An independent union?

From China Labour Bulletin, 6 February 2002 and local radio broadcasts

Northeast China is known as the rust belt – once a proud home to China’s heavy industry it has recently suffered millions of redundancies and bankrupt state-owned enterprises as China’s companies ‘restructure’ – a coverall term that means ‘privatise’ and ‘bankrupt’, while the economy is increasingly ruled by the market and other capitalist systems.

Confusing reports emerged from China about a huge protest that began on 1 March, and was still ongoing on 21 March.

Reports say that up to 50,000 sacked, laid off, and retired workers from the Daqing oil field in Heilongjiang province have been protesting violations of contract conditions – mostly refusal to pay workers their legal dues for severance pay, social security payments, and heating allowances by their former employer, PetroChina.

According to a China Labour Bulletin (CLB) report, the workers have set up a union called the Daqing PAB Retrenched Workers’ Provisional Union Committee with elected representatives.

Oil sector workers in Shandong and Liaoning provinces staged solidarity demonstrations when they heard of the revolt in Daqing.

The report also says that Daqing officials said that, “ .. the workers’ action, in particular organising their own union, was unacceptable and illegal”. The implication is that the officials believe that workers have established an independent union. But unions are normally for working people, and while many countries allow workers who have resigned or retired to retain union membership in a non-active capacity, establishing such a union may be one of the first instances of a union being established by non-workers. This must be doubly frustrating for China’s government-controlled ‘union’, the ACFTU, however time is probably on the ACFTU’s side – unpaid jobless workers will find it difficult to finance an independent union without help from workers who still have jobs.

80,000 oil workers at the Daqing oil field have been made redundant recently.

Unrest in Liaoyang

From China Labour Bulletin, LabourStart, South China Morning Post, and China Labour Watch reports

Two weeks after industrial unrest hit Daqing, China’s police were involved in more huge demonstrations in neighbouring Liaoning provincial capital, Liaoyang.

Workers from around ten state-owned enterprises assembled in the city to protest unpaid wages and pensions, poor severance pay, and corrupt officials. China’s law does not grant right of assembly to its citizens fearing the establishment of independent unions – as is claimed in Daqing. The main headache for China’s leaders in the Liaoyang unrest is that it involves workers from more than one industry.

Police arrested one protest organiser, Yao Fuxin, on 17 March and were said to be hunting down a dozen others.

An AFP report said it was believed the Liaoyang workers had also established a union outside the auspices of China’s only legal union centre, the All China Federation of Trade Unions.

CLB said that China’s media was ignoring both disputes, perhaps fearing snowballing revolts.

By 22 March four alleged leaders of the protest in Liaoyang were in police detention at the Tieling City Detention Centre. In addition to Yao (54), also arrested were Pang Qingxiang (58) and his wife Guo Suxiang (56), Xiao Yunliang (57), Wang Zhaoming (39), and one unidentified worker.

The four named workers arrested worked at Liaoyang’s bankrupt Ferro-alloy plant.

Although the detentions reduced the size of the protests, on 21 March 1,000 laid off workers hit cold rain-swept streets to appeal their shoddy treatment as laid off workers by the government, some carrying banners saying, “The government has humiliated the people.”

Yao Da, daughter of Yao Fuxin, said, “Many of us have nothing to eat and the government refuses to address our demands, so there is nothing to do but take to the streets. We may be arrested but we are not afraid.”

After three days without protest, it was reported that the Liaoyang city government paid 50 percent of the money owed to protesters, many of who had not been paid for up to two years before the plant went bankrupt last year. Yao, Pang, Xiao, and Wang are charged with “illegal assembly, marches and protests” according to relatives. The move was noted as a climb-down after more serious government allegations that the labour leaders had “colluded with hostile foreign forces” in staging the protests. Yao’s relatives say that he has had a heart attack since his imprisonment, causing suspicion that he was beaten in jail. The ICFTU has expressed fears for the safety of the four protestors.

More than 1,000 textile workers in Guangyuan city, Sichuan province, held a strike in mid-March because the factory had failed to pay pension insurance for seven years. Detentions by police followed the protest. The government then imposed a news blackout on worker protests. The ICFTU filed a complaint with the ILO about the arrest of the workers on 27 March.

Factory fire kills six women

From South China Morning Post, 25 March 2002

Six women factory workers were killed and four injured in a shoe factory fire on 23 March.
The fire at the factory in Wenzhou, Zhejiang province, was under control in less than an hour.

Sweatshops in Canada

From South China Morning Post, 4 April 2002

The Canadian government is to investigate Eminent Knitting, a company operating in Vancouver, run by former Hong Kong resident, Eddie Mak Chi-kin and partner Roger Lee Woo-man. The company closed down in December. Scores of workers lodged complaints in late March alleging that the company paid less than the legal minimum to mainland Chinese immigrants. They said that Mak had threatened to refuse to pay workers who complained, and this had prevented them.

