One of the great strengths of the workers in factories feeding multi-national enterprises was demonstrated on 17 May 2010 when Tan Guocheng (a second generation migrant worker) pressed the emergency stop button on his assembly line at the Honda transmission factory in Foshan, and exhorted 1,900 of his co-workers mostly in their late teens and early twenties to follow him on a strike for a doubling of the basic rate. The managers moved quickly and promised to meet the workers’ demands but immediately fired Guocheng and another leader. The workers’ response was to shut down the plant in a strike that lasted two weeks, this time taking care not to identify their leaders.[2,3]
Local government, the ACFTU, and the employers combined to bring the strike to an end. Representatives from the local technical schools were brought in to threaten trainees that they would not get their diplomas if they continued the strike. The ACFTU trucked in a gang of about 100 thugs (in yellow ACFTU caps) to bully the workers back to work, but the sight of their fellow workers being beaten to the ground made other groups of workers in the plant threaten to stop work and the thugs were withdrawn.
Appreciating that solidarity is the great strength of striking workers, the ACFTU and the management met each worker separately in a joint effort to break the strike. The company promised they would not retaliate or dismiss any worker and would give a substantial pay increase, but whilst a few workers capitulated, the great majority said no.[4]
Honda, like most multinationals relies on a long and complex supply chain and in two weeks, the strike at the Foshan transmission plant had paralysed Honda’s operations in the whole of China. Finally, Honda offered pay rises of between 30% and 50% and added a housing subsidy of 50 yuan per month. This split the strikers who returned to work on 31 May, but it was not a complete victory, as the two sacked leaders were not reinstated.
The Honda strike was not an isolated incident. There had been a significant level of industrial strife in China over the preceding period, the most violent being two major incidents at SOEs about to be privatised. In the second week of August 2009, thousands of workers organised a protest successfully opposing privatisation of the state-owned Linzhou Steel Corporation, in Anyang City, Henan province. This action involved the workers kidnapping the state official sent to oversee the takeover. Many of these workers were to lose their jobs, but all were to lose their pensions, medical care and housing allowances. Fengbao Iron and Steel, the private group to which Linzhou Steel was going to be sold at less than half its estimated value is owned by Li Guangyuan, who started his business empire by taking over a TVE using his position as village Party secretary to secure a good deal.[5] Protests were all the more forceful because Fengbao has a poor record of social insurance payments, unpaid wages and the illegal seizure of farmland.[6]
Around the same time there was a serious strike and riots at the state-owned Tonghua Iron & Steel Corporation, in Jilin province. The Corporation was to be sold to a private company, the Beijing-based Jianlong Heavy Machinery Group, and the workforce reduced from about 30,000 to approximately 5,000. With this announcement, a spontaneous stoppage of work and a mass demonstration including local residents and workers from other plants occurred. The local authorities responded by mobilising thousands of police who engaged in street battles to break up the protest, during which the new general manager appointed by Jianlong, Chen Guojon, was killed. The regional government was forced to cancel the privatisation of the company and bring it back under state ownership.[7]
Irrespective of China’s heavy censorship of Facebook, Twitter, and the internet generally, word of such events circulates and one incident will influence and even spark another.[8] During April and May 2014, thanks to chatrooms, blogging and text messages, a strike of previously unknown magnitude and length broke out in six factories in Dongguan owned by the Taiwanese multinational Yue Yuen. On 14 April as many as 48,000 workers downed tools over severance pay, wage arrears and non-payment of medical insurance, pension contributions, injury compensation, housing allowance, and other so-called fringe benefits. The public activities of both strikers and the police were immediately reported on the internet for all to see.
In terms of the new capitalist China this was an historic event. Police were called in to break the strike and the internet carried videos of strikers being beaten. Almost immediately, pickets were thrown up around stores selling Yue Yuen products (such as Adidas, Nike, and Timberland) in Los Angeles, Manchester, Melbourne, New York, Oxford, San Francisco and Taiwan.[9] The outcry had an effect and in an unprecedented step the government ordered the factory to increase wages and pay its social security contributions. Simultaneously two independent militants, Zhang Zhiru and Lin Dong, arrested and held in jail for two days for assisting the strikers, were released.
Public sympathy and media attention have also made the authorities less quick to arrest and haul workers away.[10] Some companies, such as Honda, have international reputations to protect and their sales would suffer if they were seen to endorse the use of force to repress striking workers, especially where those strikers are women.
