Tom
Stephen E Philion wrote:
> 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 development, the region is now a basket case of outdated factories and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."