China Labour Bulletin Article by Geoff Crothall and Han Dongfang
to be published in the forthcoming book China's Great Leap

On August 8, 2008, China will formally announce its emergence on the world stage as a powerful, prosperous and modern nation with a spectacular party attended by representatives from just about every nation on earth. For the Chinese government, the Olympic Games will be the culmination of nearly two decades of work stretching back to the original bid for the Games in the early 1990s. China's current leaders are determined that the political mission initiated by their predecessors, to make the Olympics both an international success and a source of pride for the Chinese nation, will be completed on time and without a hitch. By showcasing breathtaking new venues, Olympic medalists and Beijing's clean streets, the Games will doubtless be a success. But at what cost?

The all-consuming process of gaining, preparing for and hosting the Olympics has become highly politicized. Indeed, the government's mission to demonstrate its greatness through the Games could overshadow and distract from the increasingly serious social and economic problems Chinese workers have to contend with every day of their lives.

Some of these problems, such as the appalling health and safety record of Chinese construction sites, are right under the noses of Beijing's Olympic organizers. The construction workers who built the Olympic stadiums and support facilities, and completely overhauled Beijing's transport system in readiness for the Games, are almost exclusively migrant laborers who work in extremely hazardous conditions, usually have no labor contract, no work-related medical insurance, cannot form a trade union and have no right to collective bargaining.

Olympic torch fails to shine on construction sites

In late July 2007, Sports Pictorial, a magazine published under the auspices of the Chinese Olympic Committee, interviewed a group of fifty-seven migrant workers on Beijing's Olympic construction sites about their work and living conditions. Most workers earned between forty yuan (about US$5) and sixty yuan a day, although a few earned more than eighty yuan. Many said they did not know how exactly they would be paid, and more than a third said they only got paid at the end of the year and received a small monthly allowance to live on. "I earn more than 1,000 yuan a month and get paid at the end of the year," said twenty-eight-year-old Hu Yaowu from Hebei "I've been married four years but can't afford to start a family."

Nearly all the interviewees worked ten-hour days, and only took days off if they were sick or had to go home to help with the harvest. They did not get weekends off, certainly no paid vacation, and most had no work contract or medical insurance. All those who suffered from minor injuries or illnesses at work paid for their own over-the-counter medicine or treatment at the local clinic. One worker, Liu Jiafu, who required surgery after incurring serious chest and leg injuries in a work-related accident, did have his medical expenses paid by his boss. However, when Liu, fifty-five, was released from the hospital, his boss had vanished and he received no compensation for his disability or loss of work. "Right now, I'm good for nothing," Liu told Sports Pictorial.

These problems are by no means confined to the construction industry. Lu Guorong lost her fingers while operating crude machinery at a small factory in a rural town on the Hebei-Shandong border, less than a day's drive from Beijing. Not only did the factory owner refuse to help her, he fired her two days after the accident because without her fingers she could no longer operate the machinery. Lu sought redress at the local labor bureau but in the arbitration hearing her official trade union representative appeared on behalf of the factory owner.

In the metallurgical industry, there has been a spate of accidents over the last few months. Thirty-two workers at a steel plant in Liaoning were killed in April 2007 when nearly thirty tons of molten steel poured onto the shop floor. And in August, fourteen mainly migrant workers died and fifty-nine were injured following an aluminum spill at a factory in Shandong.

Coal mining is probably still the most dangerous profession in China, and one of the most dangerous in the world. The number of accidents and fatalities has decreased from the horrendous highs of 2004 and 2005, when about 6,000 miners died each year, but there were still, according to official statistics, 1,066 accidents and 1,792 fatalities in the first half of 2007 alone. In August 2007, 181 miners died after two coal mines in Xintai, Shandong, flooded following torrential rains in mid-month. It is also important to note that the majority of accidents occur in small-scale illegal mines, precisely the kind of operations most likely to conceal accidents. The State Administration of Work Safety claimed on July 14 that it had uncovered forty-six coal mine accident cover-ups in the first half of the year, which suggests many others remain covered up and that the actual death toll is much higher than officially acknowledged.

In factories across China, workers are forced under threat of dismissal to labor in hazardous, even life-threatening conditions. In gemstone-processing factories where dust concentrations exceed permitted levels and visibility is down to one meter, workers must operate equipment without any form of silica dust protection; to complete order contracts, many workers in toy factories are forced to do overtime until they faint at their machines or even die from exhaustion. In these factories, bosses often illegally confiscate identification papers to prevent workers from quitting or running away when they can no longer endure the conditions, and many factories withhold most of workers' monthly wage packets, allowing them only pocket money.

Fair play for workers?

These conditions are commonplace across China, but the government usually takes action when specific outrages are brought to public attention by an outside agency. When a report by Playfair in June 2007 exposed the use of child labor at factories producing official Olympic merchandise, the Beijing Organizing Committee of the Olympic Games revoked the license of one company and suspended three others. BOCOG's prompt response to the revelation of abusive labor practices at its licensee factories is a good first step, but it is little help to the workers if the government stops there. The workers are out of a job and have no guarantee that even if they find another job their work conditions will be any better. Instead of merely punishing employers caught in the act, the government should give workers the power to protect their own interests by granting them the fundamental freedoms to organize their own unions and the right to strike.

