Exploitation and protest in China PDF Print E-mail
Wednesday, 16 June 2010 21:55
“We are locked in here for almost the entire day like dogs in a kennel, strapped to our stations and clad like automatons…we are like their slaves who must pay them a measure of due homage. When we protest at their brutal treatment, they often become violent and it’s downright frightening…”

– [Translated] letter to family from Pei Pei, Foxconn factory worker, Shenzhen, China.

At Foxconn’s Longhua factory near Shenzhen, 300,000 workers in one gigantic factory complex are coerced into working incredibly long hours. One employee - who recently died from fatigue - once worked 127 hours of overtime in a month. They are paid a pitiful 900 RMB ($A162) per month.

Employees are prohibited from speaking to each other during shifts. They are not permitted to have unauthorised toilet breaks, and women workers are regularly subjected to rape, beatings and sexual harassment by company bosses.

A well-oiled security force patrols the factory, intimidating workers through violence and spot-searches. The atmosphere here is more suited to a prison than a factory. Apple CEO Steve Jobs – whose iPhones and iPods are produced here – declared these conditions “pretty nice, for a factory.”

In 2008, Apple was forced to admit that child labour had been employed to build its products in a number of factories across China. A year later, an Apple report confirmed that 23 of these factories failed to even pay the minimum wage of 3 RMB ($A0.50) per hour.

It is not only Apple; other corporate heavyweights such as Dell and Hewlett-Packard depend on these inhumane conditions in order to pump out their electronic consumer products every day.

The result of such conditions has been a spate of suicides at the Foxconn factory – 10 this year alone with three other attempts. The Sydney Morning Herald reported that management’s initial response to the deaths was to force employees to sign a pledge to not “hurt themselves…in an extreme manner.” They have since agreed, under a mountain of pressure, to increase the monthly salary, but have attached strings to the offer.

Foxconn’s crimes are only the tip of the iceberg. Lax labour laws, yellow unions and a demanding ruling Communist Party make conditions of life for workers intolerable across the country. A huge pool of unemployed migrants keeps a downward pressure on wages.

Yet recent events in China have shown that workers are not willing to accept their treatment passively. They have demonstrated tremendous bravery in standing up against the repression and violence of the Chinese bosses and state.

Over the past three weeks, workers at the Japanese-owned Honda factory in Foshan, Guangdong province, have been on strike to improve their harsh living conditions. On May 17, a group of 100 workers spontaneously went out on a one-day strike for better pay. Officials agreed to respond “in a week”.

Four days later, fears arose that Honda was recruiting new workers from the nearby city of Zhanjiang. Seven hundred more workers immediately struck; leaders made arguments for a factory-wide strike. Company officials offered small wage increases to pacify the strikers, who refused to compromise, and pulled even more of their fellow workers out to join the strike.

By May 25, the Foshan strike was having drastic effects on Honda’s operations across China, as the stoppage at the car transmission factory forced four large Honda assembly factories to shut down in Guangzhou and Wuhan.

Two days later, hundreds of workers rallied outside the gates of the factory, singing “unity is strength” and “we will not compromise.” When officials handed out letters demanding the workers sign and return to work under threat of the sack, all workers refused to sign. Instead they collectively folded the unsigned letters into paper planes and flew them around in the air.

The strikers held a mass meeting and agreed on a six-point manifesto: raise the pay by 800 RMB ($A139); increase subsidies; no further actions against workers who return to work; reorganisation of the company-backed “trade union” into one with real representatives; democratic elections for trade union positions; and reissuing of contracts.

With the strike costing the company 1 billion RMB ($A200 million), Honda offered a 24 per cent pay rise. While the majority of workers returned to work, some still defiantly remain on strike at the time of writing.

The strike is significant. Zheng Qiao, director at the China Institute of Industrial Relations in Beijing, has suggested that “such a large-scale, organised strike will force China’s labour union system to change.”

The impressive strike at Honda fits into a pattern of escalating class struggle in China. The ruling class’s desire for international competitiveness forces the working class to pay with their lives, jobs and welfare.

The regime is predicting potentially 250,000 riots, protests, and strikes that involve “mass” numbers of people this year. In the past, experts have estimated that a mass act of resistance occurs roughly every ten minutes in China, and this rate is only set to increase in the future.

Just during the course of May, countless protests occurred across the country. In Shenzhen, 2,000 workers struck at a plastics factory. Workers at a chemical fibre plant have been on strike for three weeks in Yizheng city. Cotton-spinning workers in Pingdingshan, Henan province, started work stoppages and battled with police forces trying to break their picket lines.

The accounts and stories coming out of China illustrate that regardless of the repression, regardless of the picture of an economy going through seeming endless boom, working-class people always fight back against the system that exploits them.

The struggle of workers in China has revealed that the country’s boom is one full of contradictions. It is a boom which offers little for peasants or workers. When the boom begins to peter out, we can expect even more unrest and anger.

For information about labour disputes in China, see http://www.china-labour.org.hk/en/.
 

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