ILRID 1535 Prelim

Sociology

• The study of society: social relationships, structures, and processes.

• Examines macro or meso-level phenomena

The Sociological Imagination

ability to connect personal problems to public issues

Social Construction

what we perceive and experience as “reality” is created by larger social forces we share.

ex: Gender is socially constructed

Sociologists do not take everyday life for granted as “natural” or given, but rather built by particular structures and cultures in society

Sociologists like to make the familiar, strange

Sociology of Work

The study of work from the perspective of macro and meso level social structures, relationships, and processes

Examines patterns of inequality, exploitation, and activism that emerge from work

Work vs Labor

Work: tasks and actions people perform to create value and sustain themselves

• Transhistorical. Humans have always worked.

• Various relationships of work

  • Households, tribes, clans

  • Arts, guilds and crafts

  • Kings, lords, parish

  • Slaveownership

Labor (Employment): the capacity to execute tasks, which is sold and bought on a market using money

• 1700s. Humans only recently began to Labor, came with emergence of capitalism.

• Employer/Employee Relationship of Labor.

  • Bosses and managers in a firm/business

  • Co-workers and colleagues

  • Wages

  • Social classes are defined by markets and property

Proletarianization

proletarianization is the social process whereby people move from being either an employer, unemployed or self-employed, to being employed as wage labor by an employer

Feudalism vs Capitalism

Feudalism

• No labor markets

• Lords and peasant/serfs

• Peasants/serfs depended on land for needs, which lords granted them for their service

• Money less necessary

Capitalism

• Labor markets

• Employers and employees

• Employees depend on wages for needs, which employers give them for their labor

• Money more necessary

Day in the Life of a Peasant/Serf vs Employee

Peasant/Serf

• Till the land for your needs

• Work at your discretion

• Give the surplus (beyond your needs) to your lord

• Monetary exchange minimal for things land cannot provide

Employee

• Sell your capacity to work on a market to employers

• Work “on the clock” that an employer decides for you

• Leisure “off the clock” of your wage labor

• Monetary exchange required for everything, for needs and extra

Changes: Wage dependency emerged as a new social risk in human society & wealth from wage labor emerged as a new opportunity in society

Adam Smith

• “Homo economicus”

  • Trading and bartering are a natural feature of being human

• Wage labor is beneficial for societal ethics and prosperity

• Wealth of Nations, Invisible Hand, and Theory of Moral Sentiments

Karl Polanyi

• “Fictitious commodity”

  • Labor is not a normal commodity, like a computer

• Wage labor undermines societal health, and must be put in check by a state/gov’t

• The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time

Karl Marx

• “Proletarianization”

  • Rendering people dependent on wages to survive

• Wage labor excels at generating wealth, but is bad at distributing wealth

• Capital Volume 1, The Communist Manifesto, The Critique of Political Economy

Max Weber and Emile Durkheim

• “Anomie”

  • Social disintegration and isolation from labor

• Wage labor encourages individualism and rationalization that strains social bonds/relationships

• The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, and The Division of Labor in Society

Exploitation

• “Appropriation of the unpaid labor of workers”

• Workers are paid for their labor power - capacity to work - not for their products of labor

• Systematic feature of the wage labor relationship in capitalism

• Exploitation = labor - labor power

Labor Power

• capacity to work, to create value, which the worker sells to the capitalists in increments for a wage.

• Reproduced outside of labor

  • Bodily upkeep: rest, appearance/aesthetics, exercise, etc

  • Education: technical skills and knowledge

  • Price of labor-power is determined by the cost of food,

    clothing, housing and education at a given standard of living

• Laboring depends on labor power

Class

Economically significant attributes of groups that shape their opportunities, choices, and interests in a market economy

Two Perspectives on Class

Property: Class depends on ownership of Means of Production

• Two Classes:

  • Bourgeois own the means of production

  • Proletariat does not

Social Stratification: Class depends on a combination of Economic, Cultural, and Social Capital, goes beyond just property ownership

Proletariat vs Bourgeoisie

Proletariat

• Does not own the means of production. Propertyless

• The social class that must sell their labor power to employers

Bourgeoisie

• Does own the means of production. Propertied

• The social class that buys workers as labor power and directs them

Contradictory Class Positions

• People who occupy a middle ground between a proletariat and bourgeoisie class position

