Is there a labor movement in China?

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		Common Purpose If there is one thing that sets off alarm bells in the collective class consciousness of employers and their various federations in the export-driven boom towns and cities of China’s southern coastal provinces it is this: that internal migrant workers will one day find common purpose that crosses the barriers imposed by their very diversity. Employers of migrant labour use various tactics to achieve a strategic goal of heading off the emergence of a common purpose. These include: only hiring workers from one region; conversely, hiring workers from many regions; dividing up dormitories on the basis of hometowns – or again, doing the opposite; using line managers from one area to control workers from another etc. As labour shortages have given workers more confidence, employers have also developed perhaps more familiar methods aimed at heading off labour militancy including: complex and divisive bonus and penalty systems; ‘awarding’ overtime to one group of workers and denying it to another; targeting potential militants; circulating blacklists of those who have taken strike action at other factories etc. Despite all this and much worse – violence, intimidation, disease and exhaustion stalk the zones as they strive to meet orders from international brands – migrant workers are finding common purpose at least on a factory by factory basis. From being rare events, strikes are now an everyday occurrence in the southern province of Guangdong, the number one destination for foreign capital. In 2004 the province’s Labour Disputes and Arbitration Committee heard 812 collective labour disputes compared to 545 in 2003.[10] The factors that have driven an increase in collective or strike action are, as always, far from straightforward. Labour shortages which began after the Spring Festival of 2004 are an important factor. The results of a survey carried out by the Guangdong Bureau of Statistics in 2004 showed that the province had a shortage of over one million workers, and the trend was rising. More than 70 percent of enterprises were experiencing recruitment problems, with Macao, Hong Kong, and Taiwan invested factories being worst affected. The most serious shortfall was for unskilled labour. The survey concluded that low wages and the absence of guaranteed rights were largely responsible for the shortage of migrant workers who were leaving Guangdong in search of better jobs elsewhere.[11] In early 2005 another survey demonstrated that recruitment problems remained serious and that “the contradiction between workers demanding better pay and conditions while business profits were constantly declining” was one of the major reasons.[12] At the same time, supplier factories are being squeezed to meet ever shorter turnaround times. The brands themselves remain under pressure from Western trade unions and consumer organisations to monitor and improve the conditions in which their products are made. Over a decade of at times excellent reporting by journalists in the mainland media exposing poor working conditions has also had a profound effect on workers’ capacity to defend their rights and interests, even as these stories are often no longer deemed newsworthy by editors. Some employers interviewed by the author said that they refused to allow newspapers into the dormitories. The ‘uphold rights’ (weiquan) phenomenon that is unfolding in China is rooted in both farmer and migrant worker resistance to illegal repression and rights abuses by employers and government officials alike. As a result, while productivity is increasing due to competition and pressure from the brands, employers are being forced to offer higher wages to retain workers. Government-set minimum wages that remained static in Guangdong for nearly 12 years have increased twice in the last two. This changing environment has tipped the scales of labour relations slightly in favour of migrant workers in Guangdong as well as other export-oriented provinces. The result is more instances of workers demonstrating a common purpose in struggles against employers. Migrant workers’ views of themselves and their place in society is also changing. Despite the residential restrictions that migrant workers face in the form of hukou regulations, research has found that migrant workers’ view of themselves is not determined by formal residential status.[13] A survey by the Guangdong Federation of Trade Unions asked the question: under what conditions would you need to describe yourself as a ‘worker’? 70 percent of the migrant worker respondents answered that reliance on wages for their livelihood was the most important criteria for worker status while only five percent said that obtaining non-rural residential status was the key criteria.[14] Important here is the fact that migrant workers saw themselves as workers and that by implication the main factor affecting their wages and livelihood is the behaviour or decisions of their employer. This is the basis for capitalist social relations which are in turn the basis for class conscious resistance to employers. One of the many examples of increased confidence among migrant workers was the brief but intense strike at a Hong Kong-owned Tianshi printing factory in Shenzhen in February 2005. The strike was sparked by conditions attached to a pay rise that was accompanied by the introduction of fees for food and dormitory accommodation. Mandatory working hours were also increased. On 26 February, the day the new arrangements were announced, over 1,000 workers downed tools and mounted a picket line at the factory gate. Police arrived within the hour but did not intervene. The Hong Kong boss refused to negotiate with the strikers who then marched to local government offices to demand assistance. Large numbers of security personnel including riot police were promptly deployed once they got there. A company manager arrived and agreed to drop the extra working hours but not the fees for food and accommodation. Still angry, workers at the government offices began to move towards the Shenzhen-Huizhou highway in order to block it and police detained one of the main organisers. However dozens of other workers broke through the police cordon and stood in the middle of the road. Riot police then charged with batons drawn and dispersed the workers, detaining three more. Within ten minutes of the clash, the employers agreed to drop the news fees as well. This concession combined with further warnings of detentions from the police brought the demonstration to an end. It is not known if the detained workers were charged but they were almost certainly fired.