Content

I. Abstract

II. The CCP’s changes in social policy in the reform era

III. Working conditions in the EPZs

IV. Some special features of rural migrant workers

V. The regime of spatial and social apartheid

VI. The beginnings of resistance

VII. Four cases studies

VIII. The gender dimension of workers’ resistance

IX. Conclusion: Defending workers’ rights and the role of NGOs

Appendix: Lists of Abbreviations

 I. Abstract

This report aims at identifying how the combined results of
the one-party state and the capitalist reforms since the 1990’s
has deeply affected women rural migrant workers, and how
these women workers have responded to these changes. The reason
for focusing on women workers is because they account for the
overwhelming majority of the labor force in EPZs (Export Processing
Zones), and as an oppressed sex are more vulnerable.

What makes China’s case different from that of the USSR is that in China
the one-party state has been kept intact and it is the Chinese Communist
Party (CCP) that has led the reforms up to the present moment. We
will show that the combination of the one party state and its earth-
shaking market reforms have come at the expense of the workers. We
further identify seven elements of the repressive regime at the national,
municipal and local levels, and argue that the combined results of these
elements have given rise to a kind of spatial and social apartheid which
systematically discriminates against the rural population, with women
being the most oppressed. Recently, however, more and more women
workers have been able to get rid of their fear of their bosses and the
local government, and are striving to make their grievances heard.
Through four case studies (GP, Computime, Stella, Uniden) we will tell
the stories of their struggle and the lessons we can draw.

 II.The CCP’s changes in social policy in the reform era

Between 1949 and 1980, workers were granted the title of ‘the
leading class’ in China, and enjoyed the right to employment
and social security, something which they could not even dream
of before the overthrow of the KMT regime. However, not only were
political democracy and institutional rights to recall incompetent party
leaders absent under the one party state, but workers were also simply
denied the basic right to self-organization. The All China Federation
of Trade Unions (ACFTU) was the sole legal national trade union, and
membership has been compulsory for workers, but workers did not
enjoy any genuine rights to recall union leaders. Moreover, under the
danwei (literally, production unit) regime, while the party leader in each
‘unit’ could not fire workers based on economic reasons, workers were
also tied to the ‘unit’ with no right to change occupations or employers,
no rights to recall party leaders of their respective production unit,
and no freedom to establish their own organizations. On top of these
were personal files of every worker, which recorded every word during
meetings he/she might have said or any action he/she might have taken.

These files were kept by the party secretary of the danwei, and were the
main reference for any punishment or promotion of the workers. The
combined results of all these political and social control have been the
severe atomization and deep political apathy within the workforce.

The CCP’s policy of ‘women could holding up half of the sky’ as well
as the need for rapid industrialization freed large amounts of urban
women from the family and allowed them to enter into jobs that were
closed to them before 1949. Still, as late as 1977, women workers only
accounted for 28.3% of the workforce in the state sector, and 32.9%
of the total urban workforce. [1] Equality between the sexes has been so
interpreted that women workers must work as hard as men, without
fully recognizing the fact of women’ special needs as a childbearing sex.
The socialization of housework was partially introduced but remained
under-developed; instead the party propagated the idea that women
doing housework was an important contribution to the revolution.

While it is a gross exaggeration to claim that workers in the Mao period
‘ran the state and the factories’, workers did enjoy relatively privileged
status when compared to peasants and intellectuals, not to speak of the
disappeared class of entrepreneurs. Workers were not the rulers; the
bureaucrats were and still are. But workers enjoyed the best treatment
among the ruled. It was this relative advantage that state workers once
enjoyed which might have led them to believe in the official doctrine
that the CCP was their party. Although such a privileged position is
now a thing of the past, it provides the basis for the nostalgia of these
workers today.

Deng Xiaoping’s rise to power in 1979 became a turning point for
workers—since then the market reforms have enriched the bureaucracy
at the expense of workers and common citizens. Accordingly, Deng
started the first step of shifting the CCP’s social base from workers
to the newborn entrepreneurs. The 1982 revision of the constitution
abolished the right to strike altogether, while at the same time, from
1982 onwards, the constitution had been many times revised so as
to give constitutional support to private enterprises and their private
property. An ever-widening gulf, was being laid between the rulers and
the ruled, and it was this that later led to the eruption of the democratic
movement in Tiananmen Square. The CCP was particularly alarmed at
the fact that huge numbers of workers came out to the support of the
students’ demand of basic democratic rights. After the crackdown, the
CCP could no longer take workers’ tacit consent to CCP’s leadership
as granted as had previously been the case. Instead, under Deng
Xiaoping, the CCP leadership decided to further encourage the growth
of a new class of entrepreneurs and professionals through the provision
of increasing market opportunities.

The social base of the CCP, gradually but irrevocably, shifted from
workers to entrepreneurs. More than 30 million workers in the state
sector were sacked, a scale never seen in history. Over the past 10
years, the active urban working population has grown to 200 million,
but its composition has changed greatly. The number of workers in
SOEs shrank from 112 million in 1995 to 69 million in 2003. The
number of workers in collective enterprises declined from 35.5 million
in 1995 to 9.5 million in 2003. [2] At the same time, 150 million rural
people have left the land and roamed the country as migrant workers
in search of employment, the overwhelming number of them ending
up working in private enterprises with wages so low that workers
are barely able to sustain themselves, and with little social security.

This great social transformation can be summed up in this way: good, secure jobs have been eliminated and replaced by bad and insecure
jobs. This represents a great social regression. Meanwhile, the old
working class was “restructured” such that it has today shrunk to a
minority, along side a new working class composed of rural migrants.
The Chinese working class now consists of two major sectors: the state
and the private sectors. Although the downward pressure in wages and
working conditions are largely applicable to both sectors, the private
sector is more regressive than the state sector.

Gone is the honorary title of ‘leading class’. Workers have now become
second-class citizens, and rural migrant workers come in third. In spite
of this, there has been virtually no large scale opposition on the part
of workers, simply because they have never enjoyed any freedom of
association, and decades-long political apathy and atomization makes
them so fragmented that they are totally unable to face up to the ever-
stronger one-party state. That is why even when there is opposition
among workers it is confined to single factories and as such easily
suppressed by the police.

In the face of such a tremendous social regression, women workers are
doubly pathetic. As early as 1987, when the first wave of downsizing
in the state sector began, women workers accounted for 64% of those
sacked. Accompanying the downsizing was a fierce propaganda
campaign to portray women as an inferior sex because of their ability
to bear children—it is simply economically not viable to employ
women, claimed the elite. Not only were women workers sacked,
but young women, including recent college graduates, have been
repeatedly rejected for interviews with employers simply because they
are women. Even if they are able to find employment women’s wages
are lower than those of men. In 1990 wages for women were only
77.5% of those men, and in 2000 it was further lowered to 70.1%. In
the northeast, once a major industrial center but now an area of severe
economic conditions, unemployed women workers often become sex
workers in order to raise their families. For each transaction they may
only receive 50 Yuan [3] because of fierce competition, a result of theoversupply of sex workers.

 III. Working conditions in the EPZs

The 150 million migrant workers who have left the rural areas in
search of jobs constitute a new working class that has formed
alongside the old, and many of the new migrant workers are
women. Under the one party state, working people are denied the basic
rights of association; therefore they are totally extremely vulnerable to
“super-exploitation.” Migrant workers are doubly vulnerable, because
they are considered less educated and less skilled than urban workers,
thus the market value of their labor is substantially lower. Because
of the same reason, rural migrant women occupied the lowest tier of
the pyramid of exploitation. These factors make the wages of migrant
workers so cheap that it has attracted tremendous amounts of foreign
investment.

There are some 800 EPZs (Export Processing Zones) all over the
world, employing approximately 30 million workers. The Chinese
EPZs employs approximately 20 million, accounting for two thirds of
the world total. The Chinese figure speaks for the fact that China has
become the favorite investment haven for transnational corporations
(TNCs). Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) flows to countries where
wages are exceedingly low, which implies a high rate of profit. Chinese
wages are very low, even lower than India’s, although China’s GDP per
capita twice that of India. China was awarded the title of ‘world factory’
for its huge exports. The title should read: ‘the world’s sweatshop.’

