Workers riot in south China over job losses: government

AFP
November 26, 2008

GUANGDONG, China (AFP) — Hundreds of workers sacked from a toy factory in China clashed with police and smashed buildings, authorities said Wednesday, in the latest bout of violent unrest linked to rising unemployment.

The riot occurred Tuesday in Guangdong province, southern China's export heartland where similar protests have flared recently, after about 2,000 workers gathered to demand severance pay, according to the local government.

The workers smashed offices at the factory where they used to work and overturned police cars, with the violence leaving six people injured, the government of Zhongtang township where the unrest occurred said in a statement.

"(Rioters) smashed one police vehicle and four police patrol cars... fought with security guards... and entered factory offices breaking windows and destroying equipment," the statement said.

The riot occurred at the Kaida Toy Factory, a company owned by a Hong Kong firm in Zhongtang that is in the process of laying off workers, the statement said.

A Zhongtang policeman surnamed Huang told AFP that 19 people had been arrested.

"Our investigation is continuing as not all of these people were employees of the Kaida Toy Factory," Huang said, adding that the situation was calm on Wednesday and authorities were looking to ensure there was no more unrest.

The Zhongtang government said that up to 500 workers were responsible for the riot, while 1,500 others "looked on."

The factory has been operating for more than 20 years and employed up to 6,500 workers, according to the government statement.

One worker surnamed Hu told the Guangzhou Daily the factory laid off over 380 workers on Wednesday last week, giving more severance pay to workers who had been employed for more than seven years and less to other workers, it said.

"Many workers thought this was unfair and negotiations between the factory and the workers did not reach a resolution on the issue," the paper quoted Hu as saying, adding more job losses were expected this week.

Southern China has enjoyed an export-driven boom in recent years supplying the world with cheap toys, gadgets and clothes.

But amid the downturn in the global economy, coupled with rising labour costs, expensive raw materials and the appreciation of the Chinese currency, factories have found it difficult to make ends meet.

Up to 7,000 laid-off workers staged a similar protest in Guangdong last month after another Hong Kong-owned toy factory, one of China's biggest, closed down.

China's social security minister, Yin Weimin, last week described the employment situation across the country as "critical", as the nation's police chief warned his deputies that this could lead to unrest.

"(You) should be aware of the challenge brought by the global financial crisis and try your best to maintain social stability," Public Security Minister Meng Jianzhu told his deputies.

China's economy has slowed sharply in recent months amid the global crisis, and the World Bank has forecast growth of 7.5 percent for next year, which would be the nation's slowest expansion in nearly two decades.

However the Zhongtang government maintained that the layoffs at the Kaida toy factory were not directly linked to the global economic downturn, rather an expiration of labour contracts.

Kaida's mainland operations were not immediately available to comment.

Massive riot in northwestern China

John M. Glionna
Los Angels Times
November 18, 2008

Thousands, angered over a plan to raze a city center, burn cars and battle police with rocks, iron bars and axes. A Communist office is overrun and 60 officials are injured.

Reporting from Beijing -- An angry crowd of 2,000 rioted in northwest China's Gansu province over a government plan to demolish a downtown area, torching cars and attacking a local Communist Party office, injuring 60 officials, state-run media reported Tuesday.

At one point, rioters met a surging wall of armed police officers with a hail of rocks, bricks, bottles and flowerpots. The crowd later confronted police with iron bars, axes and hoes as they tried to hijack a fire truck and smashed windows and office equipment in two government buildings.

The violence, one of the most marked instances of social unrest to grip China in recent months, was sparked by government plans to relocate the city of Longnan's administrative center after May's devastating earthquake, according to the Xinhua news agency.

State-run press has reported on numerous pickets and demonstrations that have broken out across China in recent weeks, including a two-day strike by disgruntled taxi drivers in the southwestern Chinese city of Chongqing.

Earlier this month, a crowd of 400 in the southern boomtown of Zhenzhen threw stones and set fire to a police car after officers tried to stop a motorcyclist at a checkpoint. The cyclist fled and was killed when he hit a lamppost.

In June, 30,000 people demonstrated in the southwestern province of Guizhou, setting fire to cars and the local Communist Party building following rumors that officials had tried to cover up the death of a teenage girl.

Activists warn that tensions over the sudden downturn in the Chinese economy could provoke similar public outbursts, even though police have made efforts not to immediately resort to violence in quelling the riots.

"The government's emphasis on maintaining a harmonious society just extenuates the levels to which it is worried about these kinds of threats to social stability," said Joshua Rosenzweig, a Hong Kong manager of research at the Dui Hua Foundation, a human rights group.