• Ex: Workers who are stockowners in their 401ks or individual Retirement Accounts

  • Decreased likelihood in regulating the financial sector

Social Stratification

• Upper, middle, lower, and underclass

• Determined by Economic, Cultural, and Social Capital

• Economic Capital

  • Income ($)

• Cultural Capital

  • Status/Prestige

• Social Capital

  • Who you know

Class Consciousness

• Identifying one’s position in the class structure and how its conditions and interests are shared by others in the same or similar positions

• Basis of labor movements, social revolutions, and political coalitions

• “False Consciousness”

  • Misidentifying one’s position in the class structure and those who share their conditions and interests

Instrumental vs Disciplinary Power

Instrumental Power

• Person A (employer) makes Person B (employee) do something

  • “the probability that one actor within a social relationship will be in a position to carry out his [her/their] own will despite resistance” (Weber 1978: 53)

• Command, Punish, Threaten, among others

• Traditional notion of power

• Inefficient and time-consuming

Disciplinary Power

• Person B (employee) makes oneself comply without Person A (employer) having to do anything

  • “to induce in the [person] a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power” (Foucault 1977: 201)

• Self-Regulation

• Highly efficient

Bentham’s Panopticon

• circa 1791

• a prison design that allows constant surveillance of inmates from a central tower

  • Asymmetric Visibility

  • Continuous Observation

  • Individualization

• “The Panopticon is a machine for dissociating the see/being-seen dyad: in the peripheric ring, one is totally seen, without every seeing; in the central tower, one sees everything without ever being seen” (Foucault 1977: 202)

Panoptic Control

How Disciplinary Power is exercised

• Makes subordinates always visible and identifiable

• Subordinates cannot see superiors when they are looking

• Observation of subordinates is depersonalized, not done by one superior but rather by “the system”

• Omnipresent potential presence of superiors — power is continuous.

Application of Panoptic Control

Amazon

• ToT: Time off Task system

  • “Always scanning”: items, packages, inventory, locations, etc.

  • “Computer system knows every single scan you’ve made”

  • “If scanning stops... you have ‘time off task,” which is time not working, at least as can be recorded by the computer.”

• Surveilled by computer system that is continuously tracking

• Asymmetric visibility between self and boss

• Individualized locations and actions

• Regulating oneself to work and break within temporal limits

Email Surveillance

• Asymmetric Visibility

• Do not know when boss is reading

• Continuous Observation

• Access to all emails

• Individualization

• Email address

The Panopticon across Society

• Cubicles, hospital rooms with curtains, classrooms

Individualization as a Social Construction

• Individualization is created by social structures

  • Social Media Handles: Companies

  • Social Security Number: Federal Gov’t

  • Net ID: Cornell University

• These render us visible and yet we cannot see who sees us.

• Social construction, not “natural”

Dimensions of Job Quality (Non-Economic)

Non-Economic Dimensions (Control)

• Autonomy over Tasks

  • Autonomy: “self-direction over what they do and how they do it”

• Flexibility over Scheduling

  • Flexibility: “capacity to decide the pace and scheduling of work”

• Termination

  • Termination: ability to leave or for promotion

Dimensions of Job Quality (Economic)

Economic Dimensions

• Income

  • e.g. wage, salary, remuneration, etc.

• Benefits

  • e.g. pension, health insurance, dental insurance, etc.

Polarization

The widening and concentration of inequality in job quality between top and bottom jobs

• Growth of “Good Jobs”

  • High scores (mostly) across Autonomy, Flexibility, Termination, Income, and Benefits

• Growth of “Bad Jobs”

  • Low scores (mostly) across Autonomy, Flexibility, Termination, Income, and Benefits

• Decline of Middle Jobs

  • Mixed scores across Autonomy, Flexibility, Termination, Income, and Benefits

Precarity

• Susceptibility to insecurity and risk

• e.g. volatile income and tenuous employment

• Shared phenomenon across social classes

Origins of Precarity and Polarization in ‘80s

• Shareholder Revolution

• Globalization

• Deunionization

• Reduced Government

Business vs Social Unionism

Business Unionism

• Unions represent their own members

• Union demands are only about wages and benefits

• Contract bargaining with specific employers

  • Workplace only

Social Unionism

• Unions represent all workers

• Union demands are about the power of workers

• Policy reform by gov’t or community changes

  • Workplace connected to wider world

Welfare State

“A state commitment of some degree which modifies the play of market forces in the attempt to achieve a greater measure of social equality”