[15] Another Hong Kong-owned factory sparked a dramatic strike and protest against very low wages by 3,000 workers making electrical components. The workers chose a public holiday to down tools and march to a main intersection in the Futian district of Shenzhen which they proceeded to block. The action was timed to cause the maximum possible disruption to tourists and locals enjoying the October Golden Week.[16] After negotiations with the police failed to persuade the workers to disperse, the district Party chief promised to use all his authority to get the issues with the employer solved. Threats by officials from the local labour bureau were ignored by the workers who responded that the bureau had ignored previous requests for assistance. Following pressure from the strikers and the local government alike, the Hong Kong owner agreed to almost triple the wage and pay full legal overtime rates. Workers had previously taken strike action at the factory over the cancellation of a night time allowance and won. The action took place in October 2004, six months after labour shortages began to appear and workers obviously saw an opportunity to get the local manager to improve a 10-year old wages deal with the Hong Kong owner.[17] As with the more traditional urban working class, current political conditions and restrictions on organising limit the struggles of these workers to one factory. Police intervention in strikes usually comes when workers block roads or public spaces. Other barriers to cross-factory collective action mentioned above are important – place of origin, language, and gender for example – but an environment in which these barriers might be challenged is gradually emerging. The question of the right to strike, which is not protected in mainland China, is therefore more important than ever to the challenge of establishing common purpose. At the same time it is important to remember that migrant workers are neither strike happy or straining at the leash to organise either their own associations or branches of the official trade union. Collective action is still largely in response to employer behaviour – either illegal or excessive – and it is not the case that workers are going on the offensive to organise. Social Solidarity Yi pan san sha is a well known Chinese proverb. It likens people in society or a nation to being in a constant state of disunion, literally as grains of sand in a bowl, separate and incapable of joining together to form a cohesive mass. The proverb is oddly reminiscent of the notoriously anti-working class former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher’s pronouncement that ‘there is no society only individuals’. Forget the labour movement, forget any movement for change – we are all too self-interested. If the current factory-based labour protests in China are to overcome the political and historical barriers facing them and forge a labour movement, they will have proved both the old proverb and the old reactionary wrong. Most of the research following labour relations in China separates off-farm migrant workers from the traditional urban working class. This division is, to date, entirely justified. But the impact of globalisation and economic restructuring are beginning to change this reality. In a recent interview with the recruitment officer at a successful privately-owned agricultural products company in Ningbo city, the officer commented that the second wave of migrants was different from their parents “[T]hey are not really farmers at all. They dress like young city people and have the same dreams and demands. They don’t want to go back to the soil and most of them at our company don’t.”[18] An exchange between a PhD candidate from Jilin University and a specialist on migrant workers’ rights in the southern city of Shenzhen during a labour relations conference attended by the author earlier this year was instructive. The specialist argued strongly that migrant workers are at the very bottom of Chinese urban society and that their wages, conditions and rights were negatively affected as a consequence. He is absolutely correct. However, the continuing movement from farm to town along with the differences that exist within China’s vast territory should warn us against clinging too hard and too long to evolving truths. On the other hand, the PhD candidate’s response was that in her city – Jilin – it didn’t make any difference where an unskilled, semi-skilled or skilled worker came from, the hours and conditions that the labour market offered were uniformly bad! In an interview with a private labour contractor conducted in Jilin by the author back in 2001, the interviewee responded to a question on working hours with a blunt “I don’t care who you are, there is no eight hour day”. The link to our subject is simple. There will be no effective national labour movement in China until there is an ideological shift in the mindset of at least a substantial minority of working people: namely that the interests of migrants and urban workers are gradually converging and that local workers have more in common with their migrant worker brothers and sisters than with the boss – local or not. The objective conditions for such a shift in consciousness are only just beginning to emerge in China. Nevertheless, the potential impact of such convergence is electrifying. Page: 1 2 3 [10] China Trade Union Yearbook (2005), published by ….. [11] “Survey Report on Labour Recruitment in the Pearl River Delta”, 2004, available at http://www.gdstats.gov.cn/tjnj/table/gaishu_c.htm#6 [12] Guangdong Province Bureau of Statistics official web site, 2005, “Guangdong spring season labour shortage must be given serious attention – survey analysis of the 2005 spring season Pearl River Delta enterprise recruitment” available at http://210.76.64.38/tjfx/t20050512_27804.htm [13] These regulations designate an individual’s residential status according to his or her place of birth, namely rural or urban. [14] It should be noted that the chances of obtaining such a change in status are very low! [15] This summary is based on a newspaper report in Singpao News at : http://www.singpao.com/20050227/local/680209.html [16] There are two ‘Golden Week’ holidays in China each year: May Day Golden Week and October Golden Week which commemorates the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949. [17] Yazhou zhoukan, 17 October 2004, (magazine) ‘Three thousand furious peasant workers protest labour abuses’. While the increase the workers won was substantial, the deal was simply bringing basic wage and overtime rates up to just above minimum wage levels. [18] Interview with the author, 27 April 2006.