"I don't think we're even close to seeing the real impact of the global financial crisis on Chinese society. I'd be surprised if the government wasn't very concerned about the increasing level of social unrest all over China."

Chinese economists say that rising wages throughout China have led many laborers to expect better working conditions and residents to demand more accountable government. "The local government has become the front line of conflict," said Hu Xingdou, an economics professor at the Beijing Institute of Technology.

"But there is no channel to allow people to express their will. They lack the right to speak, the right to organize and unionize to represent their interest, therefore they can only use an irrational way by demonstrating or rioting to solve problems."

But government officials have recently began to forego a decades-old policy of swift repression to meet public demonstrations. Following a two-day strike, Chongqing taxi drivers were able to air their grievances in a three-hour meeting with government officials that was available online across China.

And officials in Zhenzhen moved quickly to counteract claims of police violence following the motorcyclist's death -- promising compensation of nearly $30,000 to the victim's family.

"In these cases, as well as labor and factory strikes, the government policy now seems to involve much less police response," said Rosenzweig. "Fewer labor leaders have been detained and prosecuted for criminal offenses. There's much more emphasis on trying to mediate disputes."

The melee in Longnan began when about 30 angry residents gathered Monday outside the party office, but the crowd soon swelled into the thousands, Xinhua reported.

He Zhouwa, manager of a local machine brick factory, said people were ready to use any means possible to stop the government plan to relocate the city center.

"People are still at the municipal party office compound," he said late Tuesday. "I did not dare to go there, but everyone is talking about this. There were hundreds of petitioners there last night and this morning."

A Longnan city government statement said the protesters, many of whom had come to petition government officials over the loss of their homes and land, were "incited by a few people with ulterior motives."

The Role of Trade Unions in China

Carl Finamore
August 25, 2008

The recently-concluded summer Olympics introduced China as a major player on the world stage in spectacular fashion.

No doubt about it, the country made a superbly dramatic entrance.

Of course there were the much-publicized disclosures that some elements of the production were staged - the embarrassing lip-synching episode and the use of pre-recorded fireworks fed to live television broadcasts.

But first-class, stellar performances by Chinese athletes on the field amply demonstrated there was nothing fake about the progress China has made in the last several decades.

A more valid criticism was that the Chinese government’s track record on human rights won’t win any medals. And to be sure, it must be recognized that some of those complaints were made by those with less than genuine motives.

This was the topic of a recent discussion between twenty northern California labor leaders and a visiting high-level Chinese delegation from the Guangzhou Federation of Trade Unions (GZFTU).

The delegation, which is affiliated with the state-controlled All China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU), surprised us a bit when they said this was the first visit of top Chinese labor officials with leaders of a AFL-CIO Central Labor Council.

Facing new challenges to organize multi-nationals, our guests emphasized they wanted to rapidly end their isolation from American unions.

GZFTU's Chairman Chen Weiguang began by acknowledging that China‘s unions had to be reformed. “We need to protect the rights and interests of the workers and elect leaders who will stand up for workers,” said Weiguang. “Of course, the bosses within the enterprises want a union chair who will be obedient to the company but we believe the union belongs to the workers, not the bosses.”

Chen speaks from his experience as a major planner of the successful unionization of Wal-Mart in China.

China's “Economic Miracle”

Currently the seventh largest world economy, the country of 1.3 billion is on track to become the third largest by 2015. Its Gross Domestic Product (GDP) has grown at rates that are among the highest for any major country in the 20th century. (US Dept. of Agric., USDA 2004 report)

There are many internal factors contributing to China's economic "miracle" such as a more-skilled workforce and unprecedented capital spending on roads, utilities, buildings, machinery and equipment.

Over time, infrastructure improvements result in big increases in labor productivity and mass production of quality products, something U.S. policy makers do not appreciate. Substantial foreign investment in new technology since the early 1990s has also helped spur productivity.

Before the mid-1990s there were clear differences between state-owned "socialist" factories, which offered lifetime employment, housing, and medical care, and private sector factories, which provided little job security, low wages, and no fringe benefits.

Today, however, competition and persistent government efforts to privatize state-owned firms has led even these enterprises to offer less job security, fewer welfare benefits, and stricter labor conditions. (China Labour Rights Bulletin)

As a result, wages of Chinese workers have remained very low. Experts estimate wages at around 12% of US workers, thus providing China an extremely favorable trade advantage.

For example, the USDA reports that “furniture manufactured in China can enter the U.S. market at 25 to 35 percent of the cost of comparable furniture” made in the United States.

This imbalance is representative of most Chinese exports.

