Worker Rights and Labor Protest in China

In 2004, Shi Tao emailed details about a government plan to suppress media coverage of the 15th anniversary of the Tiananmen massacre to the Asia Democracy Foundation. The Chinese government asked Yahoo who sent the email, and Yahoo provided the information. Shi Tao was sentenced in 2005 to 10 years in prison and remains in jail. In 2007, he won the World Association of Newspapers Golden Pen of Freedom award. Yahoo also handed over the identity of Wang Xiaoning, a journalist also serving a ten year sentence. A high school senior set up a protest site at www.boycottyahoo.com. 

There’s an old labor movement saying that Theodore Roosevelt once paraphrased: “Capital is organized, and the laborer can secure proper liberty and proper treatment only if labor organizes also.” Today, a corollary is true: capital is globalized, and the laborer can secure proper liberty and proper treatment only if labor globalizes also. Corporations are orchestrating a “race to the bottom” in wages and working conditions worldwide. They cleverly call this “free trade,” when in reality it relies on the destruction of freedom through the suppression of workers’ right to organize. Labor unions in the US and Europe are starting to emphasize that global labor solidarity is essential both as a moral concern for laborers around the world and as an economic concern for union members everywhere. The following is excerpted from the China Labour Bulletin (CLB) report, Going it Alone: The Worker’s Movement in China 2007-2008.

The unprecedented wave of Chinese labor legislation [over the last two years] was a direct response to the pressure exerted by the workers’ movement over the previous decade. A government committed to maintaining social order and harmony could no longer afford to ignore the strikes and protests staged by workers on an almost daily basis across the country.

This legislative approach has made workers much more aware of their rights and they are now more willing to use the mediation, arbitration and court systems to stand up for those rights. However these systems are far from perfect and employers are increasingly fighting back, instructing lawyers of their own to exploit weaknesses in the law and evading their legal responsibilities and obligations on narrowly technical grounds.

The Need for Independent Trade Unions

The government has done little to address the economic interests of workers. The minimum wage was introduced in China in 2003, but it has rarely represented a decent or living wage, and at the end of 2008, minimum wages across the country were frozen in response to the global economic crisis. The ACFTU [The All-China Federation of Trade Unions, the government-controlled and only legally permitted “union”] too has preferred to concentrate on resolving rights violations after the fact rather than pro-actively fighting for workers’ interests, thereby inadvertently creating the conditions for protests to emerge.

Because there are next to no genuinely representative trade unions in China’s private enterprises, workers have no one to turn to when seeking to defend their economic rights and interests. But even if trade union officials were willing to stand up for the workforce against management, the lack of an effective intra-factory mechanism for resolving disputes means that grievances tend to pile up, causing disputes to escalate. When managements arbitrarily change employees’ pay and conditions without consultation, workers are often left with little option but to stage a public protest in the hope of forcing the government to intervene on their behalf.

The All-China Federation of Trade Unions is a paradox. It is the world’s largest trade union, it has almost doubled its membership over the last five years, it enjoys unprecedented Party and government patronage, and yet, for the vast majority of China’s workers, it is an irrelevance. The ACFTU cannot claim to be a credible trade union just because it has the backing of Chinese Communist Party and government. It needs the support and trust of the workers it is supposed to represent.

Trade unions are, at their most fundamental level, organizations set up by workers to uphold and fight for the collective political, social and economic rights of labor. However, as CLB showed in its report Protecting Workers’ Rights or Serving the Party: The Way Forward for China’s Trade Unions, the ACFTU’s increasing subservience to the Party and government has prevented it from fulfilling this basic mission.

The goals of the ACFTU are primarily political -- maintaining social stability and political order -- whereas the workers focus on fighting for their economic interests and defending their legal rights. The workers do not have a political agenda; indeed, their actions only become political when the authorities try to suppress them, for example by arresting and detaining labor activists or refusing workers’ demands to set up their own union branches.

