Hong Kong – China Solidarity: Reflections on the Past 10 years of Supporting Worker Advocacy in China

Issue No : 75  April - June 2010

By Suki Ming-lai Chung

Over the past decade, Hong Kong labour NGOs have been playing an active and vital role in supporting and strengthening the labour activism in China. They have done this by engaging in direct organizing, campaigning and advocacy for the rights of migrant workers and by regulating the violations of the foreign investors, particularly those Asian exporting capitals from Hong Kong and Taiwan. As fellow Chinese across the border, we exercise our special position to empower Chinese workers through solidarity and concerted actions with them in their struggle for justice and dignity. It is also a struggle of workers in search of a new set of social values and attitudes, and new economic and political structures in China, which have a bearing not only on the country and on Hong Kong, but also on the whole world as the interplay between the west and the east intensifies. 

A banner raised in the city of Basel, Switzerland in 2007 during LAC’s public campaign against Baselworld, which shows more than 2,000 watch and jewellery exhibitors from over 50 countries, including Hong Kong ; Photo: LAC

Before 1997, Hong Kong was not merely a by-stander, but has been part of the workers’ movement in China. The centre court of the labour movement is right here in the Asian region where this city is. From being more or less an ‘outsider’ in carrying out research into the labour practices of transnational corporations against the background of the consumer movements in Europe and North America, Hong Kong labour groups have developed more as a partner directly engaging in the ‘weiquan’ (rights-defending) struggle of grassroots workers and pushing for changes in laws and policies in recent years. In the process of building solidarity with Chinese workers, we develop a strategic approach of organizing-campaigning-advocacy. Such a model of solidarity may serve as a reference and could be replicated in other labour communities in the region. In this short article, we will give a general review on the major approaches and strategies in building the network of solidarity with Chinese workers from the perspectives of our experience. 

In our participation in the workers’ movement, we are most concerned with migrant workers, the ‘mingong’, who are at the bottom of an inhumane structure of a gigantic scale, and who are seriously faced with un-enforced and un-enforceable labour laws, lethal occupational hazards, the loss of medical and pension provisions, the deprivation of civil rights because of the household registration system, and massive discrimination and violence against them. We identify the protection of well-being of workers as our first concern, but the spaces and approaches of intervention that Hong Kong labour NGOs use are due to the great need for rectification of labour rights violations given the absence of independent unionizing in China. 

Since the launching of the Open Door Policy in 1979, the working class in China has been re-composed by the dual movement of privatization of the state-owned enterprises and valorization of foreign investment.¹ The dismissal of vast numbers of state-owned enterprises workers has coincided with the integration of 200 million migrant labourers moving from the rural to the urban to seek jobs to escape poverty. The result of that is the changing role of the state and of the party-affiliated trade union in regard to labour protection. Rather than being the direct employer of workers, the state assumes the capitalist model of capital-labour regulation through legislation and legal procedure. In other words, labour relations are being more regulated through legislation, but not through the strengthened collective power of workers. As we can see in recent years, the proliferation of more labour laws such as the Employment Promotion Law (2007), Labour Contract Law (2007), Labour Dispute Arbitration Law (2008) and Social Insurance Law (under draft) persist in parallel with the de-facto deregulation at the local level under the pressure of capital flight. The role of the party-state is easily subverted by the local governments to protecting the interests of the employers more than the workers, when they are competing for foreign investment. As such, many of the most egregious labour rights violations have been caused by the Chinese government’s ‘governance gap’, i.e. the inability or unwillingness of the local authorities to enforce or enact good labour laws, combined with negligence and abuse on the part of the employers. 

Meanwhile, the official trade union, the All China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU), is caught in the dilemma between losing representation amongst the migrant workers and supporting the fast-speed capitalist developmental course led by the party-state. In the absence of a powerful and independent trade union, the regulation of labour relations is not based on organized labour but the haphazard intervention of the state and the judiciary when pressured by spontaneous workers’ actions. Migrant workers therefore have to rely on using the law and spontaneous wildcat actions to defend their interests. It is against this background that the Chinese migrant workers resort to litigations to claim their legal rights and compensation. And it is against this background that a spectrum of NGO approaches for the protection of the rights of migrant workers has emerged, which can be seen in more and more Hong Kong labour NGOs supporting the legal struggles and self-organizing of migrant workers, due to the great need for rectification of labour rights violations in the past decade. 

Silicosis victims and their family members in the press conference in June 2005. Photo: LAC

Since 2004 Labour Action China (LAC) has been assisting workers who have contracted occupational disease to defend their legal rights and improve the safety and health conditions in the workplace in the gemstone processing industry in Guangdong Province in China. Our intervention in occupational disease in China as a way of engaging with the struggles of Chinese workers at the grassroots is on the basis of the real needs and requests for solidarity from a group of more than 80 silicosis workers. These migrant workers had contracted the disease after working from 1-10 years in the gemstone processing factories in Guangdong Province which had been largely invested in by Hong Kong capital. Starting in 2004 with supporting the struggles initiated by the occupational disease victims, we eventually developed a three-dimensional strategy of organizing, campaigning and advocacy to build solidarity with workers, regulate the labour practices of companies and monitor the labour laws in China. This strategy was exercised in the following aspects:

1.         Legal and paralegal assistance, including finding lawyers to represent the victims in their litigation cases against their employers and against the inaction of the local government.