From these statistics, it should be clear that raising the wages and living conditions of Chinese workers is imperative. Solidarity is not just an abstract emotional impulse; it is an economic necessity that unites workers around the world.

Our goal should be to avoid divisive competition between ourselves by establishing uniform international labor standards.

A Conversation with Chinese Labor

Our meeting with the Chinese delegation proved to be a lively and frank exchange. I asked a question about the control of the Communist Party over the official trade unions.

As reported by Paul Burton in the May 28, 2008, Labor, the San Mateo County Central Labor Council newspaper, Chen responded to the question by explaining the history of unions under the Communist Party.

“For a long time China was a 'command economy' and unions were subservient to it. There was no distinction between labor and capital because we were all part of the nation,” Chen said. “The Party worked hard for the development of the working class and to educate workers. Things have changed with the move to a market economy and differentiation in factories between bosses and workers.”

Chen said that over the past 30 years of economic reforms, workers have made great sacrifices and now that capital had become too powerful the Communist Party was rethinking the balance of capital and labor, enacting new labor laws as part of that change.

Apparently some progress is being made.

Burton summarized the meeting by observing that “with the enactment of recent pro-worker labor laws in China, the situation may be changing as workers exercise their rights under these new labor laws.

“The China Labor Bulletin (CLB, online at www.china-labour.org.hk/en/) reported that 'the number of labor dispute cases in Guangzhou for the first two months of 2008 equaled the total number of cases in 2001. More than 60 percent of all cases involved non-payment of salaries and over-time.'"

CLB director Han Dongfang wrote encouragingly that “by developing collective bargaining at the grassroots level, enterprise-level unions will be transformed into labor organizations that genuinely represent the rights and interests of workers.”

Let's wish them well. We all should work toward this common goal in each of our unions. But some would say it is not possible to achieve while the Chinese government retains exclusive control of the unions.

The role of Trade Unions in China

Founded in 1925, ACFTU has around 170 million members. It is the only union legally recognized but its membership is shrinking as privately-owned companies become a larger share of the economy.

The numbers are staggering. In their Feb. 9, 2008, issue, ChinaDaily reports that 200 million were employed by 5.39 million registered private establishments in 2007. This is more than half of all companies in China. These firms alone generated 60 percent of the GDP.

ACFTU is responding to this challenge by mounting a huge organizing campaign in the private sector, especially among the foreign-owned. As a result, the Federation expects it membership to increase to 200 million by its September 2008 Congress. It also hopes to announce successful completion of a “100-day” bold unionization effort begun in June to organize 80% of the Fortune 500 firms.

This new thinking was forced upon Chinese unions after they encountered stiff opposition from notoriously anti union Wal-Mart. Labor officials, normally accustomed to dealing with state enterprises, were shocked when the company actually refused to even meet with union organizers, a tactic commonly employed in America.

ACFTU began a successful grass-roots organizing campaign, a first for the state labor body.

The union was finally recognized in 2006. Chen Weiguang played an important role confronting Wal-Mart as a hostile employer rather than as a friendly joint-venture partner with the government. The latter view has always compromised the union’s ability to represent workers.

For example, the ACFTU official website still clearly reveals its cooperation with management: "Trade unions of the foreign-invested enterprises in China have firmly centered on production and business operation to conduct activities and have given support to enterprises in their operation and management according to law; have educated workers to observe factory rules and regulations and discipline; organized workers to launch labor emulation campaigns; and aroused the enthusiasm of the workers for running the enterprises well, so as to contribute to the sound development of the enterprises."

Yet, soon after the Wal-Mart victory, the ACFTU website announced: “This successful experience in setting up Wal-Mart unions is groundbreaking in that we have discovered a new line of thinking. It not only will influence other foreign and private investors to quickly abide by the law to allow unions to be established, it also brings to trade unionists a new mission. Following the new logic in setting up unions, new adjustments in union work will be needed, be it in methods, in organizational structure, ways of identifying backbone activists, down to how to use union funds….”

We are obviously observing the wavering contradictions of a mass labor organization of millions trying to define for itself a new role and trying to discover for itself a new voice that speaks more sharply to the needs of Chinese workers.

The big question is whether the announced changes in union structure and purpose enacted from “above” will be sufficient to satisfy millions of Chinese workers “below” who so desperately need an organization representing their class interests.

So far, the government is walking a delicate tight rope of enacting reform without relinquishing control.

Fresh off the success of their grand Olympic production, the state retains the stage with the home crowd anxiously awaits their next major performance of reforming the trade unions.