The response by the Beijing Organizing Committee of the Olympic Games to the Playfair expos¨¦ is very much in keeping with the government's heavy-handed approach to potentially embarrassing labor issues. On June 29, more than 3,000 workers at the giant Shuangma Cement Plant in Mianyang, Sichuan Province, went on strike to protest against the company's proposed severance package. Shuangma, a former state-owned enterprise, was in the process of restructuring after being acquired in May by the world's leading building materials company, Lafarge. Shuangma's proposed severance package of 1,380 yuan for each year of employment was the equivalent of the average monthly wage in Mianyang and included a clause which meant workers agreed to forgo all other retirement, medical and welfare benefits. When this package was presented to the workers on June 27 as the company's final offer, it was immediately rejected. Nevertheless, management went ahead and attended a planned banquet in Mianyang City with local government officials to celebrate their good fortune after the Lafarge buyout. They had just started the banquet when the strike began. Management and local government officials rushed back to the plant, but instead of addressing the strikers' demands, they sealed off the town, surrounded the plant with police and removed all Internet postings related to the dispute.

Likewise, when news emerged that the entire workforce of the Jinzhou bus company in Liaoning had gone on strike on July 19-bringing the town to a standstill-the authorities did not address the drivers' concerns over pay and privatization but merely blocked all news related to the strike. By contrast, the rescue of sixty-nine miners from a flooded coal mine in Henan in July 2007 was given extensive national coverage and portrayed in the official media as a miracle, without any analysis of how the miners became trapped in the first place. Blame for the accident was put on nature, rather than the human abuse of it. The August 2007 Xintai mine disaster killed 181 coal miners and was initially given much publicity, as authorities hoped it would provide them with another miraculous rescue story. However, as hopes faded for the trapped miners, we once again saw the usual media clampdown as families of the miners were ordered not to talk to the media. Those journalists who attempted to interview relatives were threatened with violence. After seven days, the government ordered a complete news blackout and all coverage in the official media of what had been a major news story ceased overnight.

One World, One Dream?

The intensification of news management in the run-up to the Olympics has been obvious to all; while foreign journalists have been told they will have unfettered access to all news stories in China during the run-up to the Games, domestic journalists have been warned not to report "false" (bad) stories, their movements have been restricted, and critical blogs and websites taken down. The television journalist who created the infamous "cardboard pork dumpling" story in Beijing, which claimed that vendors were selling dumplings made of pulped cardboard to unsuspecting customers, was jailed for one year and fined 1,000 yuan on August 12, 2007 for faking news reports and "infringing the reputation of commodities." Even the most innocuous criticism has been punished. At the end of July, two high school teachers on Hainan Island were given fifteen days administrative detention for posting bawdy song lyrics critical of local officials.

All this does not bode well for the Olympics. If, as seems very likely, these domestic controls are maintained, how will petitioners or protestors arriving in Beijing be treated? Will this traditional avenue for seeking redress be allowed any public expression at all in the capital next year? We have already seen an attempted march on Tiananmen Square on August 28, 2007, by 300 migrant workers demanding the payment of their rightful wages broken up by police before it could even begin. What will happen to the millions of migrant workers in Beijing who have no permanent residency? Will they be forced to return to their home towns? Will other social undesirables, beggars and mentally ill people be removed from the streets too?

It seems from the evidence so far that Beijing is more concerned with image management than dealing with the underlying causes of its problems. We believe, however, that the government should take precisely the opposite approach. Instead of trying to conceal the less flattering side of China in order to protect its own image, the government should grasp the opportunity presented by the international media spotlight to openly discuss the real problems facing the country. If the Chinese people and the global community could better understand these issues, everyone including the government would be in better position to resolve them.

Child labor in the shadows

The specter of child labor, which BOCOG sought to exorcise so swiftly after the Playfair 2008 report, is an obvious example. Statistics related to child labor in China are designated "highly secret," and apart from occasional highly publicized crackdowns on employers the government has done little to address the problem. If, however, the use of child labor is brought out in the open and the government encourages the active involvement of all sectors of society in addressing the problem at its root, the greater the chances are that child labor can be checked and reduced in the future. Moreover, the government for its part should take urgent measures to reform the rural education system and provide sufficient funds to ensure that children stay in school, thereby cutting off the supply of child labor at its source. Many primary and middle schools in rural areas are currently funded almost entirely by fees charged to students' parents. And increasingly, these parents are deciding there is little point in them paying out thousands of yuan each year if there is little or no chance of their child going on to high school or university. As such, many children drop out in their second year of middle school (about age fourteen) and go straight to work, even though the legal minimum employment age in China is sixteen. The government could solve this problem by providing enough funding to ensure that the compulsory nine years of schooling in China are free and universally available. However, the government currently only spends about 3 percent of the gross domestic product on education, half the United Nations recommended minimum level of 6 percent.

