Global Policy Forum

By Philip P. Pan

The workers of this dust-choked, industrial town in eastern China woke one morning last spring to find a curious banner draped over a main road. "Protect the rights of migrant workers!" it declared in bold characters. The posters appeared next, pasted on the grimy walls outside their factories. Then came the letters, printed on bright pink paper and delivered in stacks to their workshops and dormitories.

It all advertised something entirely unfamiliar to the men and women on Tangxia's busy assembly lines: a "workers' association" that would represent their interests, protect their rights and help resolve disputes with their employers. For less than $3, anyone could join. "It sounded like a good thing," recalled Yang Jiankang, 35, one of nearly 1,500 workers who signed up and received membership cards. "If a factory owed us back wages and refused to pay, it promised to help us get our money."

Local officials set up the group as an experiment, hoping it would help them manage the thousands of migrants from the countryside who had taken factory jobs in town. And for three months, it seemed to flourish. Workers received help with grievances. State newspapers published flattering reviews. Higher-level officials approved plans for the organization to expand.

Then, suddenly and quietly, the association shut its doors. According to people involved, senior officials in the provincial capital and in Beijing decided it looked too much like an independent labor union - and in China, that's a crime. What happened to the Tangxia Migrant Workers' Association helps explain why Chinese workers, once portrayed as masters of the communist state, are so vulnerable to the market forces now transforming the world's most populous nation.

Economic reforms begun two decades ago have brought unprecedented prosperity to millions in China. But the Communist Party's reluctance to pursue political reform as aggressively has left workers without strong courts or other institutions that might protect them from abuse in an unruly, sometimes harsh form of capitalism.

One reason workers wield so little leverage against employers is China's strict ban on independent unions. Worried that union members might challenge the government as the Solidarity movement did in Poland two decades ago, China's Communist rulers are quick to suppress any labor group not under their direct control.

That leaves workers with only the All-China Federation of Trade Unions, an organization whose primary mission is to support the party and its policies. Better known for organizing badminton leagues than picket lines, it has done nothing to stop the layoffs of millions of its core members, state factory workers.

In recent years, the party has tried to revitalize these official unions, both to better protect workers and to extend its influence in the new economy. Privately, according to Chinese sources, some federation officials have urged the party to grant workers the right to strike and to let them elect their own union chiefs - reforms that might give them a fighting chance against factory bosses.

But party leaders have resisted. Some of those factory bosses are party members, and, more important, the party is worried about unleashing a wave of labor activism it could not control. As a result, many workers know labor unions only as puppet organizations set up and controlled by factory owners, who often appoint managers or relatives to key positions. In China, the factory boss is sometimes also the union president.

Tangxia is about 400 kilometers (250 miles) south of Shanghai, near the freewheeling trade port of Wenzhou, and is the kind of town where unions are weakest - and where job conditions are worst. Most of the workers here are young men and women from the countryside, peasants squeezed by dwindling harvests and rising taxes, some now living more than 1,500 kilometers from home.

They come to Tangxia in search of jobs, and they find them in factories producing the most ordinary of goods: cigarette lighters, T-shirts, plastic bags. Most of these businesses are privately owned. Wenzhou pioneered experiments with capitalism in the early 1980s, well before the rest of China, and the private sector dominates the region's economy.

At least a quarter of the town's 210,000 residents are migrants. More arrive every week, drawn by wages that can exceed $125 a month, several times what they can earn at home. But it isn't easy money. Long hours are the norm. Safety conditions are questionable. Abuses are common, as are disputes with employers.

Workers with complaints sometimes seek out Ning Jiaxin, 35, a stocky, plain-spoken migrant from Guizhou Province employed as a production supervisor in a local Velcro factory. They respect him because he put himself through college and has worked in factories all along China's industrial coast. They also know he sympathizes with them. Last year, his nephew was electrocuted in a factory accident.

"I've seen many unreasonable and unfair things happen to workers, and I've had these experiences myself, too," Ning said recently, sitting in the cramped, concrete dorm room he shares with his wife and baby, a hint of fumes from the factory below hanging in the air.

He recalled working in a pen factory in Wenzhou that withheld two months' pay from all employees as a "security deposit." After three months on the job, workers finally received a month's wages. But the factory fired some workers just before they finished the three months - and paid them nothing. "They had to leave without a penny!" Ning said. "It was pitiful. And there are others like them."

"Most migrant workers don't have much education," he said, "and they have no sense of the law. They don't know how to protect themselves or where they should go when they're in trouble."

In March, Ning tried to change that. Local officials asked him to help set up a "nonprofit, nonpolitical migrant workers' association" in Chenzhaiwang village, a neighborhood in Tangxia where migrants far outnumber natives. "Our main purpose was to maintain public order and social stability," said Lin Jingguang, a village official who was instrumental in establishing the association. The plan was to help workers resolve disputes - before they tried to settle them on their own.

When the association began recruiting members in April, the workers were skeptical. After all, many of them had heard similar promises about another organization that was supposed to represent them - their factory labor union.

Three years ago, the All-China Federation of Trade Unions began a widely publicized campaign to organize workers in places like Tangxia, and it has since set up nearly 1 million new branches. In Tangxia, the federation set up unions in about a third of the town's 300 factories, officials said. But all this organizing has hardly improved job conditions. An unusually candid article, published recently in a prominent Chinese academic journal, explained why: The vast majority of these unions are controlled by management. Workers in Tangxia call them "boss unions."

"A boss union is worse than no union," said Chang Kai, the author of the journal article and a former professor at the federation's research institute. "A clever employer will use them to control workers. Because the law allows only one union, setting up a boss union makes it illegal for workers to organize a real one."

Under the law, workers are supposed to elect their union chiefs, and factory owners and their close relatives are barred from being union leaders. But the law is often ignored, and factory owners routinely appoint managers to run the unions. For example, Zhen Yinbing, the union chief at the steelworks factory, is also the company's office director and personnel chief.

"Who do I represent?" Zhen said. "Both the boss and the workers. If I speak at a meeting, I'll say, 'First, on behalf of the general manager,' and then I'll say, 'Second, on behalf of the union.' I know it's hard to understand, but it's the truth."

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