Connecting with Chinese Workers
Date of publication: June 30, 2009
Source: The Breadwinner
By Manfred Elfstrom
"First, I went on my own to the boss and asked for a reduction in work hours. Then, I came with a few of my workmates and said that I’d bring the whole shop floor into his office next time if things didn’t change. We now work shorter hours."
---Worker in Guangdong, 2006
In the United States, we often discuss labor issues in China in ways that make workers there seem inaccessible. They are reduced to a series of statistics, such as the number of migrants from the countryside who have flooded China’s coastal boomtowns looking for work or the number of mining accidents per year in the country’s interior or the number of toys made and exported from such and such port. We highlight sweatshop abuses, but paint Chinese workers as meek victims, thereby generating sympathy for their plight but risking a subtle disgust at the workers’ supposed unwillingness to stick up for themselves. Alternately, newspapers sometimes imagine a great wave of working class anger in China that will imminently shake the country to its foundations—an epic, abstract vision that leaves little practical room for engagement.
Instead, progressives should focus on what Chinese workers are doing right now to improve their conditions, as well as some of the broader economic, legal and cultural forces at play in Chinese society that serve to amplify or diminish workers’ efforts.
Chinese workers have been anything but silent over the last few years. Labor disputes accepted by arbitrators and courts have risen by a third annually since the enactment of China’s Labor Law in 1995—until 2008, that is, when workers brought roughly twice as many cases as they had the year before. Since the start of the global economic crisis, hardly a day has gone by without thousands of workers striking, blocking roads, tussling with security guards, or marching to local government buildings to make demands. A taxi strike in Chongqing last November spread from city to city, including provinces as different as inland, largely rural Hubei and the coastal, industrial center of Guangdong, the tropical island of Hainan and the arid, northwestern province of Shaanxi.
This dynamism builds on a long history of worker activism. At the beginning of the twentieth century, workers from the same home province would band together in China’s port cities for mutual aid and to make demands of local authorities and the foreign powers that enjoyed extraterritorial rights. These "native place associations" gave way to unions that launched a series of massive strikes, most notably in Shanghai, together with the newly formed Communist Party. Crushed by Chiang Kaishek, the unions returned under the guidance of the Party after China’s revolution. During the Mao era, workers in state-owned enterprises enjoyed respect and generous benefits. Nonetheless, strike waves recurred during the late 1950s, during the Cultural Revolution and in the 1980s. As China transitions to a market economy, there is pressure for the All China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU) to reevaluate its traditional "transmission belt" role and adopt a more proactive stance toward workplace problems.
In recent years, laws, if not always their implementation, have begun to keep pace with the country’s rapidly changing labor relations. In 2008, three major pieces of essentially pro-worker legislation went into effect. These were the Labor Contract Law, Employment Promotion Law, and Labor Dispute Mediation and Arbitration Law (or Arbitration Law).
The Labor Contract Law mandated contracts for all employees without exception, stabilized employment through the use of non-fixed-term contracts for workers who were on their third contract and for those who had worked at a single enterprise more than ten years, strengthened penalties for non-compliance with existing labor regulations, and opened more space for collective bargaining and consultation by the ACFTU. The law’s passage in 2007 was preceded by an unusually lively public comment period, including fierce opposition from foreign business associations and Chinese entrepreneurs—and a robust defense by Chinese labor activists, academics and the ACFTU, joined by the international labor movement.
The Employment Promotion Law, meanwhile, tightened prohibitions on workplace discrimination among other things. While a disappointment to many activists, the Labor Dispute Mediation and Arbitration Law succeeded in abolishing arbitration fees, a longstanding source of frustration for workers’ rights advocates (though some advocates would have preferred that the fees be abolished for workers only, not employers). It also went some ways toward streamlining the arbitration process. Unfortunately, the surge of labor disputes last year has led to more, not less of a wait at arbitration panels. In December, Guangzhou alone reported a backlog of more than 9,600 cases and warned that some would not be completely settled until September 2009.