The Chinese government adopted the first labor code in 1995, offering
protection of wages, working hours, employment regulations and
holidays, etc. Yet the code is rarely enforced. In most circumstances,
local labor departments simply turn a deaf ear to workers complaints,
sometimes even going so far as to press workers to give up their
rightful claims. This greatly helps the TNCs and their sub-contractors
to unscrupulously exploit workers, especially women workers, who
make up the absolute majority of the working population in EPZs. In
EPZs workers work from 12 to 14 hours per day. In times of rush
orders, it is not unusual for workers to work from 8am to 10pm, and in
some cases they may work until 2am. Many workers only have one or
two days off per month, and some none at all. This of course greatly exceeds the maximum legal working hours [4]. Workers find it hard to cope with such hard labor, but refusing to work overtime will result in
firing. Only young workers in their late teens and early twenties can
endure such inhumane hardship. When they reach their late twenties
they will find it hard to continue, forcing them to resign on their own
account, thus releasing management from the burden of paying any
compensation if the latter fire them.

In EPZs the number of women far exceeds number of men, making it
difficult for women workers to find male companions. Even if a woman
does find a male companion, her family may oppose her choice if the
man does not come from the same county, or for whatever reasons, and
parents of migrant women generally discourage their daughters from
finding partners in the cities. Moreover, some factories have rules that
force women workers to resign if they marry. It is common for married
couples who come to the same EPZ to live separately, each staying in
their own factory’s dormitory. Even when the couple work in the same
factory, they still have to live in separate dormitories, making normal
sex life impossible. If women workers get pregnant, very often the
only choice is resignation, because they simply cannot continue to do
such hard work, and management rarely transfers pregnant workers to
less taxing jobs. The employers then need not pay any maternity leave,
although workers are liable to such pay according to the law. In a word,
women workers are seen as simple tools for the process of ‘adding
value,’ not as humans.

In the city of Shenzhen, near Hong Kong, the minimum wage for 2006-
2007 was 700 Yuan per month for the outer EPZ and 810 Yuan for
the inner EPZ (for 2005-06, it was 580 and 690 respectively). Though
these are the highest minimum wage levels nationally, they are still
shamefully low. Yet the majority of migrant workers in China do not
even get this level of wages—some may get as low as 300 Yuan, which
is not even enough for decent food.

Many workers suffer illnesses due to overwork. Workers face many
obstacles to maintain their health: the management’s harsh policies of
no sick leave and restriction on using toilets, high medical expenses
charged by both private and public hospitals, etc. Most women workers
suffer from menstrual pain, many become nearsighted [5] (particularly
those who work in electronics plants), and many face such severe
problems as occupational accidents and exposure to toxics. Apart from
physical health, many women workers suffer emotional and spiritual
damage from having to separate from their families, a lack of social
support networks in the cities, sexual harassment, etc.

 IV. Some special features of rural migrant workers

Although all women migrants face the same difficulties in the
EPZs, there is little awareness among them of the need to
organize to defend themselves. The main reason is first and
foremost the repressive state, which we will later examine in detail.
But apart from this external factor there is an internal factor that we
should recognize. Rural migrant workers, though better educated
than average rural residents, are still less educated than average city
dwellers. As such, many not only lack self-confidence, but also lack
some basic knowledge that should be required for all workers – for
example, most of them have no idea about the labor code, and many
tend to obey employers’ instructions which may endanger their health
or even lives. Secondly, while SOEs workers have some kind of
collective identity due to their common experience built up over years
in the danwei, migrant workers generally have no prior collective
experience whatsoever. They very much inherited the individualism
characteristic of individual farming households, particularly because
most migrant workers were born during the 1980’s after the last trace
of communal life was dismantled. When this generation of young rural
residents come to cities they are absolutely atomized. Many come from
different provinces, and even when they come from the same provinces
they may come from different counties with different regional dialects.
When young migrants make friends they incline towards finding those
from their home counties or at least provinces. When friendships are
confined within these dividing lines, provincial prejudices can develop
which in turn further damage worker solidarity.

 V. The regime of spatial and social apartheid

A. The hukou system (household registration)

The underlying reason for the deplorable conditions which
workers are forced to endure is that the one-party state and its
whole system of social control has been kept intact through the
reform process. Workers are denied the basic rights of association,
strike and freedom of the press, and are thus robbed of their main
weapon for self defense from unscrupulous employers and corrupt
local governments. On top of this, rural migrant workers are further
repressed by another aspect of state control which amounts to a social
apartheid directed against rural residents. As such, any analysis of the
condition of workers in China cannot avoid an investigation into the
state’s hukou system.

Hukou, or household registration, may seem unremarkable in that
many countries have such registration policies. But the Chinese model
is fundamentally different from, say, the systems in Taiwan or Japan
today, as the latter systems do not carry discriminatory or carry any
repressive implications, at least for the present day.

The hukou system has a history of over two thousand years in China,
and was established during the imperial era as a means of social
control and to facilitate tax collection. When China entered into the
modern period in 1911, first the “warlord” governments and then the
KMT government continued to maintain the hukou system. However,
it is under the CCP government that the hukou system’s functions of
political and social control grew to unprecedented levels. In 1958,
after the policy of exceedingly rapid industrialization was inaugurated,
the hukou system was greatly strengthened, eventually developing
into a regime which systematically discriminates rural residents as
second class citizens. Residents are entitled to different kinds of rights
according to their hukou, ranging from physical mobility from the
rural areas to the cities or from one region of China to another, to the
kind of social benefits different citizens may or may not enjoy. At the
beginning of the decade, the hukou system was characterized by the
following features:

1. It tied the residents to the city or the village where they reside.
Changing the place of residence required prior permission from
local authorities. Hukou practically became a life long or even
hereditary identity for common people. Mobility between villages
and between cities was highly controlled.

2. After the inauguration of the ‘planned economy’, all social benefits,
including the provision of staple grains, housing, medical care and
retirement benefits, fell under the power of the planning bodies,
and all of these basic necessities were distributed to people only
on the basis of their hukou. A person without a hukou was simply
an outcast and had no means for survival whatsoever.

3. One of the chief roles of the hukou is to segregate the rural population
from the cities, to bar the former from entering into cities, to keep
them away from those social provisions and benefit which urban
dwellers enjoy: the right to food, social security system, public
housing, subsidized education, low priced consumer goods, etc.

4. Hukou is hereditary. Rural citizens and their children remain with
rural hukou in almost all circumstances, except if they join the
army or enroll in college. Further more, until 1998 the system
would further discriminate against rural women. Children would
inherit their rural identity from their mother rather than their father.

The serious consequence was Chinese rural women were being
robbed any chance of upward social mobility through marrying
with an urban man. While a rural male migrant might be able to get
urban residence permit through marrying an urban woman, a rural
woman migrant could not. This was why urban men would resist
marriage to rural women; otherwise their children would inherit
their mother’s rural hukou, a severe decline in status that few
would accept. This regime was particularly designed to exclude
rural women and their children from becoming permanent urban
residents, thus relegating them to the status of third class citizens.

5. Household heads are responsible for keeping the ‘household
registration book’ (hukou bu). This in practice gives the parentspower to interfere into their children’s affairs. For instance, when
their sons or daughters have to marry they have to produce their
hukou bu for inspection by officials. If the parents do not approve
their son’s or daughter’s marriage, they can prevent it by refusing
to produce the hukou bu. Given the tradition of patriarchy in China,
daughters are more vulnerable in this situation.

6. Until 2003, there were serious penalties for migrants who violated
hukou system, including being fined, jailed or being sent back
home (at their own expense—those having no money were required
to perform forced labor to pay for the traveling expenses). As was
shown in the case of Sun Zhigang, [6] sometimes failing to produce
the proper documents could lead to physical assault and even death
of the migrant.

7. People do not have the right to vote for local deputies to the People’s
National Congress if they do not have a local hukou, regardless of
the fact that they may have been working or living in a given area
for many years.

