"Gendered Space and Labour Control in a Chinese State-Sponsored Hydroelectric Project in Ecuador" 25 January 2023

[...] I use ethnographic evidence from my research on the transnational Coca Codo Sinclair (CCS) Hydroelectric Project in Ecuador. The CCS is a hydroelectric dam construction project contracted to Sinohydro Corporation, a Chinese state-owned construction firm, and funded by a 1.7-billion-USD Chinese Government loan that Ecuador agreed to repay with oil exports. [...] I conducted fieldwork for four months during 2013 and 2014 to explore how Sinohydro organises boundaries between spaces, bodies, and symbolic differences to relationally produce and maintain the daily organisation of work and life at the construction site. [...]

Spatial Politics and Labour Control

As I have shown, professional rank, class, and gender divisions at the CCS Project site intersected to inform the organisation of space and labour relations. These divisions were symbolised in material contrasts between the apartments and barracks, the fenced-off female dormitory and the rest, constantly reminding people of their place as they carried out their daily activities and moved through the space. Labour control thrived by also regulating employees’ social relations and daily practices in space according to management’s definition of the appropriate place to be and relationships to have.

Focusing on the spatial design, the fence, and the Chinese employees’ responses, I argue that the Chinese transnational company relied on the logic of spatial differentiation and patriarchal social norms to discipline and control their employees’ labour processes and produce efficient workers. I have highlighted how the Chinese women perceived and negotiated the built space and responded to the discourses about their skills, romantic relationships, and loyalty. I use these observations to reveal the cultural and labour politics that Chinese transnational projects can engender in their operations in Ecuador. At the base camp, as in other spaces, the spatial organisation of China’s transnational projects reverberated and had a collateral impact on social relationships. These interactions, in turn, shaped the gendered organisation of work while reinforcing labour hierarchies and inequalities. By accounting for the experiences of women living in the space, I show how marginalised actors strategised to transgress those boundaries and contest their assigned places in the hierarchy as they pushed against Chinese transnational capital’s labour control practices in the workplace.