PUB - Publikationen an der Universität Bielefeld

This chapter examines labour organisation and welfare provision under global subcontracting, focusing on strategies of ‘flexible accumulation’ (Harvey, 1989). Global employers consolidate a flexible labour regime through a welfare hierarchy that grants extensive benefits to a shrinking core workforce while shifting responsibility for the growing number of peripheral workers to subcontractors. This structure intensifies the precaritisation of labour, deepens welfare hierarchies and maintains control by sustaining workers’ fear of downward mobility. Central to this system is the ‘appearance of care,’ whereby companies showcase generous welfare schemes for core employees, projecting a moral politics of care aligned with both the Vietnamese socialist state’s vision and Northern consumers’ demands for ethical responsibility. However, this façade obscures the precarious realities of the majority of subcontracted workers and renders broader labour precarity invisible, revealing care as a strategic tool within global capitalism’s mechanisms of accumulation and control.