Bottom-Up Activism

Without unionization, the largely migrant workforce has no effective protection. Independent labor organizations are outlawed and must largely work “underground.” Government-sponsored unions, the only available alternative, have largely failed the migrant workforce. There are some within the ranks of the official federation who do take their responsibilities seriously. But in general, the ACFTU has been passive in the face of employer resistance, and has gone along with a top-down “company union” approach. This attitude on the part of the official unions is a remnant of their role under socialism, when they had a meaningful say in how state-owned factories were run, and served as “transmission belts” between workers and management, helping to administer a full set of lifelong and virtually free housing, health, and education benefits, and job and retirement securities — the so-called “iron rice bowl.”

Once the socialist system was dismantled, however, the unions were left, like the government itself, with monopoly power but with neither the responsibility to guarantee the security and well-being of the workforce, nor the contractual and shop floor activism typical of the bourgeois unionism model. Since the start of “market reforms” most trade union leaders have served as little more than enforcers of the new capitalistic regimen, often involving corruption and collusion with managers and local officials, especially in the privatization of formerly state-owned enterprises.

In most such cases, especially when foreign firms agree to set up in-house unions to meet official regulations, management appoints the “leaders,” or even fills such top posts themselves. ACFTU locals receive 2 percent of the total payroll, part of which goes to its leadership, and the rest supposedly to support activities for workers — a prescription, under current conditions, for payoffs, favoritism, and the siphoning-off of funds. As a result, there is widespread cynicism toward labor leaders, a view that taints even those who are honest worker representatives.

It is significant, therefore, that a second major change occurring over the past few months is the rapid spread of ACFTU unionization into leading foreign enterprises — a response to growing labor discontent, fear that independent unions will fill the vacuum, and outside pressure. With state-owned enterprises closing or privatized and the shift to unrepresented migrant labor, the official union has seen the percentage of workers that it represents rapidly fall and its influence decline. Only by organizing more seriously in the nonunion foreign sector, and among migrants, could it regain its former position. The government too pushed ACFTU to move, under pressure from exposures of poor working conditions and fear of a rise in labor protests. Though most of its recent unionizing campaign is still top down, there are also cases of bottom-up organizing that could mark the beginning of a new phase in its activism.

The breakthrough came at Wal-Mart — strange as that may seem given its virulently anti-union position. But its very stubbornness proved its undoing. Had it cooperated with the ACFTU early on, it could have set up the typical “company union.” Instead, it stalled the many attempts to organize its rapidly growing number of stores. Faced with this stubborn resistance, local ACFTU activists took the unprecedented step of going to the workers themselves and beginning to sign them up. Since legally, any twenty-five employees can form a union, which must then be officially recognized, this proved an unusually easy route to organizing Wal-Mart — the only such success in any country. On July 28, 2006, the first of its stores was unionized in Quanzhou City, Fujian province, using this bottom-up organizing method (Anita Chan, “Organizing Wal-Mart,” Japan Focus, September 8, 2006). The organization of more Wal-Mart stores — twenty-two out of sixty in just three weeks — and even its national headquarters in Shenzhen, where a twenty-seven-year-old was elected head of the union committee, followed, and the movement spread to other companies.

Among them was Foxconn, which had similarly stonewalled earlier attempts to get it to cooperate in recognizing official top-down unionization of its plants. Following the successful model at Wal-Mart, the ACFTU, encouraged by the local government, tried once again to unionize its Longhua plants. Moving atypically on a Sunday, the last day of 2006, organizers went into the factory district, quickly signed up 118 workers, and immediately announced the establishment of the union. Neither management nor the Communist Party secretary were informed — though the company may decide after all to set up its own union, raising the prospect of two competing “official” locals. A positive response from the national labor organization suggests that these recent successes have resonated among the more honest trade unionists in the federation. Such efforts have begun to alter the image of the Chinese labor movement abroad. Significantly, some top U.S. union leaders have broken with the Cold War AFL-CIO attitude of regarding the ACFTU as nothing but a government front and refusing to deal with it. In May 2007, a high-level Change to Win delegation met with the ACFTU in China.

The growing pressure for greater labor activism has been compounded by recent major scandals. First was the exposure of the use of virtual slave workers in the brick kilns and coal mines of Shanxi and Henan provinces. Many of these were teenagers or even younger, some kidnapped or mentally retarded, and most badly treated or even physically abused. Even in a country now hardened to the mistreatment of laborers, the horrors of this situation shocked the national consciousness. This scandal is only the tip of the iceberg of child labor. In Shenzhen, for example, a November 2006 investigation found two hundred children under sixteen in just a single electronics plant, Yonghong. Many were students on summer jobs, virtual prisoners of a deal between the employer and their school, in part to pay off fees they owed. In the midst of other such worker scandals, news broke of the adulteration of a series of Chinese products, leading to costly recalls and the restriction or banning of some imports into the United States and other countries.

