Building A Resevoir:An Analysis of the Mechanism of Outsourcing Production to Households in the 1960s and 1970s
During the period of the planned economy due to labor surplus and economic shortage,a work unit needed to build a labor"reservoir",which not only eased the pain of insufficient wage funds,but also had a re-served labor force to resort to when needed.A group of outsourcing workers under flexible employment thus emerged.This paper studies a group of household outsourcing workers in the machine embroidery industry in Shanghai in the sixties and seventies of the 20th century to get a systematic perception of the organization,remu-neration regulations and work processes of outsourcing workers.It is found that there were serious issues in the daily management,task assignment,political education,organization and mobilization,etc.of outsourcing work-ers.In fact,how to organize them into collective production was at the top of the agenda of the superior authori-ty.The very existence of outsourcing workers shows that the contradiction between output demand and supply tension had led to the emergence of flexible labor employment in the otherwise extremely rigid socialist produc-tion system.Understanding the government's organizational process of outsourcing workers and the latter's re-sponse,as well as the tension between the institutional design and operational practice of the employment sys-tem in the planned economy period,can give us some insight into the relationship between state,society and in-dividuals during this period.
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