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Date: Sun, 07 May 2000 09:44:21 -1000
From: Stephen E Philion <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: China's recession adds pressure for workers' rights
The Telegraph (UK)
Sunday May 7, 2000
China's recession adds pressure for workers' rights
By Damien Mcelroy in Beijing
CHINA returns to work today after an unprecedented week-long national
holiday ordered by a Communist leadership alarmed at escalating violent
protests and strikes among a discontented workforce.
The decision to extend the "Labour Day" holiday to a week for 300 million
urban workers seems to have been taken shortly before May 1st and had a
whiff of panic about it. Analysts see it as a barely disguised attempt to
defuse an increasingly explosive atmosphere among a workforce facing
Western-style job insecurities combined with falling wages.
Fed up with not being paid by their bankrupt employers and fearful of being
laid off, many workers are taking to the streets to challenge the
leadership for a better deal. Above all, Beijing is terrified of a workers'
rights movement emerging from the spread of isolated protests, and of China
spawning the kind of Polish-style free trade union that helped topple
communism in eastern Europe in the Eighties.
Unrest has been particularly prevalent in the provinces north-east of
Beijing which have been hardest hit by the decline of old industries amid
economic restructuring. Once in the vanguard of Mao Tse-dung dash for
development, the region is now a basket case of outdated factories and
exhausted mines.
In cities such as Shenyang, tens of thousands of laid-off factory workers
wander the streets for want of something to do. They are easily prompted
into reciting a litany of grievances. A recent flare-up involving redundant
miners in Yangjiazhanzi, 250 miles north-east of Beijing, was typical of
the type of incident now taking place regularly in China.
Cars were smashed, shops looted and fuel stores set alight as the town was
embroiled in a three-day battle between 20,000 miners and soldiers
following the announcement that the largest local employer, a molybdenum
mine, was to close.
Workers were further enraged at the management's decision to offer only a
few hundred pounds in severance pay for a lifetime's work. One man and his
wife, who had worked a combined 70 years at the mine, were given £350 to
compensate them for lost earnings, pension and health care.
At one stage, demonstrators raided the mine's explosives store to hold the
troops at bay. The growing mood of unrest has come about despite the tight
lid kept on labour disputes by the Communist Party.
Independent trade unions are banned, and any sign of a co-ordination of
protests in different areas prompts a harsh response. Labour activists are
frequently detained in laogai labour camps to undergo "re-education".
However, worker discontent has been escalating across China, according to
new figures.
The number of officially recorded strikes soared to more than 120,000 in
1999 - a 14-fold increase in five years. The new statistics are all the
more remarkable as they will have been "massaged" by officials in an
attempt to gloss over rising tensions.
They illustrate the frustrations among a workforce that was nurtured on
promises of jobs for life but is now confronted with the collapse of
uneconomic and outdated heavy industry. Many employers are failing to pay
salaries and entitlements to their workers on a regular basis - causing
great hardship.
Those laid off are often forced to sell household items from makeshift
street stalls to earn the money they need to live. One old soldier, who was
demobbed from the People's Liberation Army in the late Fifties to work in a
factory, said hardship was rising, even for those who were still being paid.
He said: "Pensions and salaries aren't going up, but rents and electricity
prices are," he said. "If you paid for enough electricity to heat your
home, you couldn't eat. So people have to steal the electricity."
There is an almost uniform bitterness among ordinary Chinese against
officials and company managers who have been able to enrich themselves from
their positions. Yet despite rising resentment, corruption is still on the
increase.
One Hong Kong academic estimates that the party-appointed management of
state-run factories skim more than £8 billion into their own bank accounts
- - usually overseas - every year. In a move eerily reminiscent of the dying
days of the Soviet bloc a decade ago, the Chinese Communist Party is now
trying to distract people's attention from the inequalities that are
feeding their deep-seated grievances.
Last week the propaganda machine was busy issuing reports of crowded
airports and bustling streets in an attempt to obscure the real reason for
the extended break. Newspapers reported a stampede to the shops, claiming
growing consumer confidence that the economy was improving.
But a quick visit to one of Beijing's biggest department stores revealed
that, while people were out in force, few were spending with the abandon
that the government had hoped for. Official figures put the annual economic
growth rate at eight per cent. But the steady decline of state-owned
companies, which still employ more than half the urban workforce, has
pitched the country into a malaise that will not be lifted by last week's
extra holiday.
Li Qiang, an electrical appliance salesman, said few people had taken up
the official invitation to spend freely during the holiday. He said:
"People are still afraid to spend. The whole economy has been changing
dramatically since 1994. There are so many laid off from state-owned
companies that, until social welfare improves, people won't spend money
needlessly."
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