One worker’s tale of
exploitation and fighting back in the new China.
Under China’s labor management
system, independent unionism is strictly banned, and the state’s official trade
union body monopolizes worker representation. That means that all of China’s
806,498,521 workers are barred from forming independent organizations to
agitate for their interests — in an economy where the poorest 25 percent of
households own
just 1 percent of the country’s total wealth, and where long hours, safety
hazards, and authoritarian management define life in the factories.
This official antagonism has
not stopped the emergence of workers’ resistance. The number of strikes has
been increasing over the past two decades, and as Eli Friedman
wrote last year, “on a typical day anywhere from half a dozen to several dozen
strikes are likely taking place.” Workers’ rights NGOs, while operating from a
distinct disadvantage, have become increasingly involved and visible.
The Chinese state denies the
legality and even existence of these growing strikes. Thus the landscape of
coverage and analysis has been sparse.
China
on Strike: Narratives of Workers’ Resistance has arrived to fill that gap.
It was compiled by Chinese university students, workers, and activists who
embedded themselves in workers’ communities and workplaces, hoping not only to
record their stories but to outline a roadmap of resistance to other workers.
The following excerpt serves
both as a record of one person’s working life and of a particular strike in the
southern metropolis of Shenzhen; its underlying causes, how workers developed a
consensus about what to do and what to demand, and its ultimate outcome.
It both encapsulates the
extraordinary circumstances ordinary Chinese workers face and shows the
transformative potential of China’s expansive labor unrest.
I am from Guizhou Province and
was born in 1980. I am the third of six children in my family. I left home to
find work because I had little education and my family was poor.
At first I did well in primary
school, scoring 80 percent or 90 percent in exams. So I skipped a grade, but my
scores started to slide. In those days I had to work from 5 AM until school
started at 8 AM. It was very tiring. I dropped out in fifth grade. I also
felt that there was too much of a burden on my mother. I therefore did not want
to continue schooling, but rather try to support my younger sister’s studies.
After I dropped out of school
I secretly got a job in a local coal mine, where I was paid 450 yuan for
fourteen days’ work. One day, at 8 AM there was a methane gas explosion, and
four of us were buried more than twenty meters underground. Rescuers dug
toward us from outside, and we dug toward them from inside. We had no food, and
the digging was exhausting. It was after 5 AM the following morning that we
were finally rescued.
All four of us had injuries. I
had been struck by a rock on the back of the head. Another person’s arm was
broken, a third person had some flesh torn from his back, and the fourth person
had been struck by a rock on the forehead. Fortunately, none of these injuries
was serious.
The boss paid our medical
expenses, but gave us no compensation. My nephew held the boss’s only child, a
three-year-old boy, out of a fourth-floor window and threatened to drop
him if the boss didn’t pay up. The boss hastily agreed. I received fifty yuan,
and the others received a hundred yuan each.
In 1996 I left home in search
of work. I first went to Hainan Island to look for my elder brother who was
there, but I couldn’t find him. I had to sneak across to the island.
I spent a miserable New Year
alone living in a brick factory. I told the boss that I would eat at his place
and I would work for him after the New Year. He said it didn’t matter and I
could eat with him as long as I liked. The boss needed employees then, and
I suppose he thought I could help out. I was sixteen years old, and I couldn’t
actually do much work.
On the third day after the New
Year I ran away, and found my older brother the following day. He had a child
who was just six months old, and I looked after him until he was eighteen
months. Then I got a job on a banana plantation. I helped with the
weeding, spraying the banana crop, and generally looking after the trees. My
monthly salary was 400 yuan for eight-hour days. I worked from dawn to
dusk, and grew vegetables for myself and my brother to eat. I also raised more
than forty chickens. In this way I was able to save 300 yuan a month to send
home.
In 1999 I went to Shenzhen. I
didn’t originally intend to go there, but my older sister persuaded me to go,
saying that you could earn 600 yuan a month. I thought that wasn’t bad, so I
went.
In 2000 I couldn’t find a job.
Apart from meals, I didn’t dare leave the house because my identification card
had not been processed and I was afraid of getting picked up by the police for
having no temporary residence permit. Not having an identification card
was one problem; another was that one needed personal connections to get a job.
I tried many places, but couldn’t find anything. I was checked for my
temporary residence permit many times, and I met both good and bad people. Once
I met a person from my hometown who took pity on me and gave me ten yuan to buy
food.
