Crisis Highlights Labor Issues

Migrant workers

Q: Han Dongfang, you have been watching workers for years, and now we have a huge surge of unemployment in China. We have workers by the millions, particularly migrant workers, who can’t go back to their jobs. They returned to the countryside during the Lunar New Year, but now they have no jobs to go back to. How is the government handling this growing problem?

A: The migrant workers are being hit quite badly. Many of them not only lost their jobs, but they can’t get their last three months to half-year of salary. To be fair, it’s not necessarily the government’s fault. It’s just that generally unpleasant things have happened [economically]. But one thing we can blame the government for is that in China there is no bargaining system in the workplace, which means all of the possible labor rights violations that happen are totally reliant on government monitoring.

For example, in Shenzhen you have more than 300,000 enterprises, but the labor bureau there has probably less than 100 people. How can you monitor that many factories…The government is not working hard enough to set up a factory collective bargaining system with the workers monitoring their own rights. You don’t need to set a huge labor bureau to monitor the rights of workers in 300,000 companies in Shenzhen. The workers themselves will deal with the boss on a daily basis.

New labor contract

Q: There is a new labor contract law which is supposed to protect the workers. It is a new arrangement to make the labor unions stronger and allow them to be represented, not just as appointed by Communist Party officials or the employers. What has happened to these efforts in the year since its implementation?

A: Starting before Jan. 1, 2008, the government had several months of consultation [about the new labor contract]. That was quite an improvement, I would say. The discussion period was very important. It made society aware that the law was on the table and would be passed in the People’s Congress.

There was a huge reaction from the employers’ side. Some individual employers, company bosses, and foreign chambers of commerce reacted very negatively. They even warned the Chinese government that the labor contract would scare investors away from the country. So that was quite a dramatic response from the business side, but it seemed that in the beginning of 2008 the government was not really afraid of that.

For example, in Guangdong province, a union even tried to explore a kind of collective bargaining negotiation system based on the labor contract law. This is also what we believed from the very beginning was the most valuable part of this labor contract law. There is one chapter which specifically addresses the collective contract. From this collective contract chapter you can really [infer] directly the right to bargain. From the right to bargain, you can even further directly take this idea of workers’ elections for their representatives.

Unfortunately, when the financial crisis began, and especially since Nov. 2008, the government officially postponed the Guangdong collective bargaining pilot, and even the Beijing official union headquarters released official papers saying everything had been postponed. So now the labor contract law, after one year, is completely dead. The central government, and all levels of government, thinks it’s a bad idea to implement this law. That’s a very stupid move in my opinion.

Q: Are factory owners running away [from workers’ owed back salary] a major problem? We hear about this fairly often—bosses fleeing the factory overnight. But is this really a large-scale issue?

A: If you have a credit bargaining system in place it provides a good opportunity for company owners to negotiate with their workers to introduce a new salary strategy during this difficult moment. For example, a boss can tell a workers’ representative: We are experiencing difficulties, so we have two choices. We can close the factory because we don’t have money and try to persuade the bank to lend us money. Or we can negotiate to rearrange the salary level and show the bank that we have a very good business, economic crisis aside. It is also possible for the boss to raise concerns too. But now, without this system, the boss is left with only one more option, which is running away. They don’t dare face the workers because there is no way to face the workers.

They run away because they don’t have other choices. But they are leaving this trouble to whom? The workers, of course. Workers who have had no salary for three months and who have worked so hard. And secondly, the local government—you will pay for this because the workers will not let go of the issue. This negotiation is supposed to exist between the workers and the employers. But now, with no system, you’ve left both parties no choices, so one runs away and the other runs to the government for help. What was purely an unlucky management and economic issue now becomes a matter of social and possibly political unrest.

Child labor

Q: One issue that has received a lot of publicity in recent years, concerning the workers in both rural and urban areas, is child labor. Has there been any progress in eliminating this problem?

A: The child labor phenomenon is attached to the moral-less society caused by 30 years of so-called economic reform. Moral standards are getting lower and lower. The government policy for the last 30 years taught people to only focus on money, especially after 1989 and the democracy movement. Jiang Zemin’s administration made people believe that it’s OK if you try to make money, even in a very bad way. But is also showed people that if you are trying to be a responsible citizen, even indirectly paying attention to government policy, you will be seriously punished…As far as child labor goes, people don’t think it is a moral issue any more.