The hukou system has proved to be as useful to ‘capitalist construction’
as it once was for ‘socialist construction’. It now acts a powerful
force for pressing down the wages of rural migrants and preventing
them from getting better jobs in the cities. It may not be able to stop
them from resisting exploitations, but it does able to prevent them
from organizing. Coming as they do from diverse provinces, being
discriminated against, having a low self-esteem, being acutely aware
of being alien and aware of the fact that they will sooner or later return
home, the workers who make up this great army of migrant laborers
find it exceedingly difficult to involve themselves in any long term
organizing effort, let alone develop a class identity. While SOEs workers
at least have local community networks which can provide some sort
of support when troubles or difficulties arise, the mass of rural migrant
workers who work in private factories do not have any such networks
for support, thus the atomization of this category of workers is more
severe than SOEs workers. Even if there are individuals who are ready
to fight for their legitimate rights, the penalty faced by those attempting
to independently organize workers is severe enough to deter most of
them. To sum up, the hukou system have acted as an effective tool
in promoting the bureaucracy’s project of re-integration with global
capitalism, and the process have enriched the bureaucracy and the new
entrepreneurs at the expense of rural migrant workers.

Since the middle of 1990’s the hukou system has been gradually relaxed.
First, rural residents were permitted to buy a temporary (usually one
year) urban residential card, which allowed them to work legally.
The fees for such permits gradually decreased to a fairly affordable
level. Beginning from 1998, parents have been able to pass down
their hukou either through the father’s or the mother’s line, hence the
triple discrimination against rural women has been alleviated. In 2003,
after the uproar surrounding the death of Sun Zhigang alarmed the
authorities, the laws on jailing and repatriating ‘undocumented’ people
(those failing to produce local hukou) were abolished. Thus the spatial
aspect of the apartheid has now largely been eliminated. However, the
substance of the social apartheid in general and the hukou system in
particular remains intact. The permanent mark of being an outsider
and second class citizen remains, and prevents migrant workers from
achieving significant upward mobility in cities. Most decent jobs are
still reserved for people who possess local hukou. Migrants can only
get badly paid jobs. They still have no future in the cities, and may
only work there for some years and then return to their home village.
It is thus extremely difficult for them to develop long-term prospects
in or perspectives on this alien environment. Although the hukou can
now pass down to children either through the father or the mother, it
is still very far from actual sexual equality. The elimination of legal
inequality among sexes within the hukou system after 1998 does not
imply the elimination of actually existing inequality. Rural women
still in general receive less education, and women’s proper role is
still considered to be the one who looks after the family. Hence many
women migrant workers, after working some years in the cities, have
to go back to their home villages after they get married to look after
their husbands and children. It follows that these women must see their
residence in the cities as something temporary, even more temporary
than what male migrant workers conceive.

B. The local governments, their paramilitary forces, and their
media

Since the reforms began, local governments have been encouraged
by the central government to lure as much FDI into their areas as
possible, and both the regime and the reform policy are so designed
as to ensure that local governments and their officials have a vested
interest in attracting FDI. First, local governments increasingly rely
on income from taxes paid by foreign investors. Second, the careers
of local officials very much depends on the amount of FDI they are
able to attract. For instance, the Huizhou municipal government has
made an official regulation that ‘those officials who are able to make
marked contributions in encouraging FDI will be rewarded with cash
and in addition have their merit recorded. The record of merit shall be
important criteria for their future promotion.’ Third, SOEs that belong
to municipal governments often closely collaborate with foreign
investors, from close business partnerships up to joint ventures. In
one of our cases, the Hong Kong based Gold Peak company has a
very complicated share-holding relationship with various Huizhou
city SOEs. Fourth, it is common for high-ranking officials, either in
their own personal capacity or through their relatives, to directly or
indirectly involve themselves in commercial activities—thus comes the
term ‘bureaucratic capital’.

To sum up, it is in local officials’ own interest to lure the maximum FDI
possible to their own areas. The most effective way to achieve this is
to bring down the cost of labor. the price of labor can be brought down
both through the action and inaction of local officials. When it comes to
social and political control, local governments tend to enthusiastically
implement all the repressive laws available to them to keep workers
powerless, from laws that ban freedom of association to the hukou
system. However, when it comes to those laws which protect workers,
from the labor code to occupational safety and health (OSH) laws,
local governments have little incentive to enforce them, and simply
close their eyes to the violation of those laws by employers. Generally
they do not even bother to promote public education on labor rights
and occupational safety among workers. Local officials and employers
share the same interest in keeping migrant workers unaware of what
the laws require them to do.

The lowest level of local government in cities is the neighborhood
committee, or in EPZs that once were rural areas, the village committee.
These basic governing bodies often have their own paramilitary forces
and are closely connected to local police and criminal organizations in
the neighborhoods. They have no legitimate power to enforce laws, but
in practice they perform the function of the police. It is these people
who implement the regime of political and social control over local
residents, especially the migrant workers. Though they are technically
not allowed to bear arms, in fact they are generally armed with billy
clubs, handcuffs, and even electric batons, and never hesitate to use
them against migrants. The numbers of these local paramilitary forces
are very often much larger than the regular police. For instance, the
city of Foshan in Guangdong province has 11,000 police, yet local
paramilitary forces number 38,000, i.e., three times the regular
police. The continuous growth of their numbers is a response of the
local governments to the huge influx of migrant workers. They target
migrant workers because migrants are considered ‘wailai renkou’,
literally mean ‘outsiders’, and people who are prone to engage in
criminal activity. Thus a growing paramilitary force is needed to keep
the social apartheid against the migrants intact. It is these people who
make regular check on the papers of the migrant workers and seize
any opportunity to fine them (whoever fails to produce the temporary
hukou card will be fined).

Whenever there are workers’ protests, these local paramilitary forces
will act as informers, provocateurs, and informal police. In 2004, 3000
workers from the Juxi shoe factory went on strike to protest forced
over-time. The paramilitary forces of the industrial area where the
factory resides arrested a dozen workers and jailed them for half a
day in order to curb the strike. These paramilitary forces will also
ensure that security guards of factories will work closely with them in
monitoring workers. In the case of the Computime factory (described
in detail below), the paramilitary forces took pictures of the protesting
workers which resulted in two of them being arrested later. In many
cases, both security guards of factories and local paramilitary forces
come from the same local security company run by local officials.
Since the paramilitary forces are not employees of the central
government, they are not paid with public money, but by levies
collected from local residents, including the migrant workers. This
system has become a burden for local residents and it is indeed much
resented by them. Unsurprisingly, the paramilitaries are most hated by
migrant workers, and it is not uncommon for confrontations between
the two sides to develop into riots.

All media are state owned and/or ultimately controlled by the
government. It goes without saying that the media seldom care to report
on the grievances of workers. However, there are differences between
local media and non-local media (media from outside provinces or
from Beijing). Local media tend to be much more intolerant towards
reporting on local protests than those outside it. Failure to stick to this
policy may end up in reprisals from local governments. Only media
from outside provinces or from Beijing dare to report on these local
incidents, because they are less vulnerable to local retaliation. This
produces a very odd situation: because media is never free to report
on local grievances, and the censorship on reporting on grievances
outside its home cities is always more relaxed, workers engaged in
action will approach media from outside the local in order to make their
grievances heard, as happened in the GP case. The shortcoming of this
tactic is that common workers have little access to reports published or
broadcast by outside media, except those coming from China Central
Television (CCTV).

The so called ‘local protectionism’ (difang baohuzhuyi) practiced by
local governments not only results in stifling of the freedom of the
press, it practically corrupts every institution run by local governments,
from the judiciary to schools, from the transport department to public
hospitals. In the GP case, local public hospitals colluded with the
factories and government officials in concealing the truth of the
cadmium poisoning.

One must, however, be aware that it is the central government which
should be held politically responsible for the wrong doings of the
local governments. It is Bejing’s policy to suppress every organizing
initiative from workers by banning independent trade unions and
strikes. And it is under the direction of the central government that
the careers of local officials have become linked to the amount of FDI
they are able to attract, hence the fiercely pro-business attitude of these
officials. Therefore it is not surprising to see phenomena such as the
GP case, wherein the task force sent to the factories by the Health
Department supported the local officials in their mishandling of the
cadmium poisoning.