The Welfare State is for all workers, not just the poorest

The Welfare State supports, not hinders, Capitalism

5 Institutional Pillars of the Welfare State

• Social Insurance: protection against income loss (largest part of welfare state)

• Social Assistance: means-tested poverty relief

• Publicly-Funded Social Services: public goods/infrastructure

• Social Work and Personal Social Services: caseworkers

• Economic Governance: regulation of markets

Decommodification

“The degree to which individuals, or families, can uphold a socially acceptable standard of living independently of market participation”

• Workers no longer having to work to live

• Necessary in capitalism

  • If people are sick = cannot work

  • If people cannot gain employment = no production

  • If people are poor in retirement = cannot consume

Poverty Rates

• After taxes and transfers, US poverty rate gets lower but is still high compared to other countries

• Speaks to US’s welfare state and allocation of resources

Public Programs vs. Private Benefits

Public Programs

• Government provided social insurance

• Social Security, Medicare, etc.

• Compulsory

• Government directly spends dollars using tax revenues

Private Benefits

• Employer provided social insurance

• 401k, Aetna Health Plan, etc.

• Voluntary

• Government indirectly spends using tax expenditures

US Welfare State

• US government provides incentives to companies to provide private benefits to employees

  • Incentive is through tax breaks

  • Goal is to solve inequalities

• US uniquely taxed the rich very high throughout 20th century, along with Britain

  • Both had badly distributed welfare states

    • Why? US is only country without value-added tax rate (tax on production and consumption)

• Welfare state is part of capitalism

  • US has 30 trillion dollars in retirement accounts, goes to financial markets

Financialization

“a pattern of accumulation in which profits accrue primarily through financial channels rather than through trade and commodity production”

• current era of American capitalism

• a driving force between the rise of the rich and stagnation of the lower and middle classes

Financialization 1.0

• Shareholder Capitalism

• 1980s to 2000s

• Shareholders took over publicly-traded companies

• Institutional investors were deregulated to invest in Stocks

• Executive Pay Lined to Stock Performance

• Stock Buybacks

• Defined-Benefit Pensions in Private-Sector Terminated

Financialization 2.0

• Asset-Manager Capitalism

• 2000s to Present

• Private Equity, Real-Estate Investment Trusts (REITS), among others

• Buy companies, change operations, potentially “asset-strip”, and sell for a profit

• Subcontracting

• Sale-Leasebacks

• Asset-Managers charge “2-and-20” Fees to Institutional Investors

“Fissured Workplace”

Companies increasingly using subcontractors, temporary workers, and independent contractors rather than directly hired employees

Labor’s Share of Income

% of Economic Output that goes to Workers’ Compensation: Wages, Retirement Contributions, Benefits, etc.

• Has been steadily declining

___ of all capital in private equity, and ___ of the US stock market comes from workers’ deferred wages in union-sponsored and public-sector pension funds.

33%, 15%

Is Social Construction real?

Yes. Social Construction ≠ Not Real.

Social Construction means that something is real — e.g. wage labor, therapy, surveillance, etc. — because it has been built by particular social structures, cultures, and groups that give that thing life, meaning, and relevance.

Occupations

• Organized social groups that claim expertise over both subjects and the labor required in those subjects (e.g. Consultants, Doctors, Lawyers, etc.)

• Membership Requirements

• Self-Aware

• Seek to Produce or Reproduce Control over Jurisdictions

Jurisdictions

• Subjects that require labor from occupational groups (e.g. Medicine, Law, Accounting, etc.)

• These subjects are themselves social constructions (e.g. "Personal Issues” or Therapy)

• In any given jurisdiction, occupations will compete for control (Clergy vs. Neurologists vs. Psychotherapists)

• “Occupational Closure” is how occupations attempt to control their jurisdiction

Occupational Closure

• Coined by Max Weber - sociologist in 19th century

• When a group erects barriers to group-entry as a way to maximize its own rewards and restrict resources to other competitor groups.

