The San Francisco Chronicle Monday, April 24, 2000
CHINA REPORTS BIG SURGE IN LABOR UNREST DURING 1999
Disputes over unpaid pensions, wages, fraud
By John Pomfret, Washington Post
Beijing -- The number of labor disputes in China has skyrocketed -- to
more than 120,000 in 1999 -- as workers in unprecedented numbers get
laid off, are paid late or not at all and feel cheated by corrupt officials
who
sell state property for a pittance to friends, relatives and colleagues.
Official Labor Ministry statistics passed to a Western diplomat and a
recent article in the journal Legal Research showed 14 times more labor
disputes -- from simple contractual disagreements to work stoppages and
strikes -- last year than in 1992. The article and labor officials'
willingness
to speak about the issue marked a departure for the Communist Party,
which has struggled to maintain stability in Chinese cities in the wrenching
transformation from a planned economy to something akin to a market
economy.
The strains were highlighted in late February when tens of thousands
of workers erupted in a violent protest at China's biggest nonferrous metal
mine near the Bohai Sea in the northeast. Workers there burned cars,
broke windows and kept police and the army at bay for several days as
they protested what they said was an unfair and corrupt handling of the
mine's bankruptcy.
Chinese labor conditions have been the subject of increased
international scrutiny in advance of a vote in the U.S. Congress on
granting China permanent normal trade relations, a major stepping stone
to its accession to the World Trade Organization. U.S. labor unions, led
by the AFL-CIO, have argued that China's entry into the WTO would
result in a deterioration of its already-limited labor rights. Chinese law
does not provide for the right to strike and bans independent unions.
The statistics show a jump from 8,150 labor disputes in 1992 to more
than 120,000 last year, answering a question posed often by China
scholars: Is the urban labor situation getting tenser, or is it simply that
China's increasing openness allows for more information about a fixed
number of disputes?
“This is significant. It shows things are getting more difficult,” said
Anita Chan, an expert on China's labor relations at Australian National
University in Canberra.
At the same time, the statistics also helped explain why the increased
unrest has yet to translate into a movement challenging the Communist
Party's monopoly on power or seeking to establish independent labor
unions. While collective labor disputes, in which workers seek to bargain
in a unit, are increasing rapidly, they still make up a minority of the
overall
disputes -- 7 percent in 1998, the last year available. And no evidence
exists of workers uniting to strike at several businesses at the same time.
Besides unrest over wages, labor disputes typically involve unpaid
pensions to laid-off employees, poor working conditions and the sell-off of
state enterprises that workers believe involved fraud by management.
Andrew Walder, an expert on Chinese urban workers at Stanford
University, said a key reason the unrest hasn't translated into a broader
movement is that strikes remain scattered and workers are unwilling or
unable to unite to pursue broader goals.
“There have been periodic press reports for most of the last 10 to 15
years or so that labor disputes are on the rise in China,” he said. “It
makes a great deal of sense that they would be: Wage issues came to
the forefront in the 1980s and increasing job insecurity and layoffs
(became) a big issue in the 1990s. Should we get worked up about such
reports? Probably not. Scattered strikes are politically meaningless. If and
when a national or regional trade union is organized and survives openly
for a while -- which is very unlikely -- we should then begin to read
political significance into all this.”
Some researchers suggested that the 1999 figure for labor disputes,
which represented a 29 percent increase over 1998, was limited by
massive government subsidies. Last year during the 50th anniversary of
China's Communist revolution, party officials were told to stress stability
at
all costs.
“Labor relations in 2000 will deteriorate as special subsidies fade out,
the economic and labor ‘reforms' intensify and more and more workers
are laid off,” said Tak Chuen, an expert on China's labor issues at Hong
Kong Baptist University.
Chuen said Chinese workers face a difficult situation because
accession to the WTO will do nothing to improve their livelihood, at least
in the short run, but failure to do so will not help either.
The Legal Research article, written by retired scholar Shi Tanjing and
published in November, called on the government to end its ban on
strikes. The right to strike was removed from China's constitution in 1982.
Shi said labor disputes in China are increasing because “the rights of
the workers have been infringed.” But the article notes that workers have
been winning the disputes, in arbitration courts and in judicial courts, at
rates of 3 to 1, 4 to 1 and even 18 to 1 in some regions.
This underscores a main strategy China's government uses to deal
with labor unrest: giving in to most workers' demands. For instance, Labor
Ministry officials said this past week that China plans to double spending
on worker issues, such as back pay, unpaid pensions and medical
insurance, a Western source said.
Eleven million Chinese will be unemployed by the end of this year, the
Labor Ministry has estimated.
Shi noted that the hot spots for labor unrest are concentrated in state-
owned enterprises in China's rust belt in the northeast and in coal mines,
textile mills and forestry departments. Some 40,000 businesses ran out of
cash in 1997, he said.
In the more economically developed southern provinces of
Guangdong and Fujian, he said, most of the disputes centered on private
or semiprivate firms where the “managers in their quest for profit
egregiously exploit workers.” Indeed, the sweatshops of Guangdong are
famed for exploitation and danger. Maiming is commonplace because of
bad machinery and poor training, and wages are very low.
Shi said a trend to watch is growth in collective labor disputes, which
occurred 6,567 times in 1998 -- nine times more than in 1993 -- and
involved 251,268 workers.
Shi's report also marked the first public acknowledgment of labor
disputes in Beijing, the capital. He said the number of labor disputes here
almost doubled in the first half of 1999 compared with the same period in
1998, while the number of collective disputes more than quadrupled.
Shi did not include statistics on strikes, partially, he wrote, because
official newspapers do not publish them and Chinese officials ordinarily
suppress that data for fear of hurting their political careers.
