WORLD VIEW:A social timebomb is ticking away at the troubled heart of Chinese industry
YAN LI (27) had been working the night shift for more than a month straight, sometimes 24 hours non-stop. Last week the young engineer died suddenly at home. His family blamed overwork.
His employer, Taiwan contract electronics maker Hon Hai Precision Industry, owner of the massive Foxconn plant in Longhua in Guangdong province, southern China, where this year 10 young migrant workers have taken their lives, insisted again this death was not work-related.
But, stung by criticism of the deaths in the plant’s 320,000-strong workforce, Hon Hai has promised pay increases of 30 per cent, and has brought in counsellors and music to ease the stress of long shifts, and nets to thwart suicide attempts.
The story of the factory’s almost military work regime, and that of this week’s successful strike by 1,900 workers at the Honda motor transmission factory in Fushan, also in Guangdong, where wage increases of 24 per cent have been won, has brought new international coverage to the uncomfortable reality in this “workers’ state”.
The contradictions of the capitalist mode of production, so tellingly described by Karl Marx, the alienation of workers, and the intensification of the struggle for surplus value – ie for higher wages – are intensifying, not withering away. A social timebomb is ticking away at the heart of Chinese industry.
Working conditions vary widely – from modern factories like Foxcomm to slave labour brick kilns. Yet another of these was exposed on Monday after 34 migrant workers were freed by a police raid in northern Hebei province.
And, despite the boom years, official statistics show that from 1996 to 2007, labour’s share of national income has fallen to 39.7 per cent from 53.4 per cent, while the corporate share has risen to 31.3 per cent from 21.2 per cent.
But employers are no longer having it all their own way. China’s youthful workforce – 86 per cent of workers at Foxcomm are under 25 – are less compliant than their parents and are increasingly willing to vote with their feet, either by moving on, or, in small but growing numbers, striking for a better deal.
Acute labour shortages are strengthening their hand. Guangdong province says it has 2.5 million jobs unfilled and global management consultants McKinsey’s head in China has described the skills shortage as the country’s critical impediment to growth.
Last year staff turnover at multinationals in China averaged 14 per cent, up from 8.3 per cent in 2001, with many employers now having to respond with higher pay. Pay rates for China’s 150 million or so migrant workers increased 16 per cent in 2009, although productivity increases have so far largely minimised the effect on profits. But some multinationals are already relocating inland or to lower wage economies like Vietnam, Indonesia or Cambodia .
“Most of the workers born after 1980 have a better awareness of their rights,” argues Liu Kaiming, an expert on migrant labour and director of the institute of contemporary observation. “They will choose where to work and ask for better salary.”
“We are different from our parents’ generation,” a labour activist in Guangdong, Cha Jinua, told the Financial Times. “Their wishes were simple. Earn some money and return to their home towns. We want to stay in the cities and enjoy our lives here. But we want respect.”
Many were born in or grew up in cities, and consider themselves to be more urban than rural. “Exactly what part of me do you think looks like a peasant?” 19-year-old migrant worker Chen Changzheng recently asked a reporter for the Dongguan Times.
Trade union activists say strikes are now much more common, but hushed up – initial media reporting of the Honda strike was quickly silenced – and unofficial union organisers may still face imprisonment for union activity (see China Labour Bulletin).
Significantly, in Honda and elsewhere, there is, however, evidence of workers creating their own independent negotiating structures to bypass state-controlled official union structures, a process that may have longer-term political implications outside the workplace.
Even official figures show a doubling of the number of disputes being processed by arbitration bodies and the courts.
The government is also on the horns of a dilemma. Higher wages are key to stimulating domestic consumption, and Beijing, prompted in part by its trading partners, has declared the promotion of private consumption a priority as it seeks to re-orient the economy away from a model that has been too reliant on investment and exports.
It has launched a flurry of incentive programmes to encourage people to buy home appliances in the countryside and cars in cities. It is also building up the social safety net to stimulate more discretionary spending.
“If China wants to build up a new growth model driven by consumption, you have to find a channel to redistribute GDP more to labour, especially to the low-income class,” Ting Lu, an economist with Bank of America-Merrill Lynch, says.
“Now this is being not just driven by politics, but by a natural changing balance in the demand and supply of labour.”
Marx would have called that a contradiction.
psmyth@irishtimes.com