  • generate group-specific advantages, exclusions, and inequalities

• Closure mechanisms (how occupations generate closure):

  • Licenses (e.g. series 7 or 63 financial securities)

  • University Credentials (e.g. doctoral education)

  • Law (e.g. certified public accountant regulations)

  • Association Memberships (e.g. bar association)

• Modern occupations — therapists, economists, doctors, etc. — have all gone through a process of occupational closure.

Inequalities from Occupational Closure - What do occupations gain?

• Higher Remuneration

  • Artificially create supply-side bottle-necks. “Rents” or premiums to wages.

• Monopoly on Knowledge

  • Hard to Replace.

• Elevated Status/Prestige

Inequalities from Occupational Closure - What do occupations block?

• Access

  • Disparities across Racial, Gender, and Class

• Jurisdictional Competition

  • Other groups from altering terms and tasks of jurisdiction

Urbanization & Industrialization, circa 1800s

• Living and laboring in dense, noisy, and unhygienic cities.

• Nervousness and Loneliness in everyday life

• Emergence of the Jurisdiction, “Personal Problems”

• Clergy vs. Neurologists vs. Psychotherapists

• Modern day occupation of “Therapists”

Doctors

• Who counts as a doctor?

• MD was not always required.

• Healing and medicinal roles have been performed by skilled yet “lay-doctors.”

• Not until late 19th and early 20th century was medicine occupationally closed by modern medical professions.

• Cost and training barriers excluded who could perform medicine and healing.

Economists

• Who counts as an economist?

• PhD is not required everywhere.

• United States:

  • Professionally-Trained Academics

• United Kingdom:

  • Publicly-Minded Elites

  • John Maynard Keynes (no PhD)

• France:

  • Civil Servants in State Administration

  • Economics not a field of study until mid-20th century.

Sociological Approach to Expertise

• Who is an expert is not a given, but rather is constructed socially by institutions, groups of power, and occupational associations, among more.

• Occupations establish their expertise by controlling jurisdictions: barriers to entry, monopolies on knowledge, and legal parameters.

• How occupations control jurisdictions creates social inequalities through disparities of access.

Occupations and Jurisdictions Relationship

Occupations map onto jurisdictions through competition and processes of social construction.

Care Work

• “Care as a practice that encompasses feeling (caring about) and activity (caring for)”

• Types: Paid and Unpaid

Unpaid -> Work supporting Labor

• A lot needs to get done to bring labor to a job

• Food, nutrition, sustenance

  • Cooking breakfast and dinner before and after a job, as well as to bring to lunch

  • Shopping for groceries

• Attire

  • Cleaning, folding, ironing clothes

• Children

  • Playing, feeding, cleaning, putting to sleep

• Household

  • Cleaning, organizing, and sustaining

Women, on average, do __ more hours of unpaid work per day than men.

2

Women lose ______ per year exclusively to unpaid work.

46 full days

“The Second Shift”

• The necessary care work in addition to labor in order to labor

• Unpaid

• Unequal division of care work given to women (cis-gendered, trans-gendered, or femme-identifying)

• “First shift” (labor) + “Second Shift” (care work)

Gendered Divisions in Unpaid Work

• Unpaid work is also gendered by the kind of work that is assigned to genders

• Women: daily jobs

  • Cooking, childcare, etc.

  • Inflexible, jobs that fix them to a rigid routine

• Men: projects

  • Repair, errands, etc.

  • Flexible, jobs for “when they have time”

• Man enjoy more control over their time then Women

Labor Power (Care Work)

• The capacity to be productive, economic sense of capacity

• Capitalism as a system depends upon labor power for profits

• Labor power is reproduced outside of laboring

  • Care work: nourishing, cleaning, and supporting

• Care work is unequally distributed across genders

Social Reproduction Theory

• the reproduction of labor power falls disproportionately upon women.

• Labor power has to be reproduced daily

• Care work is “reproductive labor”: work that restores or reproduces others’ labor power

• Wage-labor depends upon unpaid care work

• Care work is disproportionately put upon women by patriarchy

• Theorize Capitalism and Patriarchy simultaneously

  • Gender exploitation and class exploitation co-occurring

Two Traditions in Feminist Theories of Labor

• Equality Feminism

• Social Reproduction Feminism

• Emerged during the 1780s-1830s, and since have been developed.

• Context: industrialization, women economically dependent on men, women barred from work, women sequestered to the house.

