Forty Years of the Dormitory Regime

Putting the place you sleep and the place you work inside one wall is itself a form of management.

Factory dormitories in the Pearl River Delta are not a benefit. They are a device for erasing the boundary of working time: you live inside the compound, an overtime notice can reach you by knocking at ten at night, and refusing costs you a refusal made in front of your roommates.

The eighties: what the wall was for

The earliest compounds put dormitories beside the workshops because there was no local housing market and migrant workers had nowhere to live. That reason held at the time. But once a wall is up it serves more than one purpose: the gate logs every entry, visiting family requires leave, and a gathering of people from the same province cannot be held inside the compound.

Around 2000: eight to a room, three shifts

Eight to a room plus three shifts turned the dormitory into a place where someone is always asleep. Day-shift workers come back as night shift is lying down; you speak with your voice held down. One worker told me the hard part was not the exhaustion. It was that in four years she never once slept at a time she chose.

Now: smaller dormitories, the same boundary

Compounds built in recent years are much better — four to a room, private bathrooms, sometimes air conditioning. The boundary has not gone; it has changed form. Company shuttle, company canteen, company shop. A person can go months without leaving the area.

I do not want to write the dormitory as pure coercion. For many young workers away from home for the first time it is also the place they can land, and the place they meet people. Several of the letters this journal has received were written by people who met in a dormitory. A thing can be both at once.