Labor Protests Increase

The strikes, protests and demonstrations that have occurred in recent years do, however, reflect problems and injustices encountered by workers across China and have the potential to turn the country’s workforce into a more unified public voice. The workers are highly suspicious and mistrustful of the official trade union, all too often seeing enterprise union officials as henchmen of the bosses, and local-level unions as remote, quasi-governmental bodies with no real power or authority.

China’s constitution provides for a wide range of citizens’ rights, including the rights to freedom of information, free speech, freedom of association, and the right to demonstrate. The reality for China’s workers is that information is monopolized by management, freedom of speech is curtailed by internet censorship and the official media, the ACFTU monopolizes the right of association, and the local police decide who can demonstrate and when.

When workers are kept in the dark by management and the official media, and denied outlets for their grievances by the lack of an effective collective bargaining system and the impotence of enterprise unions, they have little option but to make those grievances public by staging strikes, demonstrations, sit-ins and blocking transport arteries. This is the only way they can get government officials to take them seriously. Seeing these protests as threats to social stability, local governments will move swiftly to resolve them through a combination of conciliation, mollification, promises, threats, physical force and criminal sanction.

Blockades of major transport arteries such as roads, bridges and railway lines are another favored tactic. At least 43 of the 100 cases [evaluated by CLB] involved blockades, including 17 in which road blocks were used as a secondary tactic after the launch of strike action. In these cases, workers left the factory and blocked local roads in an attempt to amplify the public impact of their protest and force the government to take notice. In the other 26 actions, road blockades became the primary form of protest as most of the enterprises concerned had gone bust or closed down. Sit-down protests at the factory gate, or in public squares, and protest marches were used in 18 cases considered in this report.

Enslaved Laborers

In May 2007 the parents of several hundred missing children, with the help of a local television station, exposed the existence of Shanxi’s slave labor brickyards. The parents claimed that children as young as eight years old had been kidnapped and sold for 500 yuan a head to illegal brickyard operators in Shanxi and nearby Henan. The television exposure caused a national scandal and the central government reacted swiftly in an attempt to calm public anger. A massive investigation uncovered 3,186 unlicensed brick factories employing 81,000 workers but claimed only a few hundred had been held against their will, including about a dozen children.

But as CLB’s investigation into slave labor showed, one year after the scandal’s exposure, many reportedly freed slaves had not yet returned home, some of those who had done so were forced to beg for a living, officials who failed in their duty of care were still on the job, and the slave traffickers and slave factories were still in business.

According to official figures, a total of 95 Party officials in eight Shanxi counties, including 18 senior county level officials, were subjected to a range of “disciplinary” measures in the wake of the scandal. Despite the fact that local Party officials must have been aware of, or were even directly involved in, the Shanxi slave labor scandal, none were criminally prosecuted.

The Shanxi slave labor brick factories were but an extreme example of the abuses and exploitation faced by rural migrant workers in China at the time. What the government has not yet done, however, is to rigorously enforce its own laws or empower workers to safeguard their rights and interests on a collective basis.

The political scientist James Scott defined collective protests as “everyday resistance” — localized strategies adopted by vulnerable members of society, not to overthrow an oppressive system, but to minimize their losses within it, in other words, to get by on a day-to-day basis. In China, however, workers’ protests that began as “everyday resistance” have now become a launch pad for something bigger. Workers across the country are aware of their rights and have demonstrated the ability to organize large-scale and effective protests. NGOs have sprung up to lend their support and assistance if needed, but crucially, these spontaneous, self-generating protests have brought home to workers that, in the end, they are the only ones who can truly defend their rights.

Editor's Note: For 37 years, Peacework was published by, but did not necessarily represent the views of, the American Friends Service Committee. Peacework's final printed issue (September 2009) focused on human rights violations and nonviolent activism in China. This issue was never posted to Peacework's previous AFSC-sponsored website. Since the print magazine was being closed down as part of budget cuts resulting from the financial meltdown, AFSC decided to spin Peacework off into a fully independent blogging platform, one not sponsored by AFSC. It was agreed that the contents of Peacework's archives, including the final issue, could be posted online by the newly independent Peacework. We are working to create that blog platform, and this article is one of those from that last issue.