To head off further blows, the government passed a new and long promised Labor Contract Law to grant workers additional rights. Directed especially at the condition of migrants, its provisions require employers to provide written contracts to each worker, convert many temporary jobs into more long-term employment with additional benefits, and allow the ACFTU to bargain collectively. The new law passed over the vigorous objections and lobbying of foreign employers, including those from the United States, who protested that it will undercut their main reason for investing in China — a pool of compliant low-wage labor, largely powerless to alter their work conditions. Chinese courts have also, on occasion, begun to enforce worker rights, such as payment for overtime, more vigorously.

The impact of these legislative and legal actions is likely to be mixed. Larger companies may actually benefit from their relatively greater ability to meet the new requirements. But they may suffer losses in other ways. When Foxconn, anticipating implementation of the new labor law, announced that it would offer permanent contracts to employees who had worked at its plants for more than eight years, the value of its stock fell sharply. Huawei, in contrast, was among those who “bribed or coerced long-standing employees to take early retirement or voluntary redundancy.” It persuaded “about 7,000 employees who had been with the company for more than eight years to resign. In return, the employees received a lump sum of one month’s salary for every year of employment, plus one additional month’s salary, and were allowed to rejoin the company on a short-term contract.” The other companies simply closed or moved out of the country (Wall Street Journal, December 14, 2007, and January 25, 2008.

In May 2008, authorities found a child-labor ring in Dongguan city, another major electronics and clothing center in Guangdong, “rescuing” about a hundred workers, most of them between thirteen and fifteen years old. They also announced that they were “investigating thousands of enterprises suspected of using child workers abducted from Sichuan and sold into slavery” (New York Times, May 2, 2008).

Nevertheless, there are serious doubts how much will change, since any major transformation will require systematic legal enforcement and determined organizing by the ACFTU — both lacking in the past. In an ominous sign of local reaction, there has been a series of brutal physical attacks in Shenzhen in recent months on migrant worker advocates, and the trashing of their offices, forcing one of the leading groups to close its doors (Citizens’ Rights and Livelihood Watch, November 21, 2007, China Labor News Translations, http://www.clntranslations.org).

 

Rural and Urban Alienation

Even in the best case, a more activist ACFTU can offer nothing more than very partial amelioration of the severe exploitation of the Chinese working class today. The new unionism, such as it may be, will face very rapidly changing conditions. The transformations now sweeping the economy of China and its working classes are profound, and some of the most telling developments are below the surface. Perhaps the most important is the change in attitude among young migrants. Though many still see themselves as peasants transported to the city, others have no intention of returning to the countryside. Most striking, while some continue to send money back home, a large percentage do not. This is a profound change. The older generation of migrants saw their urban labor as a sideline to their farms. Young migrant workers today increasingly see work in the cities as a career. This could mean the permanent urbanization of hundreds of millions of rural youth, and a sharp drop in the billions of yuan sent back each year to the countryside, exacerbating the long-term crisis there.

The alienation of young people from the countryside carries over into the cities, even among many who are doing relatively well. A well-dressed technician in his twenties conveyed in striking language the forces that are tearing not only at the rural areas, but even at his own more privileged middle-class urban stratum. He is an employee of a high-tech firm and travels all over China repairing office machines and  was flying at company expense to the mountain province of Yunnan on an all-paid group vacation. Yet his origins were in the countryside, and he had not forgotten where he came from or the hard life of those he left behind. His parents are farmers near Suzhou, in Jiangsu province, on the east coast close to Shanghai. But there is little farming left in that area. They tried selling eggs, but found there was “too much competition, prices fell and costs kept rising,” and they went back to subsistence farming. The family spent fifty thousand yuan on his high school training, yet he still cannot afford college.

It is perhaps an ominous sign for President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao, with their ideological calls to create a “harmonious society” by reducing social tensions, that this young technician was not only highly class conscious, but strikingly angry and burning with a desire for radical change. What was most startling about his critique was not so much the details, but the depth of his alienation from so many aspects of what is happening in China today — the rural economic crisis, governmental and enterprise corruption, abusive working conditions, class polarization, lack of democratic control, and even official positions on global issues like the war in Iraq — and his willingness to state this to a randomly encountered foreigner. Among his concerns was a lack of social stability that he attributed to the “get rich quick” mentality that is pervasive now, and the growing class polarization. He complained that the top 1-5 percent are rich, while the bottom 50 percent have little. He added that the divisions are also geographic with the saying: “the East of China is like the United States and Europe, while the West is like Africa.”

