Session Name: Governing the Working Subject: Ethics of the Individual in the Market Socialist Economy of Vietnam and China I
4 - Life Insurance Policies as Investments: Ethics of Gift and Social Protection for Migrant Factory Workers in China
Wednesday, July 31, 2024
09:00 – 10:45 (GMT+7)
Presentation Abstract The Chinese state's role in welfare provision has gradually shifted to designers of policies and programs that help individuals to manage risk and volatility, and to access economic opportunity. This transformation has translated into an increase in integrating financial instruments and market providers into welfare provision. This paper explores how migrant factory workers are featured in this emerging welfare landscape by investigating their engagements with commercial life insurances as part-time sales agents and clients. Using their existing social networks, sales agents/workers appeal to their colleagues' feelings of insecurity derived from the structural disadvantages migrant factory workers experience such as poor compensation, exclusion from urban employment-based welfare system due to flexible labor contracts. Promoting life insurances as an investment for their fellow workers' future, sales agents claim that their job is not only for profits but offering support. On the clients' end, buying an insurance policy is regarded as doing favors for people they know. At the same time, workers do worry about not having enough savings for their children, their fatality and bad health due to long working shifts at the factory. They hope that cashing out their insurance policies would offer security in the future. My analysis thus show that it is ethics of gift manifested in interpersonal and intergenerational exchanges rather than self-responsibility that becomes appropriated by the market logic of profit and speculation and accelerates the making of self-entrepreneurial subjects.
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