Paris, Thursday, January 13, 2000
Lawyer Tempts Wrath of Beijing by Fighting for the Rights of Workers
Occupational Hazards/ The Perils of China's Boom
By John Pomfret Washington Post Service
SHENZHEN, China - Fei Mingli, a slight teenager from Sichuan Province, came to this bustling Chinese factory town in 1998 to seek her fortune in a textile factory, cranking out blue jeans and tank tops for the Western world. Sometime after midnight on July 22, she went for a walk.
Dogs patrolling the factory grounds attacked the 17-year-old girl, breaking her right leg and ripping chunks from her nose, head and elbows. Miss Fei had violated a company rule that workers must be locked in their dormitories by midnight. She was hospitalized for 62 days.
When her father came to Shenzhen asking for compensation, the factory bosses added insult to her injuries by firing the girl and paying only medical expenses.
Miss Fei's case could have sunk into the oblivion of hundreds of thousands of other such cases in China, where workers' rights are routinely sacrificed at the altar of economic development. But Miss Fei and her father beat a path to Zhou Litai, a lawyer who has become famous for standing up for workers in a country with one of the worst occupational-safety records in the world.
Mr. Zhou took the case, and late last year, after proving that the factory did not have a dog permit and that there had been six similar attacks since 1994, he won Miss Fei a $6,000 settlement - a lot of money in a country where millions of laborers barely clear $1,000 a year. ''Lawyer Zhou is a good man,'' said Fei Zhongming, Mingli's father. ''Without him, we would have had nothing. He won justice for us.''
China once advertised itself as a workers' paradise. But in its mad rush to become a modern industrialized nation in the 20 years since economic reforms opened doors to the West, China's cutthroat system has victimized its laborers.
With China preparing to enter the World Trade Organization, the United States and other advanced nations have pushed for some type of binding international labor standards - one of the issues behind the demonstrations during the organization's meeting in Seattle in November. China and other developing countries have opposed such standards.
In the first nine months of last year, 3,464 miners died in China, one of the worst death rates per ton of minerals mined in the world. The only place where official statistics have been released for industrial accidents is Shenzhen. In 1998, the figures say, 12,189 workers were seriously injured and 80 died in industrial accidents in its 9,582 factories; the real number is believed to be much higher.
Statistics from the state hospital in Bao'an in Shenzhen tell a gruesome tale. In Building 7 at the hospital, 47 patients have lost hands; in Building 6, 21 patients have third-degree burns; in Building 5, 42 patients have lost legs.
After a ferry sank in November, killing 280 people, Communist Party leaders called for a nationwide campaign on workplace safety and acknowledged that despite years of hand-wringing about the importance of safety, serious health and safety hazards remained.
''Since 1980, labor standards in China have gotten worse,'' said Anita Chan, a senior research fellow of the Australian Research Council and a specialist on China's labor issues.
''In the state sector, workers are losing their jobs, so labor standards are almost as bad as foreign-funded or private-sector factories in inland provinces. As for foreign-funded factories, exploitation and abuses have not diminished in the 1990s. If anything, because of the Asian economic crisis, it has gotten worse.''
Attempts by workers to seek help from Beijing usually end in failure. The Communist government only allows one union to exist - the All-China Federation of Trade Unions - and Beijing has crushed any attempt to organize independent unions. The federation is generally viewed as a mouthpiece for the Communist Party, although in recent years it has fought quietly against some policies and laws that are clearly anti-labor.
''If you don't protect your workers, it doesn't matter how good your products are,'' Mr. Zhou said. ''You are creating a social volcano.'' Born in Sichuan 42 years ago, Mr. Zhou was pulled out of school by his parents as a boy and put to work on the land. After serving as a soldier in Tibet,
he returned to Sichuan in 1979, but again had to leave home because his family was too poor to feed him. Mr. Zhou found work in a brick factory in Hunan Province, making a few dollars a month lugging 100-kilogram (220-pound) bags of coal and handling scalding bricks that singed his skin. ''It was normal for the factory not to pay the workers,'' Mr. Zhou recalled. ''People were fired for nothing. People were beaten. It was bad.''
Perhaps because he was infuriated by the exploitation around him, Mr. Zhou said, he took to the law. In 1986, he set up shop in Kaixian, his hometown, in a poor county close to the smoky metropolis of Chongqing.
Ten years later, Mr. Zhou took the first case that would catapult him into national prominence but also land him in serious debt. In May 1996, a husband and wife, both workers at the Happy Toy Factory in Shenzhen, were walking on the factory grounds when they were killed by a delivery truck. The factory denied responsibility for their deaths, leaving the couple's three young children and their aging parents penniless.
-
THE grandparents and the children were living in Sichuan - the source for much of the cheap labor that has driven the economic miracle along China's seacoast. They came to Mr. Zhou as a last resort. No lawyer in Shenzhen would take such cases because local governments had warned them against ''affecting the investment environment,'' Mr. Zhou said.
As an outsider, Mr. Zhou could run a risk. He sued the Happy Toy Factory and won $40,000 - the first time in Communist China that a court had ordered a factory to pay damages to the family of deceased workers.
Since the toy-factory case, Mr. Zhou has filed 200 other lawsuits in courts around Shenzhen. He has won 30; most of the others are still pending. Most of his adversaries are factories run by companies from Taiwan, Hong Kong or South Korea that work on a contract basis for Western firms. He has yet to sue a Japanese or American company, he said, because their labor conditions are better.