Women Migrant Workers in China

'BIG STRUGGLE, BIG GAIN; SMAL STRUGGLE, SMAL. GAIN: NO STRUGGLE, NO GAIN! WOMEN MIGRANT WORKERS IN CHINA 10

shows how, since the 1990s, the one-party bureaucratic state has implemented radical capitalist reforms with profound affects on female rural migrant workers. He also reveals how these women workers have responded to The overwhelming majority of the labour force in China's Export Processing Zones (EPZs) is women. Here Au Loong-yu these changes. W different from that of the USSR is that in China the one-party state has been kept intact and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has led the 'reforms'. These have come at the expense of workers, with women being the most oppressed. The original Hukou system (see below) under the 'planned economy', which acted as a kind of spatial and social apartheid against the rural population, persists under the capitalist reform which helps to keep rural migrant workers' wages down and their self organisation even harder than workers who have city registration. Recently, however, more and more women workers have been able to get rid of their fear of the bosses and local government, and are striving to make their grievances heard. Working conditions in the Export Processing Zones (EPZ) The 150 million migrant workers who have left rural areas in search of jobs constitute a new working class, formed alongside the old, and many of the new migrant workers are women. Under the one party state, working people are denied the basic rights of association and are therefore extremely vulnerable to 'super-exploitation'. Migrant workers are doubly vulnerable, considered less educated and less skilled than urban workers, the market value of their labour substantially lower. Rural migrant women occupy the lowest tier of this pyramid of exploitation. These factors make the wages of migrant workers so cheap that it has attracted tremendous amounts of foreign investment. The Chinese EPZs employs approximately 20 million workers, two thirds of she world total. China has become the favourite investment haven for :ransnational corporations. Chinese wages are very low, even lower than 000000 11

India's, although China's GDP per capita is twice that of India. China was awarded the title of 'world factory' for its huge exports. The title should read: 'the world's sweatshop.' Some special features of rural migrant workers Although all women migrants face the same difficulties in the EPZs, the repressive state and the historical position of women in China means there is little awareness of the need to organize to defend themselves as workers. In addition rural migrant workers, though better educated than average rural residents, are still less educated than average city dwellers. Many not only lack self-confidence, but also some basic knowledge - for example, about the labour code; many tend to obey illegal and dangerous instructions from their employers. Secondly, while workers in State owned enterprises (SOEs) have some kind of collective identity due to their common experience, migrant workers generally have no prior collective experience. They inherit the individualism characteristic of individual farming households, because most migrant workers were born during the 1980s after the last trace of communal life was dismantled. When they come to the cities they are absolutely atomized. Many come from different provinces, and even when they come from the same provinces they may come from different counties with different regional dialects. When young migrants make friends they incline towards those from their home counties or provinces. When friendships are confined within these dividing lines, provincial prejudices can develop which in turn further damage worker solidarity. The hukou system or household registration The underlying reason for the deplorable conditions of work is the system of social control the one-party state kept i-:act through the reform process. Workers denied the basic rights of association, strike and freedom of press, are robbed of their main weapon from unscrupulous employers and corrupt local governments. Rural migrant workers are further repressed by another aspect of state control that amounts to a social apartheid against rural residents - the discriminatory and repressive hukou system. This system, used for over two thousand years in China, was established curing the imperial era as a means of social control and to facilitate tax collection. When China entered into the modern period in 1911, it was maintained. Under the CCP government the functions of political and social control grew to unprecedented levels. In 1958, after rapid industrialization was inaugurated, the hukou system was greatly strengthened, developing into a regime that systematically downgraded rural residents as second class citizens. Residents were entitled to different kinds of rights according to their hukou, ranging from physical mobility from the rural areas to the cities or from one region of China to another, to the kind of social benefits different citizens may enjoy. At the beginning of the decade, the hukou system was characterized by the following features: 12 • It tied residents to the city or village where they reside making mobility between villages and cities highly controlled. • Under the 'planned economy', al social benefits, including the provision of staple grains, housing, medical care and retirement benefits were distributed to people only on the basis of their hukou. Without a hukou a person was an outcast with no means for survival. • The system segregates the rural population from the cities, to keep the former away from those social provisions and benefits which urban

