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A Second wave of Labour Unrest in China? Wong Kam Yan (Hong Kong, China)
There has been a 30 percent rise in collective riots in China in recent years.[1] Whereas in 1993, there were 10,000 reported cases with 700,000 participants, in 2003 it jumped to 60,000 with 3 million participants. Among these examples, labour unrest has been quite outstanding, though it is difficult to get official statistics. The first wave of workers unrest The first wave of labour protest was mainly by workers in the State Owned Enterprises (SOEs) against outright privatization or ‘restructuring’ into ‘modern enterprises’. It started in the early 1990s, and by the turn of the twenty-first century it became sharper and involved more workers. The DaQing oil field and the LiaoYang example have been the most widely reported cases. In March 2002, 50,000 oil workers at the DaQing oil field protested for many days against down sizing. The oil industry had undergone immense restructuring to compete with foreign oil giants in the domestic market. Earlier, in 2001, a metal plant in LiaoYang, also located in the North East, as is the DaQing field, went bankrupt with public property looted by the management and local officials. Workers took to the streets to protest. Whereas the DaQing case was outstanding for the large number of protesters and their call for independent trade unions, the LiaoYang case was spectacular for its effort in trying to link up with other factory workers to fight against privatization. Both cases were severely suppressed by the authorities, and LiaoYang had its two central leaders sentenced to between four and seven years imprisonment. The LiaoYang factory was subsequently bankrupted. For the oil industry, eventually 600,000 oil workers were sacked. There may be hundreds or even thousands of cases of SOEs workers fighting back in the last ten years, but generally they have lost the battles. Up to 40 million SOEs workers were sacked,[2] and women workers were generally the first to go. Between 1993 and 2003, SOEs’ industrial output in relation to total industrial output went down from 47 percent to 38 percent. Under the policy of ‘retaining the large (SOEs), letting go the small’ (in fact many medium SOEs have been ‘let go’ as well), many medium and small enterprises had been privatized. For big SOEs, they have been restructured as commercial entities whose ultimate ambition is to transform themselves into Trans National Corporations (TNCs) and compete in the global market with Mobile, or Fords. Whether they can succeed is another matter. The new working class While SOEs workers were sacked in huge numbers and their ranks transformed in terms of age, working conditions and experiences, a new working class has been in formation in the Export Processing Zones (EPZs), mainly located in the Pearl Delta. There are some 800 EPZs all over the world, employing approximately 30 million workers. The Chinese EPZs employ about 20 million of them, thus two thirds of the world total. These figures speak for the fact that China has become the favourite haven for TNCs’ Foreign Direct Investment (FDI), for in the EPZs workers work twelve or fourteen hours a day for a minimum wage, enough only to buy three bowls of noodles a day. From these EPZs incredibly cheap Chinese products are exported to the world market, causing de-industralization abroad, and plants moving to China from many countries. This is a double loss - for both the international working class and for the Chinese working class. While the former lose their better paid jobs, the latter do not reap the benefit, but rather only get nasty jobs under terrible working conditions. These EPZs workers accept such horrible working conditions because they are mainly rural migrant workers who have nowhere else to go to earn a living. Thanks to the 1949 revolution, and in fact one of the few social conquests of the revolution not overturned during the fifteen year long capitalist restoration, peasants still possess small pieces of land, but they are simply not large enough for survival. Hence parents have to send their sons and daughters to work in the cities. Daughters have much better chances for getting jobs in the EPZs because the bosses prefer young women, for they tend to be more passive and able to endure long hours of hard work. Women workers account for 70 percent of the workforce in EPZs. While SOEs workers have largely been defeated in their fight against privatization, there has been a rise in strikes and protests in the EPZs. According to official figures Shenzhen, a big migrant city close to Hong Kong, experienced labour protests involving 300,000 workers in 2004. In the last year, there were more than a dozen reported strikes and road blockades in Guangdong province alone. Numerous other examples of unrest have gone unreported. EPZs workers go on strike In July 2004, it was reported that two battery factories on Mainland China had poisoned at least 370 workers with