Beyond the Factory Gates

Like the young workers we spoke with at Foxconn, those in the smaller factory compound complained there is little to do with the time they do get off. The area is largely barren of entertainment. Those who work all day in electronics cannot afford the goods they produce. From early morning to late at night, many workers could be seen sitting in groups in front of television sets at small stores in back alleys or crowded on the sidewalks around larger department store window displays. Along with the occasional dingy arcade with Internet access, videos, and board games, these are among the few free or low-cost forms of entertainment for hundreds of thousands of young people. Male workers said they often just walk around and see women friends. But the conditions of work and life make it very difficult to maintain stable relationships. One low-wage worker we talked with is married — a rare exception — and has a child. But his wife works two to three hours away, and it costs ten yuan just to get there, limiting his visits. Another has a woman friend, but no money for a house, and talked about how hard it is to start a family. A thirty-four-year-old worker in the dorm room we visited has a wife and child back in his village. He seemed virtually an “old man” surrounded by the universally younger faces around him. Though he only visits his family twice a year, it would be too expensive to bring them to live with him in Shenzhen, given the high fees for education — even the least costly primary school charges a thousand yuan per semester, more than his monthly wages.

For some, life in the dorms is either not available or too restrictive. But very few of those who escape factory work experience the “glory” of getting rich. Some villagers have built apartment buildings on their “family plots” and rent rooms for 800–900 yuan a month to factory workers, becoming wealthy landlords. Others prefer to do odd jobs on the street, rather than submit to the regimen of the plants and dorms. A few have small stores or open stalls selling books, videos, and DVDs — in many cases, probably pirated. Most of these are expressions of the new values of “get rich quick” marketization and “opening to the world”: self-improvement materials, “how to succeed in business” guides, love stories, etc., including such U.S. television shows as “Desperate Housewives” and “Sex and the City,” dubbed in Chinese. We were told that most women prefer the latter, while men go for Kung Fu movies.

But for many, sexual exploitation in a world of macho fantasy is all too real. At the entrance to a large and fancy foot and back massage parlor, six very young women from rural provinces were lined up in uniforms as “greeters” at ten at night. Establishments of this kind are common in China today, and while many are legitimate operations offering music and refreshments — though almost entirely to a male clientele — others shade off into the now rampant prostitution, which also depends on a constant flow of young women from rural areas. In Shenzhen, three thousand prostitutes and karaoke hostesses, left without work after a crackdown, protested publicly until broken up by armed police (Guardian, January 21, 2006).

Spontaneous Combustion

Whether inside or outside the plants, legal protections for workers are severely limited, and frequently undermined by official favoritism and corruption. Those in a small factory compound said the bosses just tell them that they “volunteered,” and if they do not like the conditions they can leave. Their main dissatisfaction is the holding back of wages. The problem of migrants not getting paid is common across China — billions of yuan are owed them. In desperate protest, some even commit suicide, a favorite method among construction workers being to hang themselves from cranes. A migrant owed four months back pay complained and was fired. Two weeks later he used a knife to kill the boss, and was sentenced to death. A young technician said that the rich steal millions and send it abroad, while the poor steal a few thousand yuan and are quickly condemned.

In an attempt to deal with this kind of criticism, and to prevent more highly organized opposition from developing among the workers, a recent law addresses the unpaid wages problem, setting up a pay dispute resolution process. With this legal backing, local authorities have on occasion come into the smaller plants to investigate complaints. They even strung up a banner in the small compound with the slogan: “Implement and apply the labor law and wipe out back wages.” Workers can go to the labor relations office too, but its capacity to help is limited by the collusion between government and business. Without enforcement by labor unions within the plants themselves, its efforts are largely worthless. In general, therefore, workers just move on if things get too bad. Some larger Shenzhen enterprises, such as Foxconn, do have complaint procedures but if a grievance is denied, there is nothing the worker can do.

With workers lacking union protection, labor actions are largely spontaneous. There are small scale, mild protests, such as slowdowns and work stoppages, virtually every day, often triggered by relatively minor incidents which become the final straw for the abused workforce. In one case, a manager defaced a work card after a conflict, and two thousand workers walked out. Another incident, one of the largest recently, saw three thousand employees block traffic in the city for one hour, over a Hong Kong-owned electronics company paying wages below the legal minimum and holding back even these for a long time. In that case, the government intervened and forced a raise — a not infrequent outcome, as the authorities often prefer a quiet settlement to an escalation of unrest. At another company there was a strike because the workers were forced to put in endless overtime, as much as from 8 am until midnight, with only two yuan per hour extra. Some 2,100 workers out of 3,000 in twenty-one plants refused to return for a week after New Years. The company finally offered pay raises and decreased hours, but the workers still refused to return without written guarantees. In the end, the company gave new contracts, but the 2,100 who struck were fired.

Minimum Gains

Even while we were visiting the city, however, the situation had begun to change, due to growing pressures on the government, the official labor organization, and the enterprises. In part, this resulted from more and more workers “voting with their feet.” For months before our visit, there were reports of a reverse movement of labor out of the coastal regions, either to take jobs at the many factories springing up in the interior, or even to return to the villages. There, a change in national policies, including an end to the main agricultural land tax, had relieved some of the worst economic burdens, making farming once again seem more viable. Some of the coastal enterprises are themselves moving inland, both to follow the work force and to take advantage of lower pay rates and other incentives that authorities offer in the interior. Other enterprises are leaving China altogether, moving to Vietnam, among other neighboring countries, in a regional “race to the bottom” of low wages and poor working conditions. But despite numerous stories about how pay in Shenzhen and the other main export areas had been driven up as a result, the effect has been very marginal, according to those we talked with, in part because of the ability of the plants to move.

While there may be pockets of labor shortages, especially of more skilled workers, the decline in the coastal migratory force should not be exaggerated, as new laborers from the rural areas continue to stream into the city, where almost any pay level in the factories exceeds what they can earn back home. At Foxconn, as at other dominant companies in Shenzhen, crowds of young people still surround the kiosk at its gate seeking employment interviews. Many have trained specifically for these jobs, and need to quickly find work to pay for their education.

Among those we met there were twenty-five very young migrants from rural Hunan province, who had just stepped out of two minibuses that had brought them to the city. They looked to be only fifteen or sixteen years old, and some appeared even younger. Since the legal minimum age for work in the factories is sixteen, they said that they were “about that.” Their vague answers were both understandable and suspicious — it is easy to get forged papers in a country where pirated goods of all kinds, including phony documents, are everywhere. Most of these newly arrived job seekers had only one suitcase or backpack, along with a bucket of cleaning goods and other items for daily life. They had paid ten thousand yuan for two years of basic technical training at a vocational high school. There they studied computers, electronics repair, and English. They had come to Shenzhen with their principal and two assistants, who would help them to find jobs. When asked about being on their own in the city, one quoted an old saying about “traveling over lakes and mountains.” All said they missed home.

With new job seekers like these arriving every day, the upward movement of wages is relatively limited. Legal base pay rates are set by the Shenzhen government, though a few companies bid wages upward to attract and keep workers. But there is nevertheless enough growing pressure that the local authorities have more than once over the past few years raised the minimum wage — already one of the two highest on the mainland, together with Shanghai. Many companies, however, were already finding ways to avoid the effects of the higher-pay requirements. Foxconn is trying to cut back the amount of overtime work under the new minimum wage law, and according to a labor rights NGO, “even the housing benefit is in danger. Some 2,000 employees have already left the factory after learning that they would be charged for their rooms...just as the minimum wages were set to increase” (San Francisco Chronicle, July 16, 2006).

(To continue...)

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Originally published in Monthly Review

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