(en) China, Wobblies With Chinese Characters?

pradeep ppillai at sprint.ca
Wed May 15 12:34:57 PDT 2002


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A - I N F O S N E W S S E R V I C E

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>http://workers.labor.net.au/135/c_historicalfeature_china.html

International

Wobblies With Chinese Characters?

Workers in China's industrial heartland have started killing their bosses as a form of labour protest., writes Andrew Casey

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This industrial tactic has become so popular that children in the grimy polluted industrial cities of north-east China, are playing a popular new game Kill the Boss - where they re-enact the death of a factory boss pretending to stab and throttle each other.

At a State-owned tool factory managers this year found themselves locked in their offices, goaded and starved and fearing they were the next to die at the hands of worker militants.

This time the workers running an industrial campaign strung up not their bosses, but a banner across the factory gate.

Workers tell bosses to sell their houses and limousines

Outside the bosses' offices they protested the privatisation plans with their banner demanding: Sell your houses and limousines, give us the means to live - where have all the State assets gone!!

The killings, the goading, the starving of bosses and the protests are not the result of a revival of the Red Guards.

Mao Ze Dong has not been resurrected. There is no State-support for these angry, sometimes violent outbreaks.

But there is evidence that at least some of this anger is organised and directed by the sprouting of what can only be characterised as a Chinese-version of the old Wobbly movement.

There have been several reports of freelance labour organisers jumping the rails, catching trains from working-class town to working-class town offering to help disgruntled workers organise themselves into independent unions.

In central China, once the cradle of Maoist heavy industry, these Wobblies-with-Chinese-characters, are meeting receptive ears with mass protests, which almost always include a demand to be able to organise free autonomous workers organisations.

While these independent workers struggles flare up, glow, have a grass-fire like effect firing up working people with the hope of change - the often heavy-handed tactics used by the local police quickly douses the power that the workers feel.

None of these flare ups have yet been able to cross the threshold to organise and maintain, for a long period, a permanent autonomous, independent trade union.

Official trade unions give bosses May Day medals

But the kids' popular game of Kill the Boss and the parents actual murdering of their factory bosses - it seems - has not yet worked to warn the leadership of the official trade unions that there is trouble ahead.

In a breath-taking example of how out of touch are the fat-headed cadres in the All-China Federation of Trade Unions, four entrepreneurs were handed May Day 'Labour Medals' this year and, again on May Day, 17 businessmen were named 'model workers'.

"This is a breakthrough," said Li Qisheng, vice-chairman of All China Federation of Trade Unions said on May Day in commenting about the 'worker awards' to the boss-class.

"Those entrepreneurs, who operate legally, and work honestly, are also contributors to socialist construction. The awards have to keep pace with time and tide."

While the State-run union leaderships praise the new rich as the party's new role models the Wobblies-with-Chinese-characters are able to hide out among the angry workers who are looking for leadership and a way to effectively strike back at the corrupt boss class who are now stripping State assets to line their own pockets - hiding behind the slogans of 'reform'.

Army told to put down underground labour movement

What the Communist Party cadres are now worried about is that while the Wobblies-with-Chinese-characters have, to date, only been able to start grass-fires, these first spluttering flames may eventually take hold and become a real bushfire burning down the whole Beijing apparatus.

In March this year CNN quoted ' a source close to security' that the Beijing leadership was worried that an underground labour organisation had been established and was spreading.

The CNN story said the Chinese leadership had issued strict orders to target the underground organisers, with the para-military People's Armed Police told to break up disputes as they crop up.

These freelance labour organisers are rapidly gaining support with stories spreading word-of-mouth about their heroic activities.

You can almost imagine a Chinese Woody Guthrie using these stories as a source of popular legend-making folksongs.

Where did the Chinese Wobblies come from?

No one really has a fix on who these Wobblies are - though there a few theories.

The main theory is that the Wobblies-with-Chinese-characters are 'rogue elements' who participated in workers struggles during the 1989 Democracy Movement, or were from what was once seen as the reform-wing of the All-China Federation of Trade Unions.