On another occasion my nephew
and I were stopped on a bridge by a police patrol. My nephew ran away, but it
cost my relatives fifty yuan to get me released. Another time I was
arrested with six or seven others and they demanded 200 yuan. We protested that
we didn’t have that much money. In fact, we all had a bit of money, and I had
hidden 50 yuan in my socks. Anyway, they finally had us weeding a
flowerbed. When we had finished weeding and realized that there was nobody
watching us, we ran away.
In 2000 I handed over 1,000
yuan to get a job at K Factory. It is a Hong Kong–invested company that made
electric toothbrushes, foot-massage basins, electric cookers, and the like. It
had a workforce of more than eight thousand.
The employment arrangement was
working for twenty-six days a month, eight hours a day, for a basic wage of
twenty-three yuan a day. There were two shifts, and mealtimes were counted as
overtime. We got a new work uniform every six months for free. Management
issued one bag of laundry powder and a pair of gloves every month. At that time
I got to know a man from my hometown, and he had some connections with both the
police and some of the company’s managers.
He made money by introducing
people to the factory. The K Factory never recruited workers directly, it got
them all through this guy and another person from Sichuan.
As a result, most people at
the factory came from Sichuan or Guizhou Province. Others were from a couple of
cities in northern Guangdong Province, and were also introduced to the factory
by their fellow townspeople. Basically there was no way to get a job there
by oneself. I heard that people who got into the factory on their own had all
been fired.
I worked hard there, and was
soon promoted to become the head of my work team and later section head.
Because I didn’t have much education, management provided me with an
assistant. In that factory the head of a work team was in charge of
sixteen machines, and each machine had two or three people tending it. A
section head supervised several work team heads.
Secretly Planning a Strike
At that time the canteen food
situation was very bad. We often found insects in the rice. I once bit into
one, and never wanted to go to the factory canteen again. But after eating
instant noodles for three days, I was driven back to the canteen.
Another problem was that the
factory charged us twenty cents for a bucket of hot water. That came to twenty
or thirty yuan a month. Everybody was dissatisfied with this.
On one night shift five
work-team leaders (two men and three women) met to discuss going on strike.
They came to me, and we went into the office to talk. Three or four assistants
saw us and wanted to join. We discussed blocking a national highway and
envisaged what kinds of difficulties could crop up and how to handle them:
If the police, beat, injure,
or kill any of our people we should handle the situation together.
If any of us falls down while
we are blocking the road we should immediately pick him/her up, otherwise
he/she might get trampled on, possibly fatally.
If the organizers of the
strike are discovered or if there are other problems, the two male work-team
leaders shall shoulder the penalty. After the strike is over, an appeal will be
made for donations to compensate them.
As it turned out, what we had
imagined beforehand closely corresponded to what actually happened. In
addition, we discussed whether we wanted to let everyone else who worked at the
factory know what we were planning. In particular, we did not want those ass-kissers
to know, in case they leaked the plan. If we mishandled the situation, we could
lose our livelihood.
At the time there were two
shifts. The assistants and the work-team leaders jointly printed a number of
flyers, which read, “Tomorrow at 8 AM converge on the national
highway!” Some work-team leaders told their people to stop work for ten
minutes. More than three hundred workers pasted up flyers, covering four
machine shops. They even stuck them up at the boss’s office.
When people asked what this was
all about they were told that the office had arranged it. When the workers came
to ask how we had arranged it, we didn’t dare explain in detail. We only said
we should all go to the national highway and create a disturbance to demand
better conditions from management. From the point of view of safety, if
anyone fell down she was to be instantly picked up. We didn’t dare explain too
clearly in case the action failed and the workers blamed us organizers.
The Course of the Strike
The next morning after the
night shift finished, we streamed toward the factory gate, taking the security
guards completely by surprise. We pushed the security guards aside and forced
open the gate. The guards, fearing violence, locked the gate behind us. With
banners at the front, we headed straight for the national highway and
completely shut it down.
Most of the workers were keen
to see the uproar, and many did not know the purpose of the rush to the
national highway. They saw people running toward it and followed them. It
was said that the drivers who were stopped by the blockade were not resentful
or upset. Some on a stopped bus slept, while others climbed down and smoked.
There was trouble at the start
of the demonstration when four patrolling officers saw us pouring onto the national
highway, and shouted, “What are you doing?” They came up and started
beating people with their truncheons. They injured some young women, who
started biting their assailants. One patrolling officer was bitten on the
face. There weren’t too many of us young men, and we were scattered
throughout the melee. So we couldn’t bring our full force to bear.