Hundreds of millions of desperate workers still suffering under conditions most observers describe as horribly primitive have so far been relatively quiet.

Chinese officials hope they remain in their seats.

But a “thumbs down” review might end up with a rebellious audience itself taking over the stage.

( Carl Finamore was President (ret), Air Transport Employees, Local Lodge 1781, IAMAW. He can be reached at local1781@yahoo.com. )

A Turning Point for China’s Trade Unions

http://www.clb.org.hk/en/node/100294

(The following unsigned article appears on the English section of the China Labour Bulletin 中國勞工通訊. We have by far failed to find a Chinese version of the article.)

We may have reached a crucial turning point in the history of China’s trade union movement. For the first time since 1949, trade union officials are openly stating that the union should represent the workers and no one else, while new legislation in Shenzhen places collective bargaining – previously a no-go area – at the core of the union’s work.

“The trade union is a matter for the workers themselves,” Chen Weiguang, chairman of the Guangzhou Federation of Trade Unions told a conference on 15 July 2008, adding that the role of enterprise unions must change from “persuading the boss” to “mobilizing the workers.”

Shenzhen’s Implementing Regulations (Shishi Banfa) for the Trade Union Law, enacted on 1 August, further define the union’s new role, creating a “responsible, empowered and battle-ready union” that can protect workers’ rights, according to Zhang Youquan, head of the Shenzhen Federation’s legal department. Zhang told a press conference to announce the new regulations that this was the first time the term “collective bargaining,” (jiti tanpan) as opposed to the previously-used but much weaker concept of “collective consultations” (jiti xieshang) had been applied in China’s local legislation.

As the experience of the labour movement in many other countries has shown, collective bargaining is the most effective way to protect workers’ rights and bolster the role of the trade union. Above all, it is a means of resolving labour disputes through peaceful social dialogue. Such an approach is sorely needed in China today, and China Labour Bulletin Director Han Dongfang congratulated the Shenzhen authorities on this important new initiative:

“After three decades of economic reform, we’ve reached the point when something had to be done. Today in Shenzhen we can see the worst excesses of capitalism, but also the desire of the people for social justice and – with these new regulations – the willingness of the government to move towards capitalism with a human face.”

Han pointed out that although the new legislation was “state-directed” reform, it would still have a positive effect if it enabled workers to engage in genuine collective bargaining. “At present, the most pressing need for the official union is independence from the bosses,” he said.

Significantly, the whole of chapter three of the Implementing Regulations (The Rights and Obligations of Trade Unions) does not contain a single reference to the traditional tasks outlined in the 2001 Trade Union Law, such as helping the enterprise to restore normal production in the event of a work stoppage or slowdown. Rather the regulations make it very clear that during a labour dispute the role of the trade union is to represent workers in negotiations with management. Moreover, for the first time in China, the regulations (Article 36) stipulate that grassroots trade union officials should receive a small monthly subsidy from the municipal federation that will go some way toward lessening union officials’ dependence on the enterprise for their operating funds.

Article 18 (Paragraph 3), Articles 27 to 31 inclusive, Article 44 and Article 45 all stress that collective bargaining is the core responsibility of trade unions and provide clear guidelines on how the process should work. These provisions effectively transform collective bargaining in China from a vague concept into, potentially, a genuine right that can be utilized by ordinary workers to improve their terms and conditions of employment.

Of course, the regulations are far from perfect; they still emphasize the supervision or control (jiandu) of grassroots unions by higher level unions, rather than a system of mutual supervision. Article 11, for example, specifies that workplace union officials will be elected by the union committee only after a list of candidates drawn up by the committee has been approved by the higher-level union. Also, grassroots unions still need the approval of higher level unions before they can officially register, and there is no mechanism by which lower-level officials can supervise or control irresponsible higher-level union officials.

However, the Implementing Regulations – together with the Shenzhen Labour Relations Regulations, due to go into force at the end of September – have effectively opened the door for the Shenzhen Federation of Trade Unions to transform itself into a much more effective representative of workers’ rights and interests.

Han Dongfang said: “We hope the Shenzhen Federation of Trade Unions can take practical steps to create a successful bargaining model that others can follow, thereby making collective bargaining a key part of China’s emerging civil society.”

Han stressed that change will not happen overnight but, step by step, progress is already being made. And in retrospect, 2008 may well turn out to be one of the most important years in the history of China’s trade union movement.

“Earlier this year, we saw the implementation of three new national labour laws, and now we have the introduction of collective bargaining in Shenzhen. This has all come from two factors: the growing determination of Chinese workers to stand up for their rights, and the government’s willingness to respond in a practical and positive manner,” he said.