The main problems for such members of the younger generation are inadequacies in schooling, medical care, and housing. Higher education has opened up to more and more children of peasant and worker families, but the conditions of high school and college graduates are rapidly deteriorating. Education itself has become another part of the pervasive system of get rich quick corruption. Colleges are increasing enrollment just to get money, but there is no work for large numbers of graduates afterward. Many of them end up in fast food restaurants and other low-paying work, since they lack basic industrial or secretarial skills, and cannot find even factory or clerical jobs. As a result, even intellectuals who used to think that they were superior now see that they are treated like proletarians. Some refuse passively to accept these conditions. In Zhengzhou in Henan province up to ten thousand college students rioted in 2006 when a school lowered the status of its university diploma and did not refund tuition fees to graduating students. High school students are also reacting to the situation. Some five hundred students in Chongqing in Sichuan province even refused to take the national college entrance exam, deeming it a waste of time and money.

 

Generational Politics

Even those members of the younger generation who are class conscious, socially aware, and well informed on global issues, however, often lack in-depth knowledge of the revolutionary socialist era in China. Younger workers generally have little understanding of the Mao Zedong period or the Cultural Revolution, which preceded the capitalistic “reforms” in which they grew up. This historical amnesia is the result of deliberate policy. State and party authorities obscure and manipulate the record of the Mao era, and stress only his nationalist character, attempting to latch onto this single part of his legacy, while stripping it of its more revolutionary side. As one young organizer put it, his migrant worker peers “cannot dream of the previous conditions in the socialist period, as they do not even know about them.”

There are now two general political trends pulling at the younger generation. One is to seek broader democracy through expansion of the representational system, challenging the monopolistic power of those in control, and demanding greater transparency and a freer media. But the younger generation is beginning to generate activists with a more leftist perspective as well, including college students and intellectuals who have studied the revolutionary era of socialism in China and are able to compare it with conditions today. Some are even attempting to link up the new ranks of migrants and other young members of the working classes with workers who lived through that socialist period. According to one young organizer, “80 percent of older workers would like to go back to the Mao period, and think that the Cultural Revolution was when the working classes were masters of society.” He is trying to spread to young migrants the knowledge that at that time there was little difference between managers and workers, who had a strong sense of ownership in the plants, built their own enterprise-provided houses, and had schools for their children. But the young activists trying to reach the working classes with such alternative perspectives are few in number, and face repression by the authorities.

While the ability of youthful organizers to reach their working-class peers is quite limited, the deepening contradictions of China today keep reviving the demand for more radical change. This takes the form of an ever-expanding number of protests, many increasingly well organized, involving tens of thousands of workers, migrants, and peasants. Even though the level of organization of radical forces remains very low, those who are reaching a breaking point of frustration and anger may be forming a critical mass.

As one young professional put it, “People today have more money and goods, but they are not happy.” In his view, the situation is very explosive, especially in the countryside, where “80 percent of farmers are borderline. If it gets worse, they will either fight or die. But they do not have guns.” Whether the potentially explosive mix of young, rebellious members of the working classes, their alienated middle-class peers, and radicalized intellectuals will reach the point of organized revolution remains problematic. Despite growing turmoil, there is little sign of any such movement so far.

Given the extent to which the gains of the socialist era have been dismantled, young members of the working classes would largely have to start over if they wanted radically to transform society. But Chinese youth have one of the most revolutionary legacies of any in the world. If they choose to move down that road again, there are still many older workers and peasants who have not forgotten how the socialist revolution was made, and who are eager to pass on the lessons of that struggle. The rapidly changing conditions of life and labor in China today make it highly unlikely that the “harmonious society” envisioned by the current leadership can be stabilized over a long period. If and when the younger generation of the Chinese working classes find their voice, they may once again “shake the world,” transforming not only their own country, but the current stage of globalization in ways that are barely imaginable.

**************

Originally published in Monthly Review

Important notice: contents published in the EL news portal, especially those in the Opinion and Dossier sections don’t necessarily reflect the opinions and positions of the European Left Party, its 30 member/observer parties, and its editors.

Contents are published under an exclusive editors’ responsibility, on the assumption they reflect  relevant views on important or interesting subjects, even if sometimes challenging and polemic.