C. The role of the ACFTU and the absence of freedom of association

Last year the All China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU)
successfully pressed Wal-Mart to allow ACFTU union branches to
be set up at its Chinese stores. The ACFTU officials hailed this as a
victory for workers, but this is a gross exaggeration: more correctly, it
is a victory for the officials, not the workers. Since the ACFTU unions
were established, 2% of Wal-Mart workers’ wages is deducted and
transferred to the ACFTU as union dues. These dues are managed by
officials who are unaccountable to the union membership. These unions
bring little benefit to Wal-Mart workers, simply because the ACFTU
cannot be seen as genuine representative of workers. The features of
the ACFTU are as follows:

1. The ACFTU is the sole legal national trade union in China.
According to the law, the founding of all lower level trade unions
must be subject to the consent of the leadership of the ACFTU.
Any attempt to found an independent trade union is illegal and
subject to criminal charges;

2. The ACFTU is legally required to accept the ‘leadership of the
party’, and there are no democratic mechanisms within the union
whatsoever, thus leaving the membership with no way to express
itself;

3. Before the market reforms, the ACFTU was known for its
productionist position regarding the union’s role in the ‘socialist
construction’, meaning that the ACFTU regarded its mission first
and foremost to help the management make the workers more
productive. Since the 1980’s the socio-economic policy of CCP has
undergone profound changes, and management in both public and
private companies have been given the power to fire workers. The
productionist position of ACFTU, however, remains unchanged,
though now it is at the service of ‘capitalist construction’ rather
than ‘socialist construction’, and the ACFTU branches have
become partners of the management in both publicly owned and
privately owned companies. A middle ranking Korean manager
from the Korean Beijing Modern Car Company once praised the
ACFTU branch in the company not for representing the interests
of the workers, but for its help in making workers work through
the night shortly after the factory was established, when manpower
was lacking. [7]

4. In the private sector, it is not uncommon for the chairpersons of
ACFTU branches to be personnel managers or middle or senior
managers of the companies themselves. The union branches only
exist on paper. We have never heard of any cases where an ACFTU
branches has supported workers in a fight for justice against the
management. In the GP case the head of the ACFTU branch did
absolutely nothing to help workers know the truth of the cadmium
poisoning.

We may add a few remarks on the All-China Women’s Federation
(ACWF) in passing. It is supposed to protect women from sexism and
all kinds of oppression that target women. Unfortunately, it is as pro-
establishment as the ACFTU. Rarely has the women’s association —
like the ACFTU, it is the only legal national women association allowed
by CCP — ever protested against the inhumane conditions in the EPZs
which women workers are forced to endure. Like the ACFTU, it is
pro-management. The case of Anjia Shoe factory illustrates this. The
factory is Taiwanese owned, and some 40 of its women workers were
poisoned by chemicals when producing shoes. After women workers
approached the ACWF for help, the ACWF came to agreement with the
management, according to which workers got compensation far below
what the law requires.

D. The repression of NGOs

It is widely argued that the marketization of a former command economy will bring about the growth of civil society. In China’s case the situation
proved to be much more complex and contradictory. Before the reforms,
the one-party state was so absolute that not only were independent
trade unions never tolerated, but practically no independent NGOs,
even at the local or community level, were permitted either. After
the reforms, this control began to relax a bit, but the government is
still very far from formally recognizing the right to association. After
the crackdown in 1989, the state council approved a new regulation
on the registration and management of social organizations which
required every social organization to affiliate with a supervisory unit.

Put simply, this means that every NGO has to be watched over by the
party, since all supervisory organizations must be Party-controlled. In
l998, a new regulation was implemented with even more restrictive
details. For example, only one organization in any particular sphere
of activity may register at each administrative level. Moreover, initial
capital of 100,000 Yuan for national organizations and 30,000 Yuan for
lower level organizations are required. All these requirements make
it very difficult for grass root organizations to emerge. One way to
set up an NGO is to create second-level organizations and then attach
oneself to a registered social organization or university. Another way is
to register as a business organization. These methods are of course not
always accessible to average people, so a third method has developed—
people form informal groups like salons and clubs (that enjoy no legal
status). These legal or semi-legal methods to form NGOs have many
drawbacks, and in no way do they substitute the need to enjoy full
rights to freedom of association.

The restriction to the freedom of association makes it very difficult for
labor advocates and activists to work for workers. In China, though
the number is small, still there are intellectuals, lawyers, students and
others who are willing to work for the welfare of common workers.
Yet the restrictions to founding independent NGOs and the penalty
for illegal organization will deter many well-educated citizens from
helping workers. The few who dare to do so are mostly only able to
engage in very low level activity, such as providing legal advice, OSH
training, recreational activity, etc. And even these kinds of activitiesare subject to heavy surveillance from the government, and some
have been forced to cease operation after repeated harassment from
officials.

E. The factory regime

With a fiercely pro-capitalist central government and local governments
doing business directly or indirectly, it is not difficult to understand why
investors can go so far in trespassing the legitimate rights of workers.
Apart from super-exploitation, factory managers generally impose
numerous measures restricting the personal freedom of workers. These
measures include:

– requiring a deposit from workers when being hired;
– requiring workers to hand over their identity cards to management
when being hired (this has become less common in the past few
years);
– refusing to give workers a copy of the employment contract as
required by law;
– forbidding workers from resigning from the company at their
free will (and according to the labor law)—they must first seek
approval from management;
– the management implement strict discipline, and the breaching of
which always resulted in workers being fined;
– dormitories are guarded by security guards and there are always
various restrictions governing these areas—for instance, outside
friends of workers are not allowed to enter the dormitories;
– security guards within factories usually have direct contact with
local paramilitary forces and are in practice accountable to the
latter. Since workers’ wages are generally too low to enable them
to rent houses outside, many of them have to be content with
staying inside the dormitories, which are cheaper, implying that
they are subject to constant monitoring;
– factories management closely collaborates with local government
to enforce those laws which aim at strengthening political and
social control.

While it is true that some of these measures have been relaxed in recent
years, the substance of which are still in place. The result of these
measures is a barracks like factory regime, with workers under quasi-
military discipline. The management of the Taiwanese, Korean and
Japanese firms is especially famous for this.

F. The dependent judiciary

It is common knowledge that the Chinese judiciary is not at all
independent. The CCP generally views the judiciary as a tool to
facilitate its rule. In fact, it so look down upon judiciary that many of
the judges who hand down prison terms and even the death penalty
to defendants do not even have proper legal qualifications at all.
However, it is reported that in the majority of cases concerning labor
arbitration, the courts have ruled in favor of the workers. Could it be
argued that the courts are less biased towards the employers than local
government? We do not have access to detailed statistics of court cases
and are therefore unable to make definite statements on this issue.
However, one must bear in mind that these court cases account for
only a very small proportion of the total number of actual violations of
labor rights. Most violations of labor rights go unreported, and in many
cases workers simply are unaware that their rights have been violated
because they have never been properly informed of the labor laws.
When workers take their employers to the court, generally it is because
it is absolutely beyond doubt that justice is on the side of workers.
Moreover, the workers who do take their cases to court are usually
more outspoken and more educated than most workers, and they have
often already done a substantial amount of reading and preparation for
their court appearances.

However, when cases involve local State Owned Enterprises, local
officials, or very large corporations, then the courts may begin to show
a clear bias in favor of the local entrenched interests regardless of
the law. In the GP case, for example, in spite of very strong evidence
substantiating the workers’ claims the Huizhou court still ruled in favor
of the company. In this case where local officials are so biased towards
the large TNCs that they threaten workers who petition the central
government with criminal charges, it is hardly surprising that the local
court to rule in favor of GP. To this list one can also add the Stella case
(more below).

To summarize, there are seven factors concerning the one-party state
in general and the social apartheid in particular which help to keep
migrant workers in their subordinate status:

1. the repressive regime at the factory level;

2. the paramilitary forces at local level;

3. the ‘local protectionism’ of local governments;

4. the fiercely pro-business and pro-government attitude of the local
press;

5. the fiercely pro-business and pro-government attitude of the
branches of ACFTU;

6. pro-government local courts;

7. the discriminatory hukou system.

In each case study below we can identify more or less the same
repressive factors at work to discourage workers from organizing.

Without eliminating this repressive regime it is extremely difficult to
undertake any serious organizing drive among workers.