Another issue is the government’s failure to implement an effective education system. The free nine-year education policy failed…For the last 30 years the government focused on university education, not basic education like primary and secondary schooling. As a huge country with a huge rural population, education policy should be focused mainly on basic education, not on university education. I’m not saying university education should be ignored, but it should not be the main focus. For the past 30 years, when the government talked of paying attention to education, they meant to create more universities and to allocate more money for universities.

In addition, and especially in the last 10 years, there has been a kind of logic that champions industrialized universities—that the more you create, the better. As a business you don’t focus on the quality of the education but solely on receiving money from students…They don’t care if a farmer’s family pays huge amounts, borrowing the money for four years while the child finishes university. But then suddenly the child can’t find a job and they can’t pay back the money. As a result, you have the government turning these universities into money-sucking machines that ultimately don’t really provide the education people need. The failure of basic education, in my understanding, is why child labor is created…If the family doesn’t want to send their children to school, then of course they go to work instead.

Local corruption

Q: You've said that land developers pay bribes to local officials for farmers' land. Farmers get inadequate compensation in return. Is this why we see so many farmer land disputes?

A: Local government corruption is a black hole—no matter how much money you throw in, there is no response. It’s never enough. Just look at how the local government steals land and makes money off of it. We do have lots of land, even if we have limits compared with the population. But look at the huge value and see how the land is being lost. It’s not enough to satisfy these local corrupted officials, so farmers lose their land. But for farmers to lose their land means they lose their life, their hope. When workers lose their job, they can find another job in a few months. Even if it’s difficult, that is the way they live. But farmers live on their land.

Stimulus package

Q: The government is discussing a stimulus package that aims to stimulate the economy, create jobs, and builds infrastructure and roads. Is there any chance the package would actually work, or is there a danger that officials will put a lot of this money into their own pockets because of corruption at the local level?

A: The government put lots of money—four trillion something—into the stimulus plan…How much of it will go into private pockets through different projects? How many of these roads are being built? Which companies get these contracts and how much do they pay to the local officials? How much of that comes from this money to begin with? We have an expression: Wool comes from sheep, not from anywhere else. That means that out of the four trillion [yuan] there will be huge amounts that become money for corruption. When these people get construction contracts, they give part of it as a kickback to local government officials. It’s not something new in this country. I’m not trying to threaten anybody.

I do believe the people from Zhongnanhai, from Beijing, from the central government—they know better than me about what kind of team they have as local government. They don’t trust them. They know they’re corrupt, but they have no way to kick them out. There are 2,400 county officials. They are all corrupt at different levels. How can you believe that the central government—Wen Jiabao or Hu Jintao—can change all of them? They themselves will be changed first if they plan to change these county officials. So they have to rely upon them to stabilize their political power.

Q: In theory there are new rules about performance accountability for local officials which would grade and rate them. There are some new rules, but it looks like they don’t mean anything.

A: To have more rules [to govern this situation] is definitely better than to have nothing, but let’s use the Chinese government’s argument: China has its own special situation. We have to base laws on this special situation to reflect the people’s understanding about the rules, politics, the economy, social matters, and relationships. You have rules produced in Beijing, but how many of these rules are being respected by local officials? The reality is that of all the rules being produced in Beijing, local officials are the biggest violators. After violating the rules, the local officials try to act as models of the law to the people, leaving the people with no faith in the legal system.

Violence against farmers

Q: It seems violence by hired thugs against farmers fighting takeover of their land increased in 2008. Why is this happening when authorities in Beijing have said they are trying to solve these disputes quickly and quietly?

A: To me, the land issue is a ticking time bomb in this country, because farmers’ livelihood is being affected. They have no other skills beyond working the land and maintaining their livelihood. If they’ve lost that, then they’ve lost everything. When these people fight, they will fight until they die and won’t give up. It’s not because they have a fighting spirit, it’s about survival.

If you look at it from the other angle, the local officials fighting against the farmers are also doing it for their own survival. When they grab land from farmers, there is always some kind of deal involved. The developers already paid them off…and if they don’t move these people away they will be facing two serious issues: The developer will ask for their money back, which the official has already spent, or the developer might report it to a higher level authority, ending the official’s career.