cadmium. The two factories belong to the Gold Peak Industrial Holding Ltd, a Hong Kong and Singapore based Asian TNC; its electronic products are sold all over the world under different brand names. The affected workers were paid little compensation, and at one point were even threatened by the company and the local authority that if they petitioned the central government in Beijing again they might end up with criminal charges. The workers managed to fight back. Since then several strikes and road blockades, the only way to make their voices heard, were launched. And it is women workers who have taken the lead in these actions. The Hong Kong intervention was important in seizing concession from Gold Peak. Without it the workers’ struggle might not have been sustained or reported. The same goes for the Stella case that we deal with below. Hong Kong has been crucial to the bureaucracy in its restoration project, but it may also be instrumental in the future for the Chinese labour movement, because Hong Kong is the only Chinese city that enjoys freedom of speech and partial electoral rights. The violent Stella strike Stella is a Taiwanese owned company making shoes for Nike and other big brands. Two factories under the Stella Company repeatedly paid their workers less than had been agreed. On April 21 2004, in one of the factories workers saw their wages being cut again, and 1000 workers immediately responded with a riot: machines were smashed, cars overturned, and supervisors beaten up. Two days later in another factory the same thing happened, but this time with even more violence. Three thousand workers broke into the plants and smashed everything inside. Police arrived but were outnumbered. The next day more riot police were sent in. Eventually ten workers were charged and sentenced to three to three and a half years’ jail. Several dozen workers were sacked by the two factories. All workers were later released in early 2005 after labour activists in Hong Kong and the US campaigned for them. Although there have been numerous strikes in the EPZs, little organization follows, even when the action succeeds in forcing concessions from the management. Strikes break out spontaneously and then end abruptly after repression or some concessions from the management. This is because these rural migrants have little understanding of trade unionism, and their way of thinking is still basically that of the peasantry - individualistic, lacking collective identity as workers, and less educated than city people. This combination hampers their ability to organize in the long term. It is these circumstances which make the Uniden case so significant. Uniden: the first conscious effort of organizing? Uniden is a Japanese electronics firm, which has operated in China since1987. It is a big company with 12,000 workers. The basic monthly salary for ordinary workers was 480 RMB, which is hardly enough for survival. In order to get 800 RMB, workers had to increase their hours with overtime to up to twelve hours a day. Such low wages had always been the chief grievance. Another complaint was bad food provided by the plant canteen. This and other grievances finally triggered off a big strike on December 10 2004. One of the activists wrote, ‘in the morning when we went to work we all got a handbill in our lockers. We all understood that something was going to happen. And then at 4pm workers started walking out from the assembly line. Just imagine how it looks like when 10,000 workers gathered together. ….if it had not been the case that things had gone far beyond their physical endurance, these women in their teens would not have turned out but rather would have continued working like robots.’ [3] Since that time and until April 2005, five strikes have been organized. And, yes, they were organized, they did not spring up spontaneously. Indeed, workers in Uniden did something very rare among EPZs workers. They called for the founding of trade unions. A preparatory committee for a trade union has been set up and is functioning. The reason for this is chiefly the fact that it was the middle ranking technicians and skilled workers who had been in the forefront of the organizing effort. And these people probably came mainly from the cities. They circulated handbills among fellow workers, placed their demands and reports on the internet, a skill which rural migrant workers are largely unfamiliar with. Rural migrant workers may have many grievances, but have little understanding of trade unionism. Our interview with Uniden workers confirmed this. It was the layer of technicians and more skilled workers who gave leadership and more conscious direction to the ordinary workers. What makes the Uniden case so special, then, is that the middle ranking technicians and skilled workers united with rural migrants workers, with the former acting as leaders. This was in contrast to the Stella case where the ordinary workers simply rioted without any serious leadership, nor even very clear demands. And