the determination of labor relations. To paraphrase Ric hard Nixon,” we are all capitalists now. '' China's slow and piecemeal movement toward privatization has not impeded the transformation of labor relations; Chinese labor practices have shifted overwhelmingly toward favoring firm autonomy, flexibility, and managerial control of worker organization. Attempts by the central government to retain some aspects of socialism, including greater employment stability, longer-term employment relations, and active worker organizations; have not met with much success. Earlier research did find significant variation between firms based on ownership. For example, Jonathan Unger and Anita Chan wrote in 1996: The economic reforms have led to a bifurcation of Chinese industry: a non-state sector of private Chinese firms, foreign-managed enterprises, and the so-called collective firms that come under very local control; and the state-owned and large collective enterprises. Depending on the sector they participate in, Chinese industrial workers enter into very different kinds of relationships with their respective management, work under quite different conditions,and enjoy different benefits and levels of job security.Dorothy Solinger found a similar bifurcation in the workforce between migrants and the regular employees of the state and collective sectors. However, her analysis of the sustainability of this bifurcation presciently concludes with a prediction that the then-current conditions of migrants in China's non-state sectors signaled the future for workers in the public sectors. It is highly possible, following the argument laid out here, that the divergence noted in earlier research was simply capturing the lag between reform's effects in the non-state sector and the then-more protected public sectors.Transformation of labor relations in the absence of large-scale privatization and political change was part of a gradual but dynamic liberalization and opening up to foreign trade and investment that occurred across both regions and across types of firms. The first half of this paper details this process of dynamic liberalization that has spawned competition and change in labor practices, including marked increases in managerial autonomy and labor flexibility. The "segmented" or gradual nature of this process, however, reduced its political threat to the ruling Communist Party leadership. This explanation builds on previous analyses of the success of China's reform that have focused on the effects of regional decentralization (sometimes associated with Chinese-style federalism), but goes beyond the regional emphasis to also examine changes across types of ownership. The gradual liberalization of labor policies and convergence with capitalist practices can only be understood as part of a more general trend of ownership expansion, through the introduction of new types of firms, and ownership recombination, which is the fusing of the public and non-state sectors through novel forms of organization.These effects have been magnified by the way in which liberalization and openness occurred as a gradual process of uneven application and selective regional benefits. Thus competition for investment in China was regional as well as a part of a larger global phenomenon. China and India compete for foreign direct investment (FDI), but so do Shanghai and Tianjin. The transformation to capitalist labor practices at the firm level has been achieved with the help of globalization and "opening up" aslocal firms and local governments have struggled to meet the demands of foreign investors and global markets. The much-needed antidote to this shift to capitalism--a state regulatory and legal regime that is capable of mitigating its excesses and effective organizations to represent labor--is not yet well established. The latter half of this paper explores two institutions, the labor contract system and the official trade union organization, to show how labor relations have shifted so dramatically toward flexibility, insecurity, and managerial control. In practice, these two institutions have not fulfilled protective or representative roles; rather, they have worked to further buttress management flexibility and management control.The question of possible divergence from capitalist labor practices in China is important not only to our understanding of China's reform process, which unlike other post-socialist countries has maintained communist rule, but also to the general literature on contemporary global capitalism. The literature on national divergence and "varieties of capitalism" has overwhelmingly focused on the advanced industrialized world, in particular the continuing differences betweenAnglo-American liberal capitalism and the more regulated and state-dominated patterns seen in much of Western Europe and Japan .Variation in labor and social welfare policies has been central to this ongoing debate. Globalization theorists argue that increased economic globalization, especially the globalization of production with increasing capital mobility, has weakened the bargaining power of labor. Not only is labor constrained by its relative lack of mobility, different countries are in competition for the jobs that investment brings, and the impulse to protect labor rights and job security has declined accordingly. Thus national divergences will wane over time as labor policies are adjusted in favor of mobile capital.However, this literature, with its focus on comparisons between advanced industrialized states, should also be extended to examining trends in the countries to which capital is increasingly flowing. Production in many industries is not shifting between Germany and the United States or the United States and Japan but rather from these countries to the developing world, including China and other countries in Southeast Asia, Latin American, and Central Europe. How these countries respond tothe pressures of globalization, in particular competition for the flows of foreign investment, also informs us about the ability of particular places to diverge from common free-market practices or even to choose from the varieties of capitalism practiced in the advanced industrialized world. Moreover, what variety of capitalism will evolve in these developing countries is likely to impact the global balance of power between labor and capital, particularly as manufacturing jobs move in large number to these low-cost areas.Given the many varieties of capitalism and the great regional diversity of China, is it possible to generalize about the emerging picture of labor relations there. Our focus here on the decline in importance of ownership and the rise of capitalist practices in both public and private firms does not conclude that there is one single version of capitalism emerging in China. Differences in industrial sector, region, and nationality still matter in determining the particular characteristics of firms. Some of these differences are highlighted below in the discussions on labor contracts and worker organizations. Moreover, the research on which this paper is based was conducted in China's urban industrial coastal cities, mainly Tianjin, Tangshan in Hebei Province, and Shanghai and its surrounding areas. The processes detailed here, especially as the result of large inflows of foreign investment and a rapid development of a domestic private sector may have different consequences in areas wherestate-sector employment still dominates and alternative sources of investment and connections to global markets are sorely lacking. As the articles in this volume by Hurst and Won show, these regions have experienced reform largely as a process of being left behind rather than the process described here of greater integration and convergence with global labor practices.The declining saliency of public ownership in determining labor practices is not a surprising outcome in reforming post-communist economies, where privatization means exactly that: the decline or death of state industry and socialist labor practices and the adoption of capitalist labor practices. But China is a socialist state---or at least, it is still ruled by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Moreover, a large portion of Chinese industry is still classified as publicly or collectively owned. Up to this point,public ownership of industry has been critical for two reasons. First, it represented national strength and national autonomy, an ability to control the nation's destiny and not be dependent on stronger, more powerful economies in the advanced industrial world. Second, there was a strong moral dimension to state-owned industry; it was industry "owned by the whole people." In state firms, workers were not employees, but the "masters of the factory." State firms took care of their employees, and employees were told to view their contribution to the firm as a patriotic gesture. Low wages and less than comfortable working conditions were sacrifices not for management or for profits, but for the nation.译文：“时间就是金钱，效率就是生命”：转型中的中国劳动关系玛丽加拉格尔过去二十五年的经济改革已经看到了中国的劳动关系的变革，随着资本主义的劳动实践由所有制类型的企业广泛采用。