 VI. The beginnings of resistance

In spite of the repressive capacity of the government and factory
owners, workers are beginning to resist.It was reported that,
according to the Guangdong ACFTU, every year there are more
than 10,000 strikes broke out in Guangdong. Another source reveals
that it may be as many as 20,000. [8] According to our knowledge, unreported strikes are common. One Guangzhou [9] worker told us: “in our factory strikes are very useful and very effective. Whenever there are arrears of wages or the management introducing bad measures we will strike and it works.”

In the past, the mechanisms of state despotism and factory despotism
were exceedingly effective in curbing worker protests. Today,
however, these same mechanisms are beginning to produce the
opposite effect. We may argue that it is precisely the extremity of
these repressive measures that are driving workers to fight back. In
the cases of which we are aware, worker strikes are always the result of
super-exploitation that has far exceeded the physical and psychological
limit of the workers. In the Computime case, workers struck because
they were paid 40% of the minimum wages for ten years! In the Juxi
case, workers struck because of more than three months of forced over
time, during which they were forced to work late into the night. In
the GP case, workers have struck because they were repeatedly lied
to concerning their being poisoned by cadmium. There is a popular
saying among workers:
“Big struggle big gain; small struggle small gain; No struggle no
gain.”

In most cases, workers have first approached local labor departments
with the hope that the latter would intervene on their behalf, and only
when officials have repeatedly ignored their pleas have workers gone
on strike. But most of these strikes have occurred spontaneously
without prior planning. Well-planned strikes assume prior organization,
but given the repressive regime from the central government down to
the neighborhood committees and factory security guards, worker’s
organizations are too difficult to sustain. Prior organization work
becomes an easy target for the management and local authorities.
Countries where there are traditions of independent trade union
movements and the existence of a layer of union cadres and activists
may be more equipped to conducting prior organizing work without
being easily targeted. In China’s case, the lack of such a tradition and
experienced activists makes organizing efforts doubly dangerous.
Therefore planned strikes are rare. Often strikes are being triggered by
particular incidents or affronts, and break out spontaneously.
Resistance often follows this general pattern:

Years-long workplace grievances -> approach local government for helps but fail -> approach the media but no response, or responses prove ineffective
– > grievances accumulate -> accidental incidents trigger workers anger
– > strikes, blocking of traffic, occasional damaging of property
– > crackdown, arrests, jailing of activists by local paramilitary forces and police -> employers make concessions OR -> employers make no concessions ->workers remain unorganized because of the repressive regime

As is shown in the GP case, younger and more educated workers are
generally more militant than older and less educated workers. GP has
two plants in Huizhou — the ABT, which is older, and where workers
are older and less educated, and the PP, which is relatively new and
where workers are younger and more educated. Of the two, workers in
the PP appear to be more ready to strike to have their grievances heard.
In the Computime case, older workers were afraid of blocking traffic,
fearing that they would be beaten by the police or paramilitaries. They
told their fellow workers to quit rather than going on strike, But the
younger workers insisted that justice was on their side and they must
fight for it. Again, education also played a role–the more educated
younger workers gathered labor code materials and argued convincingly
that they had nothing to fear because it wases as clear that it was the
employer who was violating the laws. In all of the four cases below,
no organization resulted from the workers’ struggle, either because of
external repression or internal fragmentation or both.

Women migrants are always considered to be more obedient, which
is why employers like to hire them as the chief labor force rather than
men. However, when abuses accumulate women workers, too reach
a point where they can stand no more, and when they begin to resist
they are at least as militant as men. In the GP case, for example, some
women workers were more courageous than male workers in standing
up against the employers. In the Stella case, women workers in the
Xing’ang plant were the principal agitators. Earlier at another subsidiary
plant of the Stella group, the Xinglai plant, workers had succeeded
in winning some concessions through a strike. Xing’ang workers felt
encouraged to do the same, but at first male workers were reluctant.
Finally a large crowd of women workers gathered at the dormitories
and yelled at the male workers, scolding them useless, exhorting them
to act as bravely as Xinglai workers did. The yelling and scolding
aroused the courage of male workers, and they left their dormitories
and gathered at the playing field. The fight back then began.

More workers are now learning that the only way to improve their
conditions is to resist, and partial victories are becoming more common.
Yet, even when workers have won concessions, there are few incentives
for long term organizing. Not only is such organizing dangerous, the
hukou system itself makes migrant workers, and women workers in
particular, difficult to envisage any long term planning, since they have
no roots at all in the cities. We can expect more spontaneous struggles
among migrant workers, but for these struggles to become more
organized, obstacles like the hukou system must first be removed.

Another obstacle which needs to be dismantled is the repression on
basic civil liberties and trade union rights, without which workers
will still be left without any weapon for their self defense against
unscrupulous employers and officials. Formal equality in mobility is
important but is far from enough from the standpoint of advancing
workers’ interests.

We can expect further relaxation of the hukou system in the direction
of narrowing the social division of rural hukou and urban hukou in
the medium term. But if the government is going this direction, it is
also because it now finds the original system less useful as before.
Until now, it has been very useful in helping the ruling elite to make
capitalism reborn at the expense of the rural population. However, as
the task is now completed, its usefulness is diminishing as well. We
may even argue that as time goes by the hukou system may be seen
by the government as obsolete, as it gradually comes into conflict
with a new capitalism which more and more demands the free flow of
human resources rather than its restriction. While the elites only see
the relaxation or even abolishment of the hukou system as a response
to the new needs of Chinese capitalism, workers should take this as
their first step in their struggle for basic civil liberties, trade union
rights and economic betterment.

 VII. Four cases studies

Case 1: The Computime Case

Computime International is a Hong Kong based electronic
company, and it has at least two factories in Shenzhen.
Computime wholly owns one, and the other is a joint venture
with a local company called Meizi Haiyan. It was at the latter that
a protest broke out. The main grievance was that the wages were
far below the minimum required wages. In Shenzhen the minimum
wage was 610 Yuan in 2004-05, but workers were only paid 230 Yuan.
Other complaints included forced over time, over-intensive labor
at the assembly line, the company’s refusal to contribute money to
social benefits, etc. Prior to the incident, workers had repeatedly filed
complaints to the local and Shenzhen city labor department, but the
officials were simply indifferent to the complaints. On the morning of
5 October 2004, word that the management would soon lay off some
workers spread across the plants. The next morning, 3000 workers
from one of the factories, mostly women, went on strike and blocked
the main road for 4 hours. Soon 1000 policemen were sent in by the
Futian District police to forcefully evacuate workers from the main
road. In addition to regular police forces, there were also security
guards from the Futian security company (run by local officials). Four
hours later workers were forcefully evacuated, and two workers were
later arrested in the factory. Local paramilitary forces helped the police
to identify the two through taking of pictures during the action. At
4pm, an initial agreement was reached between workers delegates, the
management and local officials, which included the raising of workers’
wage to the minimum wage.

The two arrested workers were released after being detained for 15 days.
On 7 December 2004, the Shenzhen labor department fined the factory
1.96 million Yuan for violating the labor code. Since then workers have
been paid the legal minimum wage, but at the same time overtime has
been greatly reduced, so the total sum of wages is only slightly higher
than the old wage level. Dormitories were improved after the incident.
When workers were interviewed, they explicitly expressed that they
were still not satisfied with the present wages. They have no plan to
stage another action in the near future.

After the incident, the Computime made a public statement that each
month they paid the full amount of the minimum wages to Meizi
Haiyan, but without their knowledge the management took away 60%
of workers wages. We have no way to verify that statement. In any
case, very shortly after the Meizi Haiyan plant closed and workers
were never compensated with their unpaid wages.

