Skynet: California: Chinese Labor Struggles Continue

On May 17, 2010, 2000 workers in a Honda parts factory in Foshan, China, held a strike to demand higher wages. Assembly line workers in the plant currently make $227 per month, and management is now offering them an increase of 24% to $281 per month, still far below what a worker in Europe or the US receives for the same work (1). Some credit the new demands to a smaller supply of Chinese workers, relative to past generations. In other news, factory workers employed with Foxconn Technology Group have attempted suicide 13 times since the beginning of the year, and 10 have been successful. Foxconn employees make parts for some of the largest electronics companies in the US, including Apple, Dell, Sony and HP. A Foxconn employee reported that “life is meaningless” at the plant and that “conversation on the production line is forbidden, bathroom breaks are kept to 10 minutes every two hours and constant noise from the factory washes past his ear plugs, damaging his hearing” (2). Foxconn is going to raise wages by 30% in an attempt to stem the suicides.

The strike and suicides highlight the ongoing struggles of workers in China over the past decade. In 1996, there were 10,000 large-scale collective protests every year. In 2004 there were 74,000 protests, and in 2005 there were 87,000 protests, involving over 4 million workers (3). Because of rising discontent over harsh labor standards, the Chinese government proposed a new labor law in March 2006 that would give unions collective-bargaining power, require employers to provide their employees with written contracts and require that companies negotiate with worker representatives over working conditions (4). Of course, large US corporations would have none of that. The American Chamber of Commerce in Shanghai (AmCham), the United States-China Business Council and other corporations lobbied to gut the law. AmCham has 1,300 members, including GE, Microsoft, Dell and Ford. Other companies involved in the dispute were Wal-Mart and Google. AmCham issued a 42-page report which stated that worker protections would hinder their members’ ability to operate in the country and threatened that its members would move their factories to Thailand or Pakistan (5). A second draft of the law was released in December 2006, which substantially diluted the law according to the wishes of AmCham and the USCBC (6). The new draft “scaled back protections for employees and sharply curtailed the role of unions”, according to the director of human resources in China for Microsoft. Of course, American corporations did not stop there, and lobbied further against the law. The situation became so bad that in early 2007, Liu Cheng, a law professor at Shanghai Normal University, flew to Washington to press the government to stop corporations from opposing Chinese labor reforms.

The new labor law was passed by the Chinese legislature on June 29, 2007 and was enacted on January 1, 2008 (7). China’s migrant workers received pay increases of 19 percent in 2008 and 16 percent last year, but large labor problems continue to loom (8). On July 27, 2009, steel factory workers in Jilin killed a manager over a proposed merger in which 25,000 out of 30,000 employees were planned to be laid off (9). In another incident on September 2, 2009, two female employees at Philips Respironics were injured by police who broke up a strike in Shenzhen (10). This year, on January 22, 2010, employees of Wintek, a company which makes electronic components for Apple, rioted in Suzhou (11). Clearly, many Chinese workers are still unhappy with their working conditions.

So what does this all mean? China has 25% of the world’s workforce, so Chinese labor standards have an effect on workers throughout the world. Rising labor standards in China will create pressure to raise the labor standards in other developing countries as well. This could have the effect of equalizing the standards of living in developing and developed countries. What can people in developed countries do to help people who toil for our electronic goods? We can pressure US corporations to treat Chinese workers more like human beings and less like slaves. A boycott would be ineffective, because there are few consumer electronic products that are not at least partially made in China. Microsoft, Apple, Dell, HP and Sony all manufacture parts in China. In the meantime, we can buy non-electronic goods through Fair Trade networks, where workers are paid living wages and partnerships work to improve lives in developing countries. Here is a list of Fair Trade websites.