CORPORATE CRIME REPORTER
Chinese
Worker Protests Increase as Troubles Mount, Two Reports Find
22 Corporate Crime Reporter 3, January 15, 2008
Two new reports released today show a troubled Chinese labor force pressured
by delayed and unpaid wages, worker-related illnesses and deaths, and generally
harsh working conditions.
As worker conditions deteriorate, China’s workers are fighting back with spontaneous protests.
The reports were based on the work of the Hong Kong based Labor Rights Group and its founder Han Dongfang, who appeared at a press conference at the National Press Club earlier this morning.
The first report – A Cry for Justice: The Voices of Chinese Workers – was produced by the Albert Shanker Institute.
It tells the stories of workers demonstrating in open defiance of the government – from the oilfields of Daqing, the terrolalloy workers of Liaoyang, the Heavenly King textile workers of Xianyang, the Gold Peak battery factory workers of Huizhou, coal miners from Wanbao, teachers from Suizhou, and ex-soldiers who work in factories around the country run by the People’s Liberation Army.
The second report – Speaking Out: The Workers’ Movement in China – was published by the China Labor Bulletin. It documents the worker protests that flared in recent years because of mass layoffs, lost pensions and medical insurance, excessive overtime, wages in arrears and unsafe working conditions.
According to the report, the protests were a direct consequence of two factors – the privatization of state-owned enterprises, and the ongoing exploitation of migrant workers in the private sector.
The reports were released just as China’s new labor contract law goes into effect.
“The key to real change where labor contracts are concerned will lie at the enforcement level,” Han said. “But for that, workers need the right to select their own union leaders and representatives. And you need real collective bargaining too. It is the lack of genuinely representative trade unions and the inability of workers to engage in real collective bargaining that is the root of the problem.”
Han said that the new law “does not really deal with trade union rights.”
“Time will tell if the Chinese authorities have a genuine interest in hearing from workers more constructively, through union representation,” Han said. “Otherwise, their voices will still be heard, but most likely in the streets.”
“While the drive to keep wages down in China is fueling an international race to the bottom in terms of international labor standards, the foreign direct investment sector has played that same role inside China. It has placed competitive pressure on Chinese state-owned business enterprises to allow for more managerial autonomy and ‘flexibility’ in labor policies. It has also given rise to an ideological transformation that hs reduced dramatically the importance of public ownership in the Chinese economy.”
Han
was involved with the Tiananman Square protests in 1989 and was a leader of
the Beijing Autonomous Workers Federation. He was then jailed for almost two
years in his capacity as a presenter for Radio Free Asia.
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