---

[The followinbg pictures are not reproduced here, only their présentation. For the pictures, click on the link above]:

1. Confrontation between
workers and police.
(Nanfang web site, 8
October 2004)

2. Workers began to
disperse and police was
directing traffic. (Same
as above)

5. Women workers:
deeply discontent
with wages far below
minimum wages.
(NanFang Metropolitan
News, 10^th December
2004)

3. The road was
blocked and drivers sat
on truck top to see for
themselves. (Same as
above)

4. Women workers
obstructed the road while
police demanded them
to get out of the road.
(FengHuang Weekly
Issue 31, 3 December
2004)

5. Women workers:
deeply discontent
with wages far below
minimum wages.
(NanFang Metropolitan
News, 10^th December
2004)

6. The CEO of
Computime: for 15 years
no one ever reported
that workers has been
receiving wages far
below the minimum
wages.(Same as
above)

7. The manager of
MeiZi HaiYan factory
(subsidiary Computime)
added her signature to
the government notice
which penalized the
factory for paying wages
below minimum wages.
(Same as above)

---

Case 2: The GP Case

Gold Peak Industrial Ltd. is an Asian TNC based in Hong Kong and
Singapore. GP’s electrical products are sold all over the world under
different brand names. It’s subsidiary GP Batteries began to move into
Mainland China from Hong Kong in the 1980’s to take advantage of
the low labor cost there. In Guangdong province, Hong Kong capital
accounts for two-thirds of FDI and employs more than 10 million
workers. The GP Group has more than a dozen factories in China.
As noted above, in Huizhou there are two GP plants: the Huizhou
Advance Battery Technology Company (ABT) and the Huizhou Power
Pack (PP) Company Limited. There are little more than 3000 workers
in these two factories, mostly women. In fact, what distinguishes thiscase from other cases in the Pearl Delta is that the leading workers are
mostly women. In November 2003, a woman worker from the PP plant
fell ill and then she sought medical tests on her own. Eventually it was
discovered that she had an abnormally high level of cadmium in her
body.

Cadmium is a kind of chemical used to produce batteries. It can cause
cancer, kidney failure and serious bone pains. Once enters the body,
it will take from 7 to 30 years to flush out. Affected workers will face
health problems for years to come. European Union highly restricts the
usage of cadmium and batteries contain the chemical will be banned
from import beginning from 2008 because of its toxic properties. And it
is common knowledge among battery producers that OSH training and
protective devices are necessary when processing cadmium. However,
GP provided no protection to many workers other than paper masks,
which are totally ineffective because cadmium is a kind of fine powder
that can be easily inhaled even through wearing paper masks. GP even
went so far as to order pregnant women to process cadmium along
side non-pregnant women. That is why children of women workers
were also found high-level cadmium in their bodies because of daily
physical contact between mothers and their children. Meanwhile the
poisoning continued to spread to other plants. In 2005 it was also
revealed that workers in the Jetpower plant in Shenzhen and the Hong
Kong plant were also affected by excessive cadmium levels and some
of them were diagnosed as poisoned. Altogether there were four GP
plants - two in Huizhou, one in Shenzhen, one in Hong Kong - were
affected. In addition, one environmental group found that there were
higher than normal levels of cadmium in the local environment.

Soon news of the cadmium problem spread through the PP factory and
workers demanded that the management arrange medical tests. After
the management gave no response, workers then approached the local
labor department to file complaints, but they received no response from
there, either. After laborious negotiations and a strike, the management
finally arranged blood test for several hundred workers on 25 May
2004. The results were soon released and showed that there was little
cause for alarm: the workers’ cadmium levels were only slightly higher
than normal. But the workers became suspicious, and went to the
Guangdong Provincial Hospital for the Prevention and Treatment of
Occupational Diseases to have medical tests on their own. The results
were alarming: some of the workers showed much higher cadmium
levels than the official tests arranged by the management had shown.
Outraged, 500 workers staged a three day strike in June, demanding
the truth and proper medical treatment.

On 12 July, more than 1000 workers from the ABT plant followed the
example of the PP workers and went on strike as well. Several hundred
took to the street.

We prepared a lot of small red flags, which read ‘Give us back our
health!’ We shouted the slogan and waved our flags on our way to
the municipal government house. Two workers from Sichuan province
took the lead. They were couples. The man shouted slogans with a loud
hailer, and the woman waved the flag. Many husbands (though not GP
workers) also accompanied their wives in the demonstration. Police
cars came and tried to stop us but failed. The policemen told us that
if we went on demonstrating our mayor would have to step down. One
worker responded: ‘So be it!’ [10]

More workers approached the Provincial Hospital for private medical
tests but this time the hospital refused to do the tests, an act in clear
violation of the law. More workers began to fall ill, and after they were
sent to the hospital for treatment they were very often being sent back
to factories very soon, without medication and without diagnosis.
At this time a Hong Kong based NGO, Globalization Monitor, learned
of the case and released the news to the Hong Kong media. At once
it made the headline in one of the biggest HK daily newspaper. Only
after this did Mainland media begin to report the story, but they still
tried to tone it down. On 23 July 2004, Globalization Monitor and
thirty-three HK trade unions and NGOs forced their way into the GP
building in Hong Kong to protest against the poisoning case. Shortly
after, some of the GP workers received death threats. On 11 August, the
Central Television made a more balanced documentary on the case. It
brought hope to GP workers, and dozens of them decided to petition the
central government in Beijing. In late August they set off for Beijing,
but Huizhou police and officials tried to stop them from boarding the
train. Though the officials failed to stop the workers, when the workers
arrived at the Beijing station they found that the Huizhou officials
were already there waiting for them—they had flown to Beijing while
the workers were traveling by train and were therefore able to reach
Beijing sooner. Though they did not dare to stop the workers from
petitioning, they did closely follow them. To the relief of the officials,
the workers met with the same indifference in the office of the central
government that they had encountered earlier, and returned home with
nothing.

On 3 September, fearing more confrontation both in Huizhou and in
Hong Kong, the company finally decided to reveal part of the truth.
Two workers were diagnosed with cadmium poisoning (later increased
to eleven), and 177 workers as having a high level of cadmium and
classified as under observation (later increased to 400).
The company agreed to pay a small amount of compensation to these
workers, namely 3000 or 8000 Yuan for each worker, along with
severance pay, contingent on their voluntary resignation. Moreover,
in a joint statement with the Huizhou municipal government, GP
warned the workers that if they petitioned Beijing again they would
face criminal charges. The workers regarded the compensation as
being far too little, but eventually nearly all affected workers took the
compensation and resigned because they were afraid that the plant was
now too poisonous to work inside as well as the repressive regime
imposed upon them (a special task force was sent to the factories from
the Huizhou government to oversee everything).

In early 2005, 65 PP and ABT workers decided to sue the company
and demanded 250,000 Yuan in compensation for each worker. Soon
another 244 workers followed suit. Between March and May the
Huizhou court heard the case and later ruled in favor of the company
despite very strong evidence provided by the workers.

The Huizhou municipal government has in various ways helped GP
to evade responsibility for the poisoning case. The reasons behind
are simple. Huizhou houses many electrical companies, including the
SOEs of Huizhou – for example, TCL, now one of the largest Chinese
electronic companies, belongs to the Huizhou municipal government.

Thus the city government has a common interest with GP to repress
workers and to pay as little compensation to workers as possible.
What is more, many Huizhou SOEs, including TCL, the Huizhou
Desay industrial company, Desay Group Corporation, etc., all have
business relations with GP, and in fact each of them holds shares in GP.
Furthermore, the CEO of GP, Victor Lo Chung Wing, has developed
close ties with well-placed government officials in Huizhou, and he
is the largest individual shareholder of TCL. Lo was appointed to the
Executive Council of Hong Kong government in late 2005 by the Chief
Executive, Donald Tseng.

Between 2004 and 2006 Globalization Monitor staged four protests
at shareholders meetings of GP as well as organizing GP workers to
protest against GP. The CEO of GP then agreed to set up a medical
fund for workers, but soon it became apparent that the fund is no
more than a PR show which does little in improving the lives of the
workers. In June 2006 GP sued Globalization Monitor, the Hong Kong
Confederation of Trade Unions, and the Neighborhood and Workers
Service Center for ‘defamation’.

Since then a local and international solidarity campaign with GP
workers and the three Hong Kong groups has been launched, involving
International Confederation of Free Trade Unions, International
Federation of Chemical, Energy,
Mine and General Workers’ Unions,
International Metalworkers’
Federation, Netherlands’ Union
Federation etc. It culminated in a
joint appeal between International
Trade Union Confederation and
Globalization Monitor for concern
over the GP workers on the
International Commemoration Day,
28 April 2007.