back to their home villages after they get • security guards usually have direct dwellers enjoy: the right to food, social security system, public housing, subsidized education, low priced consumer goods, etc. • Hukou is hereditary. Rural citizens and their children remain with rural hukou in almost all circumstances. Until 1998 the system would further discriminate against rural women. Children would inherit their rural identity from their mother rather than their father thus robbing rural women of any chance of upward social mobility through marrying with an urban man. • Household heads are responsible for keeping the 'household registration book' (hukou bu), giving parents power to interfere into their children's affairs, including marriage. Given the tradition of patriarchy in China, daughters are more vulnerable in this situation. • Until 2003, there were serious penalties for migrants who violated the hukou system, including being fined, jailed or being sent back home. • The right to vote for local deputies to the People's National Congress was denied if they do not have a local hukou, even when they may have worked or lived in a area for many years. The hukou system has proved to be as useful to 'capitalist construction' as it once was for so-called 'socialist construction'. It now acts as a powerful force for depressing the wages of rural migrants and preventing them from getting better jobs in the cities. It prevents them from organizing. Coming as they do from diverse provinces, being discriminated against, having a low self- esteem, being acutely aware of being alien and aware of the fact that they will sooner or later return home, the workers who make up this great army of migrant laborers find it exceedingly difficult to involve themselves in any long term organizing effort, let alone develop a class identity. Thus the system has acted as an effective tool in promoting the bureaucracy's project of re-integration with global capitalism, enriching the bureaucracy and the new entrepreneurs at the expense of rural migrant workers. Since the middle of 1990's the hukou system has been gradually relaxed so that the spatial aspect of the apartheid has now largely been eliminated. However, the substance of the social apartheid in general and the hukou system in particular remains intact. The permanent mark of being an outsider and second class citizen remains, and prevents migrant workers from achieving significant upward mobility in cities. Most decent jobs are still reserved for people who possess local hukou. Migrants can only get badly paid jobs. They still have no future in the cities, and may only work there for some years and then return to their home village. The elimination of legal inequality between sexes within after 1998 does not imply the elimination of actual inequality. Rural women generally still receive less education, and the woman is still considered to be the carer in the family. Hence many women migrant workers, after working some years in the cities, go married to look after their husbands and factory managers generally impose numerous measures restricting the personal freedom of workers children, seeing their residence in the cities as temporary. We can expect further relaxation of the hukou system in the direction of narrowing the social division of rural hukou and urban hukou in the medium term. As time goes by the hukou system may be seen by the government as obsolete, as it gradually comes into conflict with a new capitalism which increasingly demands the free flow of human resources rather than its restriction. While the elites only see the relaxation or even abolishment of the hukou system as a response to the new needs of Chinese capitalism, workers should take this as their first step in their struggle for basic civil liberties, trade union rights and economic betterment. The factory regime With a fiercely pro-capitalist central and local governments doing business directly or indirectly, it is easy to understand why investors can trespass on the legitimate rights of workers. Apart from super- exploitation, factory managers generally impose numerous measures restricting the personal freedom of workers. These measures include: • requiring a deposit from workers who also have to hand over their identity 13 cards to management; • refusing to give workers a copy of the employment contract as required by law; • forbidding workers their legal right to resign from the company without management approval; • strict discipline, the breaching of which always results in workers being fined; • guarded dormitories so outside friends of workers are not allowed to enter; contact with local paramilitary forces but since workers' wages are so low many have to stay in the dormitories, making them subject to constant • management collaborates with local government to enforce those laws which aim at strengthening political and social control. While there has been some relaxation of these laws in recent years, they are still substantially in place. The result is a barracks like factory regime, with workers under quasi-military discipline. The management of the Taiwanese, Korean and Japanese firms are especially famous for this. The beginnings of resistance In spite of the repressive capacity of the government and factory owners, workers are beginning to resist. In 2004 it was reported that in the Pearl River Delta, there were more than 30 strikes that involved more than 1000 people. Strikes that involved less than 1000 were more numerous and unreported strikes are common. One Guangzhou worker told us: "in our factory strikes are very useful and very effective. Whenever there are arrears of wages or the management introducing bad measures we will strike and it works'. In the past, the mechanisms of state and factory despotism were effective in curbing worker protests. Today, however, these same mechanisms are beginning to produce the opposite effect. It is precisely the extremity of these repressive measures that is driving workers to fight back. Strikes are always the result of super-exploitation that has far exceeded the physical and psychological limit of the workers. In the Computime case, workers struck because they were paid 40% of the minimum wages for ten years. In the Juxi case,