You look at China and it appears that the Communist Party is still in control…but the system functions based on interests, in other words based on money. If you don’t understand that, you can’t survive in this system. The system is no longer based on centralized power. Wen Jiabao’s power cannot go beyond Beijing. Local officials in other provinces don’t listen to him. There is a saying: You may have your policies, but I have my counterpolicies.

Worker safety

Q: I’ve talked with you over the years about work in the coal mines. Being a coal miner at a private mine in China is maybe one of the most dangerous jobs in the world. The government said it was going to shut down these private mines, which are basically illegal mines, where workers are paid very little. We don’t hear much about that anymore. Does that mean the situation has gotten better? It seems there were fewer reported accidents now.

A: For coal mine safety, [the government’s] idea was to close [unsafe] coal mines, but then you don’t have production. Of course you won’t have a safety issue—even a five-year-old would understand that—but it’s not the government’s way of managing things. If you close a lot of coal mines, you have less supply in the market, and the price [of coal] rises. This leads to more people taking the risk to produce coal illegally, more illegal operations, and more deaths. Market power—it’s not about good people or bad people…life is not important. Products are important. And therefore the coal miners are just part of the machine.

The coal miners themselves should have the right to get organized. They should have the right to go on strike and stop working if the working conditions are dangerous. As long as the government doesn’t recognize their right to get organized, these coal miners remain individuals dealing directly with a boss. They need the job desperately to feed their family, but at the same time you face dangerous working conditions. You know that in the morning when you go down that in the evening you may not be able to come out.

Chinese media

Q: How are the Chinese media doing in terms of their coverage of both the urban worker unrest and the farmers? These are big issues that receive some coverage, but it seems that the media are not free to cover them in any depth or to cover them in terms of problems with the overall system. In other words, they can report on a labor problem and say it’s the fault of a bad manager, and government officials can encourage them to report on some of these cases to try to pick out a bad example. But you never feel like you’re getting the whole picture from the Chinese media.

A: The Chinese media have been fighting a tough battle. If they push even a little bit outside of their territory, they can be crushed back at any time if they cross the line. The question is: Where is the line? It’s like a land mine; you don’t know where you can step.

For market competition they need to expand their readership. They need breaking news stories and are eager to find sad stories. On labor issues, for example: This is a safer topic because it highlights greedy, evil employers, rather than challenging the government. Therefore the local media has more room to report labor cases…but land issues are not OK because they are related to local government officials’ wallets. Officials’ personal interests are at stake, because they are personally involved with these development projects and receive money [for handing out contracts]. If the media report that, they don’t know which local senior official’s nerve they will touch, and then they will lose their jobs.

I think the Chinese media will continue fighting, but they have their limits. We can’t put the burden solely on them. The overseas media are still playing an important role in several areas. For example, reporting information on political dissidents, reporting land dispute issues related to local government officials’ personal interests that the inside media wouldn’t dare to cover, labor issues, and other social issues.

Legal system

Q: One of the things you do with your NGO, and also with China Labor Bulletin, is to focus on encouraging workers to use the legal system. You’ve been in contact with lawyers who are willing to take the risks involved to do this. Can you tell us a little bit about how that works and what success you’ve had? In the past few years, what kind of impact has your work had?

A: The current legal system is corrupt. Local judges are being appointed by local administrative officials and are working for them with no independence whatsoever. They take money from whoever can provide it to them to win their case. But this is probably the only avenue available to ordinary Chinese people when their rights have been taken away. Encouraging them to demand justice through the legal system is probably the only way to give them more faith in the idea of rule of law, even if it doesn’t give them more faith in the current legal system…In China if you read the labor laws, they are relatively good. But if people don’t trust [the system] they won’t use it.

If one judge were each year to ignore the law once, he or she wouldn’t mind taking money from an employer to decide against a worker in a labor case. But if you have several cases in front of the same judge every year, he or she will think twice. Five cases as a judge completely ignoring the law—I don’t think this person would dare to do it a sixth time. So I am trying to encourage people to approach the legal system using their own cases to educate the judges and to even threaten them that if they continue to deal with a case illegally, they will probably lose their job…We want to teach people that you might lose the case in this corrupted system, but there is a small chance you will win it.

Original interview conducted by RFA Executive Editor Dan Southerland in Hong Kong.