>Subject: Foreign capital returns bonded labour to China
>
>ANU Reporter (Australian National University)
>8.12.98
>
>Study finds bonded labour rife in China
>
> By Shelly Simonds
>
> Freeing up the labour market has been a major reform in China in recent
> decades. But many workers employed by foreign-run factories in the
> footwear industry are anything but free, an ANU researcher claims.
>
> Dr Anita Chan, of the China & Korea Centre in the Faculty of Asian
> Studies, recently completed a study of 54 footwear factories in China and
> found that many of the rural migrant workers in the factories had to pay
> employers between two weeks' and a month's wage as a "deposit".
>
> This created a new type of bonded workforce in China, said Dr Chan, an
> Australian Research Council Senior Research Fellow, who recently
> presented the results of her study at a lecture sponsored by the ANU
> branch of the NTEU.
>
> Other abuses revealed by the study included employers randomly taking
> money out of employee paychecks, using corporal punishment in
> factories, and illegally confiscating worker ID cards, without which
> migrant workers face police violence and deportation, she said.
>
> More than 80 million migrants seeking jobs in China made up the world's
> largest and most flexible workforce, said Dr Chan. This massive
> workforce has created a buyers' market for employers.
>
> But as competition forced factories to seek greater and greater efficiency,
> employers have tried to keep marginal costs of employee turnover down
> by requiring bonds from migrant workers.
>
> "I think the reason for the bond is that when the employer pays them such
> a low wage, of course they want to leave all the time. They are always
> looking for a factory with a little bit better pay or better benefits.
> I'm sure
> if you pay them well, they would stay," Dr Chan said.
>
> The worst offenders were foreign-owned or joint-venture factories run by
> Asians. Of these the most common offenders were overseas Chinese
> from Taiwan, Hong Kong and Korea.
>
> The study was conducted in footwear factories in Tianjin, Shanghai,
> Putian, Dongguan City, and Chongqing. Some factories were state or
> collectively owned, others were private and some were owned in foreign
> joint ventures. In each factory the research team surveyed a factory
> manager, a trade union chairperson and the factory workers, who filled
> out separate questionnaires and handed them to the surveyors before
> leaving a closed room.
>
> Dr Chan said popular wisdom held that the best paid workers in China
> were employed by foreign-owned factories, but her study found little
> evidence to support this. The best pay was from state-owned and
> collectively-owned enterprises when work hours and benefits were taken
> into account.
>
> She found that workers in factories run by foreigners worked an average
> of 11 hours a day, which was beyond the legal limit, whereas workers in
> the state-owned sector worked eight hours.
>
> Also associated with the Contemporary China Centre in the Research
> School of Pacific and Asian Studies, Dr Chan said corporal punishment
> was reported in 27 per cent of the workers in the foreign owned-ventures
> surveyed.
>
> The study also found a militarised atmosphere in these factories. Private
> security guards were commonplace, and often they carried weapons like
> electric batons. Security guards even monitored the employee's
> dormitories.
>
> Dr Chan said militarism is not generally considered a traditional part of
> the Confucian work ethic - it is simply a show of authoritarianism by
> factory managers.
>
> Many commentators have argued that foreign ownership of Chinese
> factories may bring democratisation to China, but Dr Chan said her
> research suggests otherwise.
>
>http://www.anu.edu.au/pad/reporter/V29/11/china.html
------------------------------------------------------ Daniel F. Vukovich Dept. of English; The Unit for Criticism University of Illinois Urbana, IL 61801 ------------------------------------------------------