workers struck because of more than three months of forced overtime, during which they had to work late into the night. In the Gold Peak (GP) case below, workers have struck because they were repeatedly lied to about being poisoned by cadmium. There is a popular saying among workers, 'Big struggle big gain; small struggle small gain; no struggle no gain.' In most cases, workers have first approached local labor departments to intervene on their behalf; only when officials have repeatedly ignored their pleas have workers gone on strike. But most of these strikes have occurred spontaneously without prior planning. Well-planned strikes assume prior organization, but given the repressive regime from the central government down to the neighborhood committees and factory security guards, worker's organizations are too difficult to sustain. As the GP case shows, younger and more educated workers are generally more militant than older and less educated workers. GP has two plants in Huizhou - the Advance Battery Technology Company (ABT) and the Power Pack Company (PP). Of the two, workers in the PP plant where workers are younger and more educated is more ready to strike to have their grievances heard. In the Computime case, older workers were afraid of blocking traffic, fearing that they would be beaten by the police or paramilitaries. They told their fellow workers to quit rather than going on strike, but the younger workers insisted that justice was on their side and they must fight for it. However in most cases, no organization resulted from the workers' struggle, either because of external repression or internal Women migrants are always considered to be more obedient, which is why employers like to hire them as the chief labor force rather than men. However, when abuses accumulate women workers too reach a point where they can stand no more, and when they begin to resist they are at least as militant as men. In the GP case, for example, some women workers were more courageous than male workers in standing up against the employers. In the Stella case, women workers in the Xing'ang plant were the principal agitators. Earlier at another subsidiary plant of the Stella group, the Xinglai plant, workers had succeeded in winning some concessions through a strike. Xing'ang workers felt encouraged to do the same, but at first male workers were reluctant. Finally a large crowd of women workers gathered at the dormitories and yelled at the male workers, scolding them as useless, exhorting them to act as bravely as Xinglai workers did. The yelling and scolding aroused the courage of male workers, and they left their dormitories and gathered at the playing field. The fight back then began. The Gold Peak Case Gold Peak Industrial Ltd. is an Asian transnational company based in Hong Kong and Singapore. GP's electrical products are sold all over the world under different brand names. Its subsidiary GP Batteries began to move into Mainland China from Hong Kong in the 1980's to take advantage of the low labor cost there. In Guangdong province, Hong Kong capital accounts for two- thirds of FDI and employs more than 10 million workers. The GP Group has more than a dozen factories in China. In GP even went so far as to order pregnant women to process cadmium along side non-pregnant women Huizhou there are two GP plants employ a little more than 3000, mostly women workers. In fact, what distinguishes this case from other cases in the Pearl Delta is that the leading workers are mostly women. In November 2003, a woman worker from the PP plant fell ill and sought medical tests. It was discovered that she had an abnormally high level of cadmium in her body. Cadmium is used to produce batteries. It can cause cancer, kidney failure and serious bone problems. Once in the body, it will take many years to flush out. Affected workers face health problems for years to come. Its use is highly restricted in the EU and batteries containing cadmium will be banned from import from 2008. GP provided no protection to workers other than paper masks, which are totally ineffective as cadmium is a fine powder easily inhaled even through wearing paper masks. GP even went so far as to order pregnant women to process cadmium along side non-pregnant women; children of women workers were also found high-level cadmium in their bodies. Meanwhile the 14 poisoning continued to spread to other plants. In 2005 it was also revealed that workers in the Jetpower plant in Shenzhen and the Hong Kong plant were affected by excessive cadmium levels and some of them were diagnosed as poisoned. Altogether workers in four GP plants - two in Huizhou, one in Shenzhen, one in Hong Kong - were affected. In addition, one environmental group found that there were higher than normal levels of cadmium in the local environment. News of the cadmium problem spread through the PP factory and workers demanded that the management arrange medical tests. Getting no response workers approached the local labor department to file complaints, but received no response from there either. After laborious negotiations and a strike, the management finally arranged blood test for several hundred workers on 25 May 2004. The results showed that there was little cause for alarm: the workers' cadmium levels were only slightly higher than normal. But the workers became suspicious, and went to the Guangdong Provincial Hospital to have medical tests on their own. The results were alarming: some of the workers showed much higher cadmium levels than the official tests had shown. Outraged, 500 workers staged a three-day strike in June, demanding the truth and proper medical treatment. On 12 July, more than 1000 workers from the ABT plant followed the example of the PP workers and went on strike as well. Several hundred took to the street. We prepared a lot of small red flags, which read 'Give us back our health!' We shouted the slogan and waved our flags on our way to the municipal government house. Two workers from Sichuan province took the lead. They were couples. The man shouted slogans with a loud hailer, and the woman waved the flag. Many husbands (though not GP workers) also accompanied their wives in the demonstration. Police cars came and tried to stop us but failed. The policemen told us that if we went on demonstrating our mayor would have to step down. One worker responded: More workers approached the Provincial Hospital for private medical tests but this time the hospital refused to do the tests. an act in clear violation of the law. More workers began to fall ill, and after being sent to the hospital for treatment they were often sent back to factories witho.: diagnosis or medication.