There were too many people
involved in the chaos, and a dozen or so were injured. Some of the injured were
trampled on and hurt. The people in the middle were continuously being pushed
around. Eventually, firefighters, public security officers, and even some
local policemen came. Police cars were parked four hundred meters away, but we
didn’t see anyone with guns. Because there were so many workers there, they
would not be able to do much if someone grabbed their gun. Officials from the
labor bureau turned up with money to send the injured to the hospital for
treatment.
After the police arrived they
began pushing us to the side of the road. They didn’t hit us, but used their
truncheons to form a solid wall pushing us back. The front line was formed of
women who didn’t dare to resist. Had they started to hit people we
probably wouldn’t have been able fight back properly against policemen who had
professional training. After two or three hours we had been gradually forced to
the side of the road. Then we all trickled back to the factory.
Back to the Factory
and Negotiations
Those of us who
had blocked the road were all night-shift workers. There
were some people on the day shift who didn’t know what the fuss was all about
but nevertheless joined in.
Two thousand factory workers
had been locked in their dormitories by the local police. There was a policeman
at every gate and staircase, probably about four hundred altogether. The
young women were particularly angry. Anything they could get their hands on in
their dormitories they threw around, throwing some at the policemen. Some
four hundred to five hundred workers went to the canteen and dumped all the
food for more than eight thousand people on the floor.
When we returned from blocking
the road one of the managers bawled through a loudspeaker, “If anybody has a
grievance, speak out!” He then demanded that we send a delegation for
negotiations. For the time being we selected a young man who was the head of
the factory personnel department, a man of some education, to represent us.
Since everybody was in favor,
he had no choice but to comply, and the boss asked him to come and negotiate. A
pay raise was the first item for discussion. The head of the personnel
department asked us what our demands were. The people in front said that they
wanted a wage increase, and the people behind shouted their approval.
The head of the personnel
department then passed this information on to the manager. The manager offered
an increase to twenty-five yuan a day and asked whether we would accept it.
Then the issue of hot water
was brought up. The manager said he didn’t know that we had to pay for hot
water, and immediately promised that we would get it free from then on. He
admitted that there was a problem with the canteen food and promised that from
then on we could choose to eat in the canteen or not. Those who didn’t eat in
the canteen would not be charged for canteen food.
When we returned to our
workplaces nobody did any work that day. The work-team leaders called a
meeting. The manager did not intervene, but attempted to persuade the work-team
leaders, who in turn tried hard to convince the other employees.
On the evening of the day of
the strike we got extra food, with plenty of meat dishes. Instead of the usual
two dishes, we got four dishes. On the third and fourth days we got a bottle of
cola and two apples each. Also on the day of the strike, the manager sent
office managers to look after the young women who were recovering from their
injuries in the hospital. When their injuries were healed they were
reinstated at the factory and received better treatment. None of them wanted to
leave.
Results of the Strike
After the strike, conditions
at the factory definitely improved:
Food hygiene in the canteen
was improved. There were no more insects in the food. There was a fifty yuan
reward for every insect found in the food. When a female worker found an insect
in her food a security guard took a photo of it, and the same afternoon she was
told to go and pick up 50 yuan.
Whereas previously money was
deducted from our wages for canteen meals whether we ate them or not, now we
were not charged for meals we didn’t eat.
Hot water was now free of
charge.
The daily wage was raised from
twenty-three yuan to twenty-five yuan, and the twenty-six-day working month was
reduced to twenty-two days.
A Japanese manager was brought
in, who put a stop to eating fruit and consuming drinks in the workshops. This
was because bits of fruit and drops of drinks on the floors attracted
mosquitoes and flies, there by affecting the product. In addition, the
dormitory floors were only swept once a week.
Because the workers under the
striking work-team leaders understood the situation well, they were in the
forefront when it came to blocking the national highway. They were also the
first to come forward when the manager called for negotiators.
Some work-team leaders and
office assistants stuck to their work and refused to join the road blockade.
When two male work-team leaders were arrested in their office, more than a
thousand workers surrounded the police cars that came to take them away.
But they eventually took them
away anyway. When we went back to the factory we refused to start work again
for another two days.
The manager asked the police
to release the arrestees. When they were released the factory dismissed them
without pay. Almost every worker contributed five yuan to compensate the
two strike leaders who had organized the strike. Those who did not contribute
would be looked down upon.
The involvement of three women
work-team leaders and office assistants was kept secret so they were not
arrested. Later, they left the factory one by one perhaps because they were
afraid. I also left to look after my wife. A general manager with many years of
experience also resigned voluntarily because of the strike.
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