2.         Assisting the workers to organize solidarity actions to support each other during the litigation procedure, such as media coverage and petitions to the authorities.

3.         Building alliances with civil society organizations, trade unions and politicians in Switzerland to campaign on the Baselworld, the world’s biggest jewellery trade fair, to integrate labour standards based on the International Labour Organization’s conventions into the exhibition guidelines for jewellery companies. We also have been lobbying the World Health Organization (WHO) and the ILO for a regulatory mechanism to implement the ILO conventions on labour rights and safety and health protection of the jewellery and gemstone processing industry in China. Since 2005, delegations composed of Chinese silicosis victims (with Indian silicosis victims as well in 2006) and organizers have been sent to the annual Baselworld fair.

4.         Public actions and alliance building with civil society organizations and trade unions in Hong Kong to put pressure on the Hong Kong employers for violating labour rights and evading the mainland court rulings to compensate the Chinese victim. We have demanded the jewellery trade exhibition organizing body in Hong Kong to ban such companies from participation. This campaign demand was finally achieved as the Baselworld and the Hong Kong Trade Development Council for the first time decided to sanction a Hong Kongjewellery company called Lucky Gems for its labour rights violations which contradict their exhibition regulations (the HKTDC² and the Baselworld³ contain clauses on social and labour rights based on ILO Conventions and national laws).

5.         Developing victims into organizers by working with five victims closely in handling their own and others’ cases, thus turning them into activists and paralegals. 

6.         Advocating for legislative changes in the OSH and social security system in China. This has been done by building an advocacy platform to canvass civil opinions represented by workers, mainland and Hong Kong labour NGOs, Chinese academics and legal experts, to analyze and document the legal loopholes in advocating for new legislative and policies pertaining to migrant workers’ interests. 

In the campaign for compensation and improving labour standards in the gemstone industry, the three-dimensional strategy proves to have set an example of combining the national litigation strategy (or the so-called ‘Fa-lu-weiquan’) of the workers in the production country – China- with pressure from the labour rights communities in the capital-exporting place – Hong Kong - and pressure from the trade union and civil society organizations in the trading country – Switzerland. Such a model of international solidarity could be replicated in other industries or even other countries, but one of the pre-conditions for that is consolidation and convergence of the national struggles of workers with their bargaining and associational power. 

In the context of China, due to the non-independent unionizing of the ACFTU, the NGO approaches have been developed in the niches opened by the inadequacies of the state and trade union intervention in workers’ struggles. These approaches range from one-off legal or paralegal rectification of the violated rights of migrant workers, to organizing workers in advocacy for legislative and policy changes and international campaigns. However, our experience has also told us that the one-off rectification approach is in fact reinforcing rather than challenging the existing labour relation system which is state-dominated and individualized. The major limitation of the NGO approaches lies in the lack of strategic convergence between grassroots worker mobilization (via the spontaneous workers’ strikes) and the official worker representation and negotiation system. The result can be seen as a three-tier labour movement between the party-state-union, NGOs and grassroots workers in segregation from each other. The party-state-union mobilizes national resources and employers to regulate labour relations under the official trade union and enterprise associations. The NGOs mobilize migrant workers to fight back their rights on individual basis or un-official collective platforms such as community worker centers, dormitory groups and victims’ groups. Migrant workers mobilize themselves spontaneously in petitions to the government and workplace industrial actions. 

 LAC protested at the HK International Jewellery Trade Fair against ‘bloody gems’ in 2006.

Photo: LAC

Therefore, for labour NGOs and migrant workers, the challenge lies in the need to build up a solidarity platform and long-term strategies based on the self-organizing of workers in particular, to achieve associational and bargaining rights on top of the individualized legal struggles and wildcat actions.

Chinese workers nowadays are increasingly setting the pace in advancing the domestic labour rights agenda, and they are winning important concessions from the government. But within this larger context of change, outside actors/agents can still play an important role by assisting and complementing workers’ efforts. Our example demonstrates some of the possible elements that could make up a potentially powerful and effective coordinated strategy – one involving international NGOs and overseas trade unions – for promoting a real advance in workers’ rights in China.  
 

Endnotes

    1. The HKTDC can terminate the right of an exhibitor to exhibit if the latter could cause damage to the reputation of Hong Kong and the industries in certain concerned areas including labour and environmental rights violations (Article 72 (h), Rules & Regulations, HKTDC).

    2. The exhibition regulation of Baselworld requires exhibitors ‘to provide evidence of fair labour practices, i.e. no violation of basic human rights – and social rights in particular – i.e. no employment of minors, but much rather the implementation of social practices conforming to industrial and local standards, etc. The examination is based on the regulations of the International Labour Organization’. (Article 3.5 General Regulations and Supplementary Regulations for Exhibitors, Baselworld)

    3. Valorization: the increase in assets’ capital value through applying labour in production (as the term is used by Karl Marx in Das Kapital).