it seems that no technicians or skilled workers ever played a leading role, although they may have taken part in it. Left to their own devices, migrant workers’ protests tend to be spontaneous and short lived. Even in cases where some migrant workers raise demands, these tend to be quite narrow, targeting only the specific things which concern individual workers. There is little awareness of the need to generalize demands so as to encompass all workers and build solidarity. However, the demands of the Uniden workers were much more clear: 1. Basic wages should be in line with the minimum wages as stipulated by law; 2. The company must pay for workers’ basic insurance as stipulated by law; 3. Women workers to receive one months maternity leave; 4. Compensation for overtime should be 150-300 percent of basic wages; 5. No compulsory overtime as stipulated by law; 6. Workers shall set up their own trade union; 7. No deduction of wages when workers take sick leave; 8. Food and housing allowances; 9. Increase wages according to seniority. [4] On 20 April 2005, Uniden workers struck again, this coincided with the anti-Japanese movement. Given the general sentiment at the time, the strike soon turned more radical, not only the right to form trade unions was raised but during actions some windows were smashed as well. The strike soon faced police repression, as had happened during the past four strikes, with leaders arrested, jailed, or sacked. Will such threats deter workers from protesting in the future? We need to wait and see. But back in December 2004, when the first strike occurred, a woman worker was reported saying, ‘If we were men, there would have been a strike a long time ago. Women are easier to bully, but we have hearts of steel.’ [5] As usual, there are still many details we simply do not know, and readers have to make allowance for the lack of detail, since under severe censorship it is extremely hard to verify facts. [6] Still, from different sources we can more or less figure out the general outline of the situation, significantly that a more conscious effort to organize has been taken. There are of course numerous unanswered questions: why have technicians in other cases not taken the leadership as the Uniden technicians did? Is the fact that Uniden is Japanese-owned significant? What are the other factors? Is Uniden a special case? Finally, what is the fate of the jailed workers? The future In contrast to the workers sacked by the SOEs, the EPZs workers are badly needed by companies, who suffer from a lack of labour. This difference gives the EPZs workers an advantage. Given that the wages of the EPZs workers have practically gone down over the past fifteen years, and conditions are worse than sweat shops in Indonesia, it is highly likely that there will be more struggles from this new working class in the years ahead. Still, it is a long march from spontaneous struggle to organized strike, given the disadvantages which rural migrants face. The Uniden case may be an example, but it may take some time before this exampleis repeated. And without organizing, despite their heroic and spontaneous struggles, the EPZs workers will get little long term achievement. However, when assessing the potential for struggle one must not only look at the workers. The situation in the whole of China must be taken into consideration. After more than twenty years of rapid growth, China may be entering a new period, simply because the growth have been sustained only at terrible human, social and environmental costs, in addition to paying enormous interest on public debt. And under WTO accession requirements, the domestic markets will have to open up in 2007. All this is unsustainable in the long run. Indeed it has already been unsustainable in certain sectors. And the new CCP leadership will not be able to manage all these problems. For of course they themselves are part of the problem, not part of the solution. The late former general secretary Zhao Ziyang, on his death bed, prophesized that today’s China, just like the old dynasties, will not be capable of self reform and the date for sudden collapse may not be far away. We may add that, when there is a ruling crisis, a sudden leap of consciousness may happen amongst this new proletariat in the making. It is critical that the international labour movement prepare for solidarity with future rebellions of the Chinese workers. China has a working class 200 million strong. The working class may be disappearing from some parts of the world but in other areas it is growing - its distribution across the globe is in constant change. Only with solidarity between the Chinese and the international working class can the mad global race to the bottom waged by capital be stopped and reversed. [1] Reported, 13 July 2005 [2] Hong Kong Economic Journal, March 19 2001. [3] Posted on Internet [4] Posted on the internet [5] [6] Corrections from any reliable sources would be welcome. |
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