The case is taken up in the media At this time a Hong Kong based NGO, Globalization Monitor, learned of the case and released the news to the Hong Kong media. At once it made headlines in one of the biggest HK daily newspapers. Atter this Mainland media began to report the story, but still tried to tone it down. On 23 July 2004, Globalization Monitor and thirty-three HK trade unions and NGOs forced their way into the GP building in Hong Kong to protest against the poisoning case. Shortly after, some of the GP workers received death threats. On 11 August, the Central Television made a more balanced documentary on the case. It brought hope to GP workers, and dozens of them decided to petition the central government in Beijing. In late August they set off for Beijing, but Huizhou police and officials tried to stop them from boarding the train. Though the officials failed to stop the workers, when the workers arrived at the Beijing station they found that the Huizhou officials were already there waiting for them. Though they did not dare to stop the workers from petitioning, they closely followed them. To the relief of the officials, the workers met with the same indifference in the office of the central government that they had encountered earlier, and returned home with nothing. On 3 September, fearing more confrontation both in Huizhou and in Hong Kong, the company finally decided to reveal part of the truth. Two workers were diagnosed with cadmium poisoning (later increased to eleven), and 177 workers as having a high level of cadmium and classified as under observation (later increased to 400). Compensation The company agreed to pay a small amount of compensation to these workers, 3000 or 8000 RMB for each worker, along with severance pay, contingent on their voluntary resignation. Moreover, in a joint statement with the Huizhou municipal government, GP warned the workers that if they petitioned Beijing again they would face criminal charges. The workers regarded the compensation as far too little, but eventually nearly all affected workers took it and resigned - they were afraid that the plant was now too poisonous to work in and as a special task force was sent to the factories from the Huizhou government to oversee everything, the regime became too repressive. In early 2005, 65 PP and ABT workers decided to sue the company and demanded 250,000 RMB in compensation for each worker. Soon another 244 workers followed suit. Between March and May the Huizhou court heard the case and later ruled in favor of the company despite very strong evidence provided by the workers. The Huizhou municipal government helped GP to evade responsibility for the poisoning case. The reasons behind are simple. Huizhou houses many electrical companies, so the city government has a common interest with GP to repress workers and to pay as little compensation as possible. What is more, many Huizhou SOEs, including TCL, the Huizhou Desay industrial company, Desay Group Corporation, have business Huizhou houses many electrical companies, so the city government has a common interest with GP to repress workers and to pay as little compensation as possible relations with GP, and in fact each of them holds shares in GP. Furthermore, the CEO of GP, Victor Lo Chung Wing, has close ties with well-placed government officials in Huizhou, and he is the largest individual shareholder of TCL. Lo was appointed to the Executive Council of Hong Kong government in late 2005 by the Chief Executive, Donald Tseng. Between 2004 and 2006 Globalization Monitor staged four protests at shareholders meetings of GP as well as organizing GP workers to protest. The CEO of GP then agreed to set up a medical fund for workers, but the fund is no more than a PR exercise that does little to improve the lives of the workers. In June 2006 GP sued Globalization Monitor, the Hong Kong Confederation of Trade Unions, and the Neighborhood and Workers Service Center for 'defamation'. 15 Women workers and the family For female workers. :* =er.:: whether there is family succ-= : particularly the suppor...: is crucial to their willingness is =g': for their rights. The patriarchal s,3:=- cannot be left out in any discuss. - :: women workers. Even in the GP case where women workers have take - : = lead and constitute the overwhe *E majority of the leadership, the wore- still said that having even one male leader among them is essential because his participation makes them feel safe. We believe that this sentiment is not uncommon. It speaks to the fact that women migrants generally still see themselves as inferior to men. When further asked why then they were so determined to stand up for their rights, these women workers responded that it was only because they were angry, and women workers were very emotional when they find that they are being cheated by the management. In contrast, they said, male workers are more rational in figuring the pros and cons of actions. Though there may be differences in temperament between sexes, to argue that men are necessarily more rational than women is extremely dubious. What concerns us here is that this kind of self-image necessarily affects women's determination to fighting independently. Defending workers' rights Once a GP manager remarked to his women workers, 'We thought you were all just fools, so we manipulated things and thought it would work. But it turns out that you are smarter than we thought.' Although migrant workers in general and women in particular lack a collective identity as belonging to a working class, there is always a portion who are more advanced in their social thinking and are more ready to promote collective struggles. For the moment the space for labor activism is still very limited, but it does exist. It is still possible to support the cause of workers. This article is based on extracts from a pamphlet entitled: Women Migrant Workers under the Chinese Social Apartheid, by Au Loong-yu, Nan Shan and Zhang Ping, published by the Committee for Asian Women (CAW). For further information see www.cawinfo.org