The plaintiffs said that although they worked 12 hours a day, six or seven days a week, pay cheques issued just before the company closure were worthless, and that Mak had asked them to wait till he raised the money in Hong Kong.

Garment union Unite spokesman Vas Gunaratna said the workers had still not been paid, adding the workers were mostly women, recently arrived from China. British Columbia’s Labour Ministry acknowledged receipt of dozens of complaints against Eminent.

Henan protestors block roads

From China Labour Bulletin, 3 January 2002; AFP, 23 January 2002

On 3 January 2002, around 40 workers from the Luoyang Electromechanical Equipment Company blocked the Zhongzhou Road in Luoyang city, Henan province. A local rang China Labour Bulletin while the protest was under way. He described the scene and the reasons behind the workers’ protest.

The caller said all the protestors were from the electromechanical firm. They had bought housing from the employer seven years ago. But the company had since shut down and auctioned off the houses that the workers had bought. Workers were then forcibly removed and the houses demolished. The workers were apparently telling onlookers that they blocked the road to make the local government do something about their problem.

Meanwhile about 2,000 retired workers blocked traffic for some hours in mid-January at Luoyang, Henan province. They were protesting wage increases for government officials while their living standards were falling – official salaries have outstripped standard pensions ten fold according to one report.

Mine blasts kill 27

From South China Morning Post, 28 January 2002

19 miners died after an explosion on 26 January at state-owned enterprise, Nuanerhe mine in Chengde county, Hebei province. 18 bodies were recovered.
The following day 25 miners went to find the remaining undiscovered body. A second blast killed eight of them, while one was reported missing.

Officials jailed for mining disaster

From China Labour Bulletin, 18 March 2002; ALU 40

On 12 March mining bureau officials were awarded jail sentences and fines by the Higher People’s Court of Guangxi province after a serious accident which killed 81 miners. The accident took place in Longquan tin mine on 16 July, 2001 in Nandan county, Guangxi. (See ALU 40 for details)

Fifteen managers of the mine and government officials were sentenced for corruption and imprisned from two and a half to thirteen years. Three officials were sentenced to 13-year jail terms, one to 11 years, and two to 10 years.

Though first to be arrested after the disaster, top company and government officials were not listed among those jailed.
At the time of the tragedy, local officials tried to effect a news ban, while the official People’s Daily removed the story from its Web site on 30 July.

Fireworks blast kills seven

From South China Morning Post, 7 February 2002

Four children were among seven killed in an explosion which a People’s Daily report said was probably an illegal firework factory. The accident occurred on 5 February in the early morning hours at Yulin in impoverished Guangxi province, destroying the building.

In a related story, six miners died in an accident in a gold mine in eastern Shandong province.

Pay cuts and corruption protests

From The Washington Post 21 January 2002

2,000 workers occupied the Shuangfeng Textile Factory in Dafeng (150 miles north of Shanghai) in December 2001. The factory was built in 1931.
Mostly middle-aged women, they spoke of pay cuts, worthless company shares they had bought, corrupt officials, and missing pension funds.
Police had dragged women by the hair and jabbed them with cattle prodders on three occasions to retrieve the factory for the capitalists.
The occupation began on 16 December and lasted for two weeks.

Protest is now a common occurrence in China as companies fail to honour their commitments to pay laid off and retired workers, while company managers siphon off workers’ savings, insurance, pension funds, and company loans. Long known for being vastly under-reported, even official statistics show there are more than 80 large scale protests every day on average in China.

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is now widely discredited. Government claims that China’s citizens are “masters of their own destiny” ring increasingly hollow, as officialdom listens only with deaf ears.

During the 1990s, the CCP urged stateowned factory managers to make factories profitable or close them down. Workers often paid for stocks in their own factories with life-long savings, while managers kept the controlling shares themselves, and denied workers the right to sell their shares.

4,000 workers at Shuang-feng were forced to buy company shares in 1996. “Some people invested willingly. Others didn’t think it was a good idea. But in the end, we all handed over the money,” said one spinner. “If we didn’t give them the money, we would lose our jobs.”

Over the next five years, they received only one dividend payment and were never invited to attend shareholder meetings.

In November 2001, the company secretly filed for bankruptcy. Factory bosses became the new owners, but workers only found out by reading the newspaper. They knew they were victims of a “fake bankruptcy”, a common phenomenon in China - managers hide the assets, declare bankruptcy, then buy the firm at a knockdown price, often with embezzled money.

On 13 December bosses ordered the workers to sign new contracts with half existing wages - to US$25 - US$40 a month.

The workers revolted. On 16 December bosses reacted by picking on two young mothers to discourage others. They erected a poster on the factory gate. It said, “the two comrades have separated from their posts and from the factory.” But the tactic failed and many workers struck in support of their workmates, which is more than can be said for the government’s sweetheart union, the ACFTU.

From 2,000 occupying strikers, numbers fell to 400 by 22 December, allowing the army of police to gain the upper hand.

During the next few days the workers gave in and went back to work defeated.