The reformers had given support to the workers and students during the 1989 Democracy Movement.

But the reform wing of the ACFTU was quickly purged after the Democracy Movement collapsed.

Popular understanding of the 1989 Democracy Movement, in the Western world, has it as a student-only affair with all the deaths occurring in Tiananmen Square.

In fact on June 4 1989 the army and the cadres in the streets and suburbs of Beijing murdered more people than those who were killed in the Square.

Those deaths were largely workers - not students - who supported the democracy struggle.

At this time, alongside the students, there were a number of attempts to organise independent autonomous workers federations in the factories of China with workers' demanding "shop-floor democracy" .

Website dedicated to history of the independent workers' movement

A web site dedicated to the independent workers' movement in China today -and commemorating the workers' movement of 1989 has just been created.

This site asks union supporters around the world to adopt a policy stance - over the next few weeks - remembering the role of workers in the June 4, 1989 events.

More than a decade later it is these former workers, and student activists, in the Democracy Movement, - as well as rogue elements formerly at the ACFTU - who are seen as being the most likely source for this homegrown Wobbly movement.

Most of the sketchy reports in the West talk of these freelance labour organisers as not being young people straight out of universities.

They are reported as being well-educated activists, in their late 30s and 40s, with contacts in Beijing and other big cities, and some experience in organising protests - and then experience in disappearing before the police arrive to arrest them.

But there have been enough different reports of these people to lend credence to the stories of their existence.

Clock turned back on workers rights

And the myth-building has started telling of the way they travel by train from town to town - going to wherever they hear of workers' disputes and offering a helping hand.

In the first five months of this year a massive wave of industrial unrest has spread through large swathes of China.

This year there has been hardly a week go by without reports of labour unrest - demonstrations demanding pensions; a railway line blocked by angry, unpaid workers or attempts to bring collective legal action against employers forcing overtime or demanding body searches of workers as they come and go from the factory.

The fact that even the tightly controlled State media is reporting some of these disputes indicates how widespread, even common, are the protests and strikes which are technically illegal.

Han Dongfang, an exiled labour organiser who spent time in jail for organising independent unions during the Democracy Movement period, says the working class anger shown in the disputes this year has led to what has probably been the largest protests over labour issues since 1949 - the year the Communists took power.

While some of the biggest disputes have been in the 'rustbelt' provinces where the industrial monoliths are being shut down and hundreds and thousands of workers are being put out of work.

Union officials spat on and beaten

In these places the officials of the old State-unions are being spat on and beaten up because for years they have taken the workers money - and now they are not being seen to do anything to represent the workers' interests.

Often these union officials are suspected of being partners in the corruption - pocketing bribes, or sharing in the profits of State-asset stripping.

But a lot of the industrial turmoil in the coastal provinces, in the new investment factories, is fed by the arrival of arrogant foreign capital who are rapidly turning back the clock on worker rights in this huge nation.

In these factories workers are being forced to work longer and longer hours, in increasingly unsafe workplaces and for measly wages - without the protection of any real unions.

The exploitation is especially pronounced at companies owned by Asian capital - especially Korean and Taiwanese factories producing toys and cheap goods for the consumer markets of the USA, Europe and Australia.

Chinese Wobblies may win workers new union rights

It is into this environment that the Wobblies-with-Chinese-characters have moved, and quickly set up home.

There have been a few examples of these freelance labour organisers succeeding in linking myriad disputes to get one group of workers to provide solidarity and support to another group fighting the apparatus of the State.

But to date these examples are few and far between.

The Chinese workers are fighting - and the Wobblies are providing support for these fights.

The Wobblies-with-Chinese characters may yet succeed in firmly linking a number of disputes to create the basis of a free, independent and democratic union structure. _______________________________________________ Iww-list mailing list Iww-list at lists.iww.org https://lists.iww.org/mailman/listinfo/iww-list

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