Chapter 5 is a study of within-firm mobilization during collective action and explains why those with the resources for mobilization have weaker preferences for collective action. Due to high levels of labor turnover, the majority of the workforce lacks strong social ties in the workplace, and those who do have mobilizational resources perceive collective action to be highly costly. Collective action occurs when the workers with mobilizational resources expect a high chance of success.

This chapter describes the socioeconomic changes in the post-reform era that have contributed to growing labor assertiveness. It contends that the regime’s coercive control of migrant labor in the 1980s and 1990s created the structural conditions for labor assertiveness. As in other authoritarian regimes that faced a similar situation at the critical juncture, such as Brazil, South Africa, and South Korea, China also began to deal with unstable state–labor relations as the era of rapid economic growth comes to an end.

This chapter deals with the struggles of urban laborers to reappropriate their overexploited labor in everyday life. The historical studies on working-class politics during the early republic focused on the organizational, ideological working-class movements, strikes and open protests, mostly by industrial workers. Therefore, what happened in everyday life and in other segments of the working class has been ignored. This chapter reveals the forms of laborers’ struggles to seek their rights, to minimize their losses and to maximize their gains. Their ways to struggle varied from petitioning, suing and changing jobs to violating workplace rules by slowing down on the job, working perfunctorily, reducing work productivity and engaging in workplace theft. This chapter shows how the artisans, as the most neglected group in the republican working-class history, instead of submitting to the industry and importation, struggled for survival. Moreover, it also shows how all of these small and daily behaviors led to bigger consequences, which alarmed both employers and the government, causing them to consider social measures to ensure a stable and productive working class.