Equality Feminism

• Unequal wage labor is the chief oppressor of women.

• Wage work is liberatory for women if they are paid equally to men.

• Women are of equal talent, skill, and ability to men for employment.

• A Vindication of the Rights of Women, The Female Advocate, Reflections on The Present Condition of the Female Sex.

  • Mary Wollstonecraft & Mary Anne Radcliffe

Social Reproduction Feminism

• Unpaid care work is the chief oppressor of women.

• Equal wage-work is not enough to liberate women.

• Unpaid care work is a systemic feature of wage-labor to reproduce labor power.

• The Appeal of One Half of the Human Race, Women, Against the Pretensions of the Other Half, Men

  • Anna Wheeler & William Thompson

The Irish and “Whiteness”, circa 1800s-1900s

• Ireland was colonized by Britain; immigrating to United States

• Irish racialized as “non-White,” “foreign” and a “Dark race” initially in U.S.

• Poor and segregated neighborhoods.

• “White” was a contested racial category.

• Irish fought to be “White” as they won political and economic power.

  • White Supremacy: the racist belief that groups considered “White” are superior to “non-White”

• Class solidarities with African Americans debated and fought.

Racialization

• “process by which racial attributes and meanings are projected onto previously nonracial situations”

• “Racialization leads to groups of people being cordoned off for distinct, exclusionary treatment, typically based on a combination of perceived physical appearance and putative ancestry.”

• Racialization creates social hierarchies. It gives advantages to some racial groups and gives disadvantages to other racial groups.

  • impacts people’s earnings, wealth, and ability to find employment

• EX: Black-White Wage Gap, white people’s net worth is larger than Black Americans, unemployment higher in Black people

Race & European Colonization, 1500s-1800s

• “Race” created as a social construction from European colonization of Africa during the early-modern era.

• Colonization is the forced control of a people and territory for trade, production, or settlement.

• Europeans constructed hierarchical racial groups of “White” and “Black”

• “Civilized” and “Uncivilized”

  • Ascribed social meanings to new racial groups

W.E.B. DuBois

• “The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line”

• NAACP Co-Founder

• Among the first sociologists in the U.S.

• 1st African-American to earn a PhD from Harvard University

• Racial Capitalism

• Black Reconstruction in America, Souls of Black Folk, The Philadelphia Negro, among more.

• 1868-1965 (95 years!)

DuBois vs. Washington

• Reconstruction Era (1865-1877)

  • Post-Civil War and Abolition of Slavery

  • African-Americans now Wage Laborers

• Two leaders debate social and economic progress for African Americans (1900s)

• Booker T Washington

  • Vocational training for applied and manual labor

• WEB DuBois

  • University education for intellectual pursuits

Racial Capitalism

• the theory that corporations, companies, and capitalists exploit social divisions of race for profit

• Racism precedes Capitalism

• Capital accumulation has spatially and socially specific origin

  • e.g. White people were the first owners of capital

  • Global capitalism mapped onto Colonialism

• Capitalists exploit racialization by employing laborers of color for lower wages.

  • Greater surplus can be extracted from laborers who are paid less

  • Capitalism exploits racism for profits

• Systemic or Institutionalism Racism

  • “Racism without Racists”

W.E.B. Du Bois Reading (from Lian)

• The centrality of the Black worker to American history and the paradox of slavery in a nation founded on ideals of equality

• The economically incentivized slavery

• The complex relationship between white labor and black labor, highlighting competition, racism, and the missed opportunity for a unified labor movement

• Slavery vs. employment

• Race and class consciousness

  • False consciousness

Female Labor Income Share

• Under 40% in major countries (USA, Germany, China)

• Increasing in all except China over time

Productivity vs Compensation Growth Graph

• Since 1979, the gap between productivity and typical worker’s compensation has grown

• Growth in productivity is much higher than growth in compensation

• Shows exploitation increasing

Voice Gap (Non-Economic and Economic)

Non-Economic

• Large amount of workers (35-57%) have less involvement in promotion, training, scheduling, etc. than they want

Economic

• Large amount of workers (62%) have less involvement in benefits and compensation than they want

Occupational Distributions in US (1970 and 2000)

From 1970 to 2000:

• Sales and Service (Bad jobs) have increased

• Administrative support, craft and repair, precision production, and operators (Middle job) have decreased

• Managers, professionals, and technical (Good jobs) have increased

Hourly Wages for Income Brackets over time

• Hourly wages for 95th percentile males and females have increased

• Hourly wages for 20th and 50th percentile males and females have not changed much

Insurances by Income Bracket

• Higher income brackets have more access to and participation in retirement and health insurance

  • Participation is lower than access

Precarity Graphs

• Employment level has fluctuated over time

• When GDP increases, frequency of downsizing announcements decreases

• The more income varies, the more volatile and unstable

Pension Plans Graph

• Defined-Benefit Plans: These are traditional pension plans where retirees receive a fixed payout based on salary history and years of service.

• Defined-Contribution Plans: These include 401(k) plans, where employees and employers contribute to retirement savings, and benefits depend on investment performance.

• Defined Contribution plans have overtaken defined benefit plans in the late 1990s, likely due to:

  • Employers reducing long-term financial liabilities.

Non-Union Workers on Unions over time

• Percentage of non-union workers who would vote for unions dipped slightly in 1990s, grew in the 2010s

Unionization Rate in Public and Private Sectors

• Public sector is much more unionized (40%) than private (~10%)

• Unionization rate in public sector has increased over time

• Unionization rate in private sector has decreased over time

Number of Workers in Strikes over time

• Number of workers in strikes has decreased significantly over time since 1950s

Unionization Rate across Countries

• US and UK have lower rates (20-40%)

• Sweden and Denmark have high rates (70-90%)

Share of Total Income to Top 1% in Countries over time

Evolution of Inequality in Different Countries

• English-speaking countries - follows a U-shape (inequality has high, decreased, then increased)

• Continental Europe and Japan - follows an L-shape (inequality was high, then decreased)

Union Density vs Wage Inequality

• Higher union density is associated with lower wage inequality across both middle and lower-wage earners.

• The effect is stronger for lower-wage earners, indicating that unions play a significant role in protecting and raising wages for lower-income workers.

• More unions = more wage equality

Unions and Gender

• Union workers earn more than nonunion workers

• Male workers earn more than female workers

• Union wage premium is larger for women

Unions and Race

• Unions help raise wages for all workers, but they provide a particularly strong benefit for Black men, who see the largest wage increase (30%).

• Racial wage disparities exist among nonunion workers, with white workers earning more than Black workers, but unionization helps narrow the gap.

Deunionization accounts for ______ of the growth in income inequality

one-third

____% of GDP on Social Spending

19

___% of GDP Spending on Poverty Programs

2

Public Social Spending across Countries

• Sweden has highest share of GDP dedicated to social spending

• United States has lowest

US Pension Investments vs Rest of Globe

• US makes up majority of Pension Investments (70%), more than the rest of the globe combined

  • US worth $26 trillion

Industry Share Graphs

• The U.S. labor market has shifted from manufacturing to service-based jobs, with Finance, Insurance, and Real Estate (FIRE) playing a minor role in direct employment.

• While manufacturing has declined in its share of the economy, both services and FIRE have expanded, with FIRE overtaking manufacturing in GDP contribution.

• The most dramatic shift is in corporate profits—while manufacturing’s share has collapsed, FIRE has become the dominant profit-generating sector in the U.S. economy.

Private and Public Sector Pensions - Asset Allocation

• Public equities and alternative assets have increased

• Shift Toward Riskier Assets: Pensions have moved from bonds and government securities to public equities and alternative assets, reflecting a broader trend toward higher-return investments.

• ERISA's Role in Pension Investments: The passage of ERISA in 1974 led to a structural shift, making pensions more focused on stock market investments.

• Increased Market Volatility Exposure: With the majority of pension funds in public equities, pension funds are now more vulnerable to stock market fluctuations.

How has financialization altered the private-sector workplace?

Subcontracting, cutting defined-benefit pensions, suppressing middle and lower wages

Black-White Wage Gap

Has been steadily increasing

White people’s net worth outgrew Black Americans’ by _____ in the pandemic

30 percent

Unemployment Rate by Race

Black unemployment rates are higher than white, change at the same rate

Apple iPhone Cost/Suppliers

• Manufacturing cost is 2%, profit is 51%

• Majority of suppliers are in China