---

[Pictures not reproduced here:]

The GP case was reported by media on
3 July 2004 for the first time. (Oriental
Daily, Hong Kong)

Five Women Workers
waiting for the verdict
(Chongqing Morning Post,
19 March 2005)

This woman worker carried
a protest banner reading: the
manager of GP told worker
with cadmium in their bodies
to jump from the tall and
kill themselves rather than
came and protested against
the company. (Pictures by
workers)

Rally in front of the
GP plant to demand the
respect of human rights
when arranging workers
for annual medical check
up, 12^th December 2005.
(Pictures by workers)

Same as above. (Pictures
by GM)

Six GP workers coming
to Hong Kong to protest
against GP headquarter, 19^th
January 2006. (Pictures by
GM)

Same as above.
Globalization Monitors
and international union
delegates protested against
GP on 13 December 2005.
(Pictures by GM)

Police arrived at the scene
to monitor workers’ protest.
(Pictures by workers)

---

Case 3: The Stella Case

Stella is a Taiwanese owned company in Mainland China which makes
shoes for Nike, Timberland, Clarks and other companies. It has four
factories in Dongguan, Guangdong province, with a workforce of 35,000
in 2004. The factories are named: Xing’ang, Xinglai, Xingxiong, and
Xingpeng. Stella manufactured 30 million pairs of shoes in that year,
worth a total of 3 billion Yuan. All four factories experienced different
degrees of violent workers protests in the same year.

Stella’s factories are typical sweatshops. Workers there worked
60 hours a week, 10 hours a day. The average monthly wage was
700 Yuan, but after deducting the food and dormitory fees workers
received only 500 Yuan. Workers were exposed to poisonous chemicals
during the normal manufacturing process. The management style was
kind of militarized control. Overtime work was not compensated as
stipulated in the law. Arrears of wages were common. There was also
an immediate trigger for the protests. The brand company Nike, in its
effort to promote CSR, requested Stella to operate strictly in line with
the labor code’s stipulation that workers be allowed to rest on Sunday.
Stella satisfied Nike’s request by making workers work more overtime
on normal working days. This greatly intensified the work pace and
also decreased their wages, because overtime pay on Sunday is higher
than over time pay in normal working days. This new regime proved to
be the single spark that started a prairie fire.

On 19 March 2004, two of the Stella Company’s factories, Xinglai
and Xingpeng, paid its workers 50 to 100 Yuan less than the previous
month. When workers demanded explanation, the management said that
it was workers’ own fault, and that they should have worked harder and
produced more. The workers could not accept the explanation, and 2000
workers struck and demanded negotiations. Workers’ delegates also
raised many other demands, including improving the food, forbidding
corporal punishment of workers, etc. The management eventually
conceded to the workers demands. The manager later recalled that they
had not realized that 100 Yuan is a big sum of money to these migrant
workers.

On 21 April 2004, in another Stella plant, Xingxiong, 1000 workers were
paid 50 to 200 Yuan less than the previous month. They immediately
responded with a riot: machines were smashed, cars overturned, and
supervisors were beaten.

On 23 April, exactly the same thing happened once more in Xing’ang.
At 11:30pm, great noises from 3000 workers echoed in the air. They
were in the dormitories but they did not go to sleep, but rather yelling
slogans: “Raise the wages!” “Improve the food!” Washbowls, cups,
sandals and other items rained from all sides of the building. Then
women workers appealed to male workers to act. When male workers
failed to do so, the women workers (accounting for 70% of Xing’ang
workers), in loud voices, criticized male workers as useless, that
Xingxiong workers were braver than they. The yelling and scolding
proved effective. Male workers marched down the dormitories and
gathered on the playing field. Soon the situation slipped out of control.

Some workers broke into the plants and smashed everything inside,
from machines to computers, overturned cars, and smashed windows.
Police arrived but they were outnumbered.

After three hours of riots, the workers were tired and went back to the
dormitories. The next day reprisals came. The management determined
that they could not allow any concessions this time. Workers of the
two plants were investigated. The police and the management forced
workers to accuse each other, and those who made accusations against
their fellow workers were rewarded with 1000 Yuan. On 24 May the
police charged ten workers with ‘disrupting social order’. After being
jailed for four months, the charged workers were brought to court on
25 August. The trial was not fair, in that the defense lawyers were
denied much of an opportunity to speak for the defendants. Eventually
the workers were sentenced to three or three and a half years’ jail on
October 2004. Meanwhile the management sacked hundreds of workers
or possibly even more, and resumed overtime work on Sunday.
After these incidents, labor advocates outside China campaigned for
the release of the jailed workers and demanded that Nike, Reebok,
Timberland, Adidas put pressure on Stella. It seems that the apparel
TNCs did tell Stella to do something to alleviate the situation, and it
was reported that Stella wrote to the court to request that the workers
be released. In January 2005, the Dongguan court revised its verdict,
and seven workers received probation instead of imprisonment, and
three had their charges dropped. All ten workers were immediately
released.

Case 4: Uniden — The first conscious effort at organizing?

Uniden is a Japanese electronics firm, which has operated in China
since 1987. It is a large company with 12,000 workers. The basic
monthly salary for ordinary workers in 2004 was 480 Yuan, barely
enough for survival. In order to earn 800 Yuan, workers had to work
four hours of overtime in addition to an eight hour working day. Such
low wages had always been the chief grievance. Another complaint
was the bad food provided by the factory canteen. This and other
grievances finally triggered a large strike on 10 December 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
the situation had not pushed them far beyond their physical endurance,
these women in their teens would not have turned out but rather would
have continued working like robots.’

From that time until April 2005, five strikes were consciously
organized, a very rare phenomenon in the EPZs. The striking workers
even called for the founding of trade unions, of which common
migrant workers have little or no concept. A preparatory committee for
a trade union had been set up and started 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 likely came mainly from the cities. They circulated
handbills among fellow workers, placed their demands and reports on
the internet --- requiring some skills which rural migrant workers are
largely lacking. Rural migrant workers may have many grievances,
but have little understanding of trade unionism. It was the layer of
technicians and more skilled workers who gave leadership and more
conscious direction to the ordinary workers. This was in contrast to the
Stella case where ordinary workers simply rioted without any serious
leadership, and failed to come up with clear set of 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 raised demands, these tended to
be quite narrow, targeting only the specific grievances which directly
concern the workers undertaking action. There is little awareness of
the need to generalize demands to encompass all workers and build
solidarity.

However, the demands of the Uniden workers were much clearer:

1. Basic wages should be in line with the minimum wage as
stipulated by law;

2. The company must pay for workers’ basic insurance as
stipulated by law;

3. Women workers should receive one month of maternity
leave [11];

4. Compensation for overtime should be 150 to 300 percent of
basic wages;

5. No compulsory overtime as stipulated by law;

6. Workers should be entitled to set up their own trade union;

7. No deduction of wages when workers take sick leave;

8. Workers should be given food and housing allowances;

9. Wages should be increased according to seniority.

On 20 April 2005, Uniden workers struck again, this time coinciding
with a larger anti-Japanese protest. 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 repressed by the police, as had happened during
the past four strikes, and leaders arrested, jailed, or sacked. A woman
worker was reported as saying,

‘Some officials from the local labor department told us we had to
cooperate, or else investors would withdraw and move to somewhere
else and we will be thrown out of our jobs.’
Will such threats deter workers from protesting in the future? We can
only wait and see. But back in December 2004, when the first strike
occurred, a woman worker was reported as 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.’

 VIII. The gender dimension of workers’ resistance

In three of the four cases, workers’ efforts to fight back did improve
their situations in different degrees. However, it seems that none
resulted in any organizational efforts afterward. We believe that this
is the general pattern of recent labor unrest. In fact, one characteristic
of these protests are that few workers activists are willing to take the
lead to officially represent their fellow workers when confronting
the management or the police. Reprisal against leaders of protests
has been a strong tradition for many decades, if not many centuries.
Given that there is absolutely no organization nor even network which
may provide support in times of repression, worker activists know
very well that assuming leadership openly is extremely risky. They
tend to hide among common workers even when they are taking the
lead. In one of the large strikes in a Japanese firm in December 2005,
government officials were sent in for arbitration, yet workers did not
send any delegates to talk with them. And then the officials called out
to the workers:

“Who are the leaders of this strike? Could they come out and speak to us?”

