Leslie T. Chang: Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China (2008)

An eye-opening and previously untold story, Factory Girls is the first look into the everyday lives of the migrant factory population in China.

China has 130 million migrant workers—the largest migration in human history. In Factory Girls, Leslie T. Chang, a former correspondent for the Wall Street Journal in Beijing, tells the story of these workers primarily through the lives of two young women, whom she follows over the course of three years as they attempt to rise from the assembly lines of Dongguan, an industrial city in China’s Pearl River Delta.

As she tracks their lives, Chang paints a never-before-seen picture of migrant life—a world where nearly everyone is under thirty; where you can lose your boyfriend and your friends with the loss of a mobile phone; where a few computer or English lessons can catapult you into a completely different social class. Chang takes us inside a sneaker factory so large that it has its own hospital, movie theater, and fire department; to posh karaoke bars that are fronts for prostitution; to makeshift English classes where students shave their heads in monklike devotion and sit day after day in front of machines watching English words flash by; and back to a farming village for the Chinese New Year, revealing the poverty and idleness of rural life that drive young girls to leave home in the first place. Throughout this riveting portrait, Chang also interweaves the story of her own family’s migrations, within China and to the West, providing historical and personal frames of reference for her investigation.

A book of global significance that provides new insight into China, Factory Girls demonstrates how the mass movement from rural villages to cities is remaking individual lives and transforming Chinese society, much as immigration to America’s shores remade our own country a century ago.

Publisher Random House Publishing Group, 2008
ISBN 0385520174, 9780385520171
432 pages

review (John Gittings, The Guardian)
review (Justin Hall, The Independent)
review (Patrick Radden Keefe, The New York Times)
interview with the author (China Beat)
author on writing the book
author’s talk (video, Authors@Google)

author
publisher
google books

PDF (EPUB)

Guy Standing: The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class (2011–) [EN, PL, BR-PT, FR, CN]

“Neo-liberal policies and institutional changes have produced a huge and growing number of people with sufficiently common experiences to be called an emerging class. In this book Guy Standing introduces what he calls the Precariat – a growing number of people across the world living and working precariously, usually in a series of short-term jobs, without recourse to stable occupational identities or careers, stable social protection or protective regulations relevant to them. They include migrants, but also locals.

Standing argues that this class of people could produce new instabilities in society. They are increasingly frustrated and dangerous because they have no voice, and hence they are vulnerable to the siren calls of extreme political parties. He outlines a new kind of good society, with more people actively involved in civil society and the precariat re-engaged. He goes on to consider one way to a new better society — an unconditional basic income for everyone, contributed by the state, which could be topped up through earned incomes.

This is a topical, and a radical book, which will appeal to a broad market concerned by the increasing problems of labour insecurity and civic disengagement.”

Publisher Bloomsbury Academic, London, 2011
ISBN 1849663513, 9781849663519
Creative Commons BY-NC Licence
ix+198 pages

Essay by the author (The Guardian, June 2011)
Excerpts from a seminar with the author (video, United Nations, September 2011)
Interview with the author (James Foley, International Socialist, November 2011)
Essay by the author (OpenDemocracy.net, January 2012)

Reviews: Keith Randle (Work Organisation, Labour & Globalisation, 2011), Gaverne Bennett (Socialist Review, 2011), Arne L Kalleberg & Hazel Conley & David A Spencer (Work, Employment and Society, 2012; Response), Xavier St-Denis (Canadian Rev of Sociology, 2012), Geoff Bailey (International Socialist Review, 2012), Jan Breman (New Left Review, 2013; Response), Catherine Lawlor (Global Discourse, 2013), Chris Deeming (J Social Policy, 2013), Andreas Bieler (Capital & Class, 2013), Kieran Allen (Irish Marxist Review, 2014), Monica Threlfall (E-International Relations, 2015), Dylan Taylor (POA Review, n.d.), Bengt Furåker (Arbetsmarknad & Arbetsli, 2014, SW), Edgar Augusto Valero Julio (Rev Colombiana de Sociologia, 2015, ES), Lech Mikulski (Państwo i Społeczeństwo, 2015, PL), Jean-Pierre Durand (Nouvelle Revue du Travail, 2017, FR), Anne Rodier (Le Monde, 2017, FR).

Publisher (EN)
WorldCat (EN)

The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class (English, 2011, updated on 2018-12-29; EPUB)
O Precariado: A nova classe perigosa (BR-Portuguese, trans. Cristina Antunes, rev. Rogério Bettoni, 2013)
Prekariat: nowa niebezpieczna klasa (Polish, trans. Paweł Kaczmarski and Mateusz Karolak, 2014, Introduction & Chapters 1-3, HTML, PDFs, updated on 2021-1-18)
Le précariat: les dangers d’une nouvelle classe (French, trans. Mickey Gaboriaud, 2017, added on 2020-1-18)
Bu wen ding wu chan jie ji (Chinese, trans. Weiren Liu, 2019, added on 2020-1-18)

See also Standing’s A Precariat Charter: From Denizens to Citizens (2014, EPUB, added on 2018-12-29).

Vahida Ramujkic (ed.): Schengen with Ease (2006) [English, Serbian, Spanish]

‘Extra-comunitarios’, or citizens of non-European countries, have the ‘extra’ bureaucratic task of changing their status, to one that will allow them to move and work ‘freely’ within the European Union. The length and complexity of this process can vary depending on the type of ‘extra-comunitario’ in question. Almost everyone agrees that bureaucracy is the most boring thing on the world. Time spent in waiting rooms and lines is not considered as a part of living, but an interference, daily life put on hold, with the hope that, when it’s all over, it will be possible to take up ‘real’ life again as though nothing had ever happened. It is wasted, meaningless time that has to be erased as soon as the new status is achieved – in the case that process was successful.

“Schengen with ease” is a compilation of material from a variety of official and non-official sources, brought together to explain how daily practices are affected by the application of the EU Foreign Legislation and the Schengen Agreement in the territory of the European Union.

Adopting the Assimil method (Alphonse Chérel, Paris, 1929) this book provides a systematic study of all the bureaucratic steps a “non-EU” citizen might face while trying to obtain EU status. All the required steps are taught through lessons similar to those found in foreign language skill books, comparing the administrative language of European immigration legislation to an unknown language that has to be mastered in order to assimilate in a new environment and receive a determined status.

By organizing the structure of each lesson into Narration, Grammar and Exercise, different approaches to this legal-bureaucratic situation are given.While in Narrative one is exposed laic-experiential relation to the law, law as it is experienced by those who have to fulfill it (that recollects some 30 personal experiences that run through the book and could be followed in independent way), Grammar puts together the legal-normative approximation, law as it is written (information recollected from legal sources from different EU countries and administrative levels). Finally Exercise mix up of different bureaucratic forms that have to be completed, press cuttings, and parts of original documents…

Schengen sin esfuerzo / Schengen with ease
Beograd / Barcelona / Bruxelles, June 2006
ISBN: 0-9550664-8-4
365 pages

author

PDF (whole book in a single PDF)
PDF (PDF chapters)
PDF (companion)