Unofficial strikes (those not organised by or approved by the ACFTU) have hit a number of multinational firms in the manufacturing sector, from Foxconn to IBM, Honda, Cooper Tire and Rubber, Walmart, and Microsoft. According to the Hong Kong-based China Labour Bulletin,[11] the number of “collective actions” from July to September 2014 was nearly double compared with the same period the previous year and in the first quarter of 2015 the figures for strikes rose by another 15%. Importantly, “collective actions” are spreading beyond China’s manufacturing centre of Guangdong, where the number of strikes has remained more or less constant, to inland China and major cities such as Wuhan and Chengdu. These movements are an important indication of what is to come.[12]
Mining is another industry where the regime has destroyed any basis of support amongst the workers. Coal supplies almost three-quarters China’s energy needs and the coal industry was one of the first to be privatised when, at the end of the last century, the central government closed down or contracted out to private entrepreneurs most small and middle-sized state-owned coal mines. Soon after, many large-scale state-owned mines were also contracted out to private operators.
For decades the leaders of China have pleaded with China’s coal miners to increase production as a service to the country, This culminated in 2008 with President Hu Jintao’s visit to the coal fields of Datong in Shanxi Province, the heart of China’s coal country, where he pleaded with miners to ensure essential supplies to guarantee the steady and rapid development of the economy. At the time energy shortages and rising coal prices made coal mining very lucrative. The apparently insatiable demand for coal in China attracted unscrupulous business people eager for profit and unconcerned with the lives of others, so that mine outputs greatly exceeding safe production levels.[13]
The workers and the ACFTU responded with enthusiasm, and in a spirit of co-operation agreed to accept the government line that privatisation would increase production. The new operators and subcontractors were allowed to hire inexperienced rural migrants to work in the mines. The result was an increase in production and profitability, but a simultaneous drop in wage rates and a catastrophic collapse in safety standards. According to government figures over 50,000 miners have died in accidents since the turn of the century, peaking at 7,000 in 2002. These are the reported data, the real figures are much higher. Local authorities conceal accidents or under-report fatalities to the higher authorities, especially in cases of accidents involving fewer than 10 deaths when mine operators have been known to move the corpses to other locations and pay the victims’ families compensation if they promise to keep quiet.
The government’s mine privatisation programme and its licensing and approval procedures are an open invitation to corruption. Collusion between mine owners, operators and local government officials to cover up accidents and evade punishment is now widespread and blatant, so that mine operators brazenly flout the law. Li Tieying, Vice chairman of the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress (NPC), acknowledged that: “…corruption was behind almost every accident that caused exceptional loss of life.” Under the present system the safety interests of miners are either ignored or openly violated. Militants are already arguing that the only effective way to protect the lives and rights of miners is to develop democratically elected and truly representative workers’ organisations that can stand up to the currently overwhelming power of management and safeguard working conditions at the coalface.
However, the coal industry has been hard hit by the slowdown in China’s industrial expansion, output dropped by nearly 5% in the first three months of 2015 alone, with many companies now posting losses rather than profits. The consequences for coal-face miners followed the now established pattern of non-payment of wages, wage cuts, unpaid wage arrears, lay-offs, failure to make the statutory compensation payments, etc.[14]
Workers from China’s coal mines are doubly angry; at being fooled by the government, and having to shoulder the results of the economic slowdown. There have been protest strikes and mass demonstrations, but the industry continues to contract because the cause is overproduction on an international scale, with a consequent drop in the price of coal. Redcar lost its steel plant and some 2,500 jobs, but the Longmei Group, a state-owned Chinese coal company in north-eastern China’s Heilongjiang province, announced in April 2015 it would lay-off half its workforce of 240,000, the single biggest job cut in China for years. Immediately several thousand protesting coal miners took to the streets in the city of Qitaihe. Scuffles with the police broke out when workers refused to disperse. The protest reportedly continued sporadically for at least one week.[15]
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Robertson, G and Teitlebaum, E. Labor Protest in Developing Countries, American Journal of Political Science, 55(3) 665-677, July 2011.
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Martin, J. w.m.com, 2010.
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Ibid.
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Ibid.
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China Daily, 15 August 2015.
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Ibid.
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CLB, 20 March 2013, clb.org.hk.
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The Guardian, 12 June 2014.
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Wenfang Tang and Qing Yang, The Chinese Urban Caste System in Transition The China Quarterly, No. 196, 2008, pp. 759-779.
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CLB, www.clb.hk.
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CLB 7 April 2015, clb.org.hk.
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Yi Xi, Labornotes, 16 October, 2014.
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CLB, 13 Feb, 2015, clb.org.hk.
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Yi Xi, Op. cit.