Mounting legal cases and strikes were, of course, not the only reasons for the passage of new labor laws. Existing legislation, written in the mid-1990s, was incomplete and out of date. Chinese officials, moreover, may have viewed tighter labor regulations as a means of moving up the industrial ladder by sloughing off low-skilled, low-value-added jobs. In a labor market marked by extremely short-term contracts and high employee turnover, which resulted in constant retraining and inefficiency, as well as tangled social security obligations, job stability was also a concern. But the slogan of the day in China and the official justification for labor reforms, "constructing a harmonious society," speaks to the degree to which working class unrest weighed on policymakers’ minds.
It also speaks, perhaps, to the resonance that workers’ demands have for the Chinese urban middle class. This sympathy may show the resilience of values inherited from the country’s radical, egalitarian past. Or it may be the result of abuses encountered by students, white-collar workers and factory employees alike at the hands of bosses—slights that generate a sense of solidarity. This solidarity seems to increase at times of economic stress, much as in the United States (think of the public support in America for Chicago’s Republic Windows workers). At any rate, China’s middle class has become increasingly vocal about labor rights, even as it expresses intense pride in its country’s economic growth and new power on the world stage.
In recent years, college kids have led investigations of working conditions in a Coca-Cola bottling plant, protested in support of street vendors and filled online message boards with support for the wronged employees of companies like Huawei, Foxconn and Meitai. A recent Pew poll found that 89 percent of Chinese see the country’s rich / poor gap as either a "very big" or "moderately big" problem—the greatest percentage concerned about any single issue other than rising prices (the poll was taken in mid-2008, a time of high inflation). The most common criticism of the poll, that it was biased toward comparatively affluent urbanites, only makes its findings more striking.
Through my work I have had the opportunity to meet with workers in China’s vast export processing zones and, to a lesser degree, the cities beginning to expand in the heartland in line with the government’s new investment priorities. Many of these individuals study their country’s labor laws with a thoroughness that is worthy of emulation here in the United States. They talk of gathering their co-workers together to make demands of management and of helping a husband or friend (often someone from the same hometown as themselves, much as in the 1920s) file paperwork for work injury compensation or back wages. Several workers volunteer regularly at local labor non-profits, along with a growing number of students.
We should look beyond tired stereotypes of Chinese workers as victims and of Chinese society, rigid as it might be, as an authoritarian monolith. Instead, we should find ways to engage our brothers and sisters in China around areas of common concern. Thankfully, this doesn’t mean starting from scratch; we can rely on some promising precedents.
For example, trade unionists in the U.S. joined the fight for China’s Labor Contract Law in 2007 with some success, pressuring American business associations to scale down their opposition to the legislation. Exchanges between American and Chinese textile workers have yielded interesting results. The international labor movement was cautiously supportive of the ACFTU’s organizing of workers at Chinese Wal-Mart stores, a drive that appears to have ended on a mixed note, but may have opened up new space for activists. Meanwhile, the Danish union 3F has been effective in its support of unionists at the Ole Wolff electronics plant in Yantai. The website China Labor News Translations has done a particularly good job of following both the Wal-Mart and Ole Wolff stories.
Work with non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and universities in China also hold promise. Since 2003, my organization, the International Labor Rights Forum, has partnered with several Chinese universities to bring judges, arbitrators, lawyers and ACFTU officials together to discuss labor law implementation. Some of these discussions have led to local breakthroughs. We have also established China’s first two labor law clinics, where students gain hands-on experience—and school credit—representing workers in arbitration and court. And we have joined NGOs in providing workers with basic and advanced instruction in Chinese labor law.
There are many other efforts underway and there is ample room for further creativity in supporting workers in China. In particular, more needs to be done to introduce Chinese workers’ experiences and strategies to workers abroad, not just the other way around. Capital flows easily between countries. It is time that labor forms similar links.