No response from the workers.

The “leaderless” phenomenon of these strikes does not necessarily
imply failure, at least at the early stage of actions. Rather, on one hand
it makes workers feel safe in joining mass actions, and on the other
hand, collective actions do give strength and confidence to workers
and do bring pressure on the employers, and thus generally bring
improvement for workers eventually. Needless to say, the weakness of
this tactic is that it is always easy for management to divide workers
by buying off a portion of them. From this perspective, provincial
prejudices may act as a divisive element which eventually works in
favor of the management. Therefore no action can last long enough to
yield long term results.

There are of course cases where workers are brave enough to assume
open leadership and act as representatives. The Uniden case is the
most outstanding. And when there is more or less open leadership, it
is always men who are at the head of the protests, even though women
workers always account for the majority of the work force. Generally
women have been more reluctant than men to assume leadership. In the
GP case it is women who are the leaders, which is quite extraordinary.
This is probably due to the fact that the assembly line supervisors of
GP plants are all women, and it was only when this group of workers,
who are more educated and more experienced in coordinating actions,
joined the struggle did it became more sustainable. Still, even in this
special case these women workers leaders always find themselves too
few in numbers and too isolated, and depend on the support of their
husbands. The following is an interview with one of those women
leaders after they were forced to leave the factories:

Q: Does your family support your cause?

A: Yes, they do support me. But I know many of my fellow workers
did not get their families’ support and therefore do not dare to
join actions. They just sign a name on our petition and that’s it.

Q: But isn’t XXX an exception?

A: Well it is because she does not live in the village (where the plant
is located).

Q: What is the difference?

A: Workers who live in the village often rent some of their rooms to
people from outside. If the GP plant closes, there will be no more
workers, and that means no more potential residents to rent their
rooms. That’s why they are passive in taking actions.

Q: How about the other women workers?

A: Many of them are afraid of reprisals. You know there are still
lots of them not yet have partners, and the fact that some
women workers were threaten with divorce by their husbands
(because of cadmium poisoning) makes them think twice. It is
heartbreaking.

Q: But isn’t it the case that now your fellow workers are more aware
of their rights?

A: Yes, but too few of them are willing to stand up.

Q: How many will be brave enough to stand up for their rights?

A: Not more than ten.

Q: How about the rest?

A: Most of them support us, in a passive way. There are also some
who want to hold us back.

For female workers, the question of whether there is family support and
particularly the support of their husbands is crucial to their willingness
to fight for their rights. The patriarchal system is still very much at
work and cannot be left out in any discussion of women workers. Even
in the GP case, where women workers have not only taken the lead but
constitute the overwhelming majority of the leadership, the women
still said that having even one male leader among them is essential
because his participation makes them feel safe. We believe that this
sentiment is not uncommon. It speaks to the fact that women migrants
generally still see themselves as inferior to men. When further asked
why then they were so determined to stand up for their rights, these
women workers responded that it was only because they were angry,
and women workers were very emotional when they find that they are
being cheated by the management. In contrast, they said, male workers
are more rational in figuring the pros and cons of actions. Though
there may be differences in temperament between sexes, to argue that
men are necessarily more rational than women is extremely dubious.
What concern us here is that this kind of self-image necessarily affects
women’s determination to fighting independently.

 IX. Conclusion: Defending workers’ rights and the role of NGOs

Once a GP manager remarked this to his women workers:

“We thought you were all just fools, so we manipulated things and thought
it would work. But it turns out that you are smarter than we thought.”

Although migrant workers in general and women in particular
lack a collective identity as belonging to a working class,
there is always a portion who are more advanced in their
social thinking and are more ready to promote collective struggles.
Even if they are small in number, they can play a leading role in these
spontaneous struggles and forge a layer of labor activists through these
struggles. If they have not been able to do this until now, it is chiefly
because the one-party regime in general and the social apartheid in
particular make the situation too harsh for labor activists to cope with.
To this we must also add one factor: the general indifference displayed
by intellectuals and students to the plight of workers and farmers. In
Korea, the harsh repression during the military rule might not be less
severe than the repression in China today, but the continuous inflow of
Korean intellectuals and students into the labor movement provided
the latter with a layer of committed and capable cadres. Nothing like
this happens in China.

However, we do not believe that all of these factors are impossible to
change. In the long run, in the course of the current rapid industrialization
and profound division between the rich and the poor, everything is
bounded to be fluid. In fact, after living through more than a decade
of sweat shop labor, the migrant workers have learned many valuable
lessons. Today it is more difficult for employers to fool around workers
by paying them far less than the minimum wage. Workers are now
more aware of their rights, and more ready to fight for them. It will not
be long before they will come to understand that they have to combine
their economic struggles with the struggle against the hukou system,
the paramilitary forces and the social apartheid in order to defend their
basic rights as human beings. The hukou system and the paramilitary
forces must be abolished altogether. These struggles, even if limited in
their objectives (not yet challenging the one-party regime per se), will
change the mentality of at least a portion of intellectuals and students.
The uproar around the death of Sun Zhigang already signifies this. We
have no reason to despair.

For the moment the space for labor activism is still very limited, but it
does exist. It is still possible to work through formal or informal NGOs
to serve the cause of workers. It may be that support from NGOs is not
as crucial for workers in the state sector, given that these workers are
generally more educated and have roots and network in the workplaces
and the cities they reside. This is not the case for migrant workers,
and particularly so for women workers, whose vulnerable situation we
have discussed above. It is here that NGOs could be of great help in
promoting public education on issues of labor rights among migrant
workers.

On the other hand, under the present repressive regime, NGOs have to
be non-confrontational to local authorities and even employers just in
order to exist. They can only act in accordance with the laws, which
are often narrowly defined and interpreted by local authorities, and
thus NGOs cannot encourage workers to organize a union, nor can
they advise workers to organize strikes. All they can do is to provide
legal advice. Even informal organizing is difficult, because all NGOs
are closely watched and workers are under surveillance by district
authority. However, in a country where the rule of law for practical
purposes does not exist, acting within the laws itself is necessarily not
effective even in the medium term. This is the main dilemma for all
labor NGOs working in China.

That said, it is still worthy to do whatever work possible for Chinese
workers—not only because it is better than doing nothing at all, but
because in today’s China, the promotion of elementary labor education
still benefits common migrant workers. Even teaching them to use
the internet will be of great help in the long run. In the course of
empowerment these women workers will, sooner or later, become the
first generation of workers activists and leaders. It is this hope that
makes our present work, however limited in objectives and scope,
meaningful.

February 2007

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References

A. Chinese Workers under Assault, Anita Chan, ME Sharpe, 2001.

B. Communist Neo-traditionalism: Work and Authority in Chinese Industry, Andrew G. Walder, University of California Press, 1986.

C. “China and Socialism, Market Reforms and Class Struggle”, Martin Hart-Landsberg and Paul Burkett, Monthly Review, Volume 56 No.3, July-
August 2004.

D. Dangdai Zhongguo Shehui Liudong (Social Mobility in Contemporary
China), edited by Lu Xueyi, Social Sciences Documentation Publishing
House, 2004.

E. Unpublished interviews conducted by the authors of this paper.

F. Xinchanye Gongren Jieji (The Class of New Industrial Workers), Xie Jianshe, Social Sciences Academic Press, 2005

G. Zhongguo Nongmin Dagong Diaocha (Investigation on Chinese Rural Migrants Workers), Chinese Communist Party School Publishing House,
2005.

H. Huji Zhidu (On Household Registration System), Lu Yilong, Commercial Press, 2006.

Appendix

Lists of Abbreviations:

ACFTU: All China Federation of Trade Unions

CCP: Chinese Communist Party

EPZs: Export Processing Zones

FDI: Foreign Direct Investment

GP: Gold Peak Industries (Holding) Limited

KMT: Kuomintang, or Nationalist Party of China

NGOs: Non-Governmental Organisations

OSH: Occupational Safety and Health

SOEs: State Owned Enterprises

TNCs: Trans-National Corporations