In addition to the state's chronic underinvestment in education, public healthcare has declined to the point where millions of ordinary workers' families cannot afford to seek medical treatment or risk crippling debt if they do. In the past, workers' health care was covered by the state-owned enterprises. However, with the break-up of the state-owned enterprise system over the last decade or so, the healthcare system has broken down too. Many workers laid-off in the privatization process had limited or no healthcare benefits and were forced to seek work in the private sector where the intense competition for jobs meant that employers could very often set their own terms and conditions of employment. Moreover, the migrant workers who have now replaced state-run enterprise employees as the backbone of China's working class come predominantly from an agricultural background and have never had medical insurance, and are therefore less likely to demand it from their employers in the cities.

Tilting the balance of power

Many employers ruthlessly exploit the passivity and stoicism of migrant workers, however many of those migrant workers are now beginning to stand up for their rights and demand not only appropriate wages but decent working conditions and proper health care. China's labor legislation, especially the newly promulgated Labor Contract Law, which gives individual workers a wide range of rights and safeguards, should in theory provide workers with adequate protection from exploitation and abuse. However, as has been demonstrated time and again since the enactment of the Labor Law in 1994, the Chinese government has routinely failed to enforce its own legislation. All the power resides in the hands of the enterprise owners, who in collusion with corrupt government officials (often part-owners themselves) can dictate how hard and for how long their employees have to work and for what reward. In some extreme cases, such as the 2007 Shanxi brick factory scandal in which thousands of workers were forced or abducted into slavery, that reward was imprisonment and physical abuse.

Not only can the government not enforce national labor laws, it can not even enforce labor related regulations and directives issued by the country's most senior leaders. In 2003, Prime Minister Wen Jiabao made it his personal mission to resolve the endemic problem of wage arrears in China; however, four years later, migrant workers, school teachers and factory workers across the country are still only receiving a small proportion of their promised salary. Again, following the spate of coal-mining disasters in 2004 and 2005, the prime minister spearheaded a campaign to improve mine safety. While visiting the families of victims of the Chenjiashan Coal Mine disaster of November 2004 in which 166 miners died, Wen Jiabao stated, "We must improve safety in the workplace. We cannot let another tragedy like this happen again. We must take responsibility for our miners." However the economic demand for coal in China combined with local level corruption in the coal fields has meant that production routinely exceeds safe capacity, and thousands of miners continue to die each year.

Given the government's persistent failure to enforce its own laws and regulations, the Chinese government should not merely draft more legislation to plug the gaps but empower the workers to defend their own rights. If workers had the right to organize their own grassroots democratic trade unions and the legal right to strike if necessary, they could literally play a life-saving role in ensuring coal-mine safety. Workers could demand that employers pay collectively negotiated wages in full and on time. Moreover, unions could act as an important facilitator bridging the gap between workers and management so that many of the violent protests that have erupted all over China in the last decade could be resolved or at least addressed through negotiation before protest became imperative. However, despite its commitment to "putting people first" and creating a "harmonious society," the Chinese government shows little sign of granting its citizens the rights or the ability to protect themselves. Rather we have seen a disturbing trend in which workers (like miners trapped in flooded coal mines) are portrayed as weak, pitiable and in need of rescue. And of course in this scenario, the only body that can rescue them is the government.

Fleeting glory for a few

Chinese workers are dying every single day in China, from industrial accidents and work-related illness. Most cannot afford decent medical treatment and have to suffer further from breathing polluted air, drinking polluted water and eating contaminated food. While the supreme health and fitness of the elite will be celebrated during the Olympics, the overall health of the nation is not advancing.

There are state-of-the-art sporting facilities all over China-private gyms, swimming pools, tennis courts and golf courses-but only the very rich can make use of them. The majority of Chinese citizens have limited or no access to such facilities. If the massive sums of money spent over the last two decades on bringing the Olympics to China had been spent on education, health care and sporting facilities accessible to everyone, Chinese people would be in a better position to actually enjoy the Games. And though the money has already been spent, there is still a chance that the international exposure brought by the Olympics will have a positive effect on workers' rights, which would indeed provide some lasting benefit to the country as a whole.

The opening date of the Olympics on the eighth day of the eight month of the eighth year should signify good fortune for the people of China as a whole and not just the privileged few. Thus far, however, the Olympics have failed to inspire even those ordinary workers closest to the project. Indeed, for many migrant workers interviewed at the city's Olympic construction sites, their contribution to China's Olympic dream is just another job.

"We don't need to know what these buildings are for. As long as we do the work and get paid, that's fine," a nineteen-year-old migrant worker named Dai told the Sports Pictorial. One quarter of the migrant workers interviewed by Sports Pictorial said they did not know exactly what they were working on and less than a third could correctly identify the opening date of the Games. The majority of interviewees had no interest in the opening ceremony or who would light the Olympic torch. Eight workers thought President Hu Jintao would light the torch, others nominated themselves, their work mates or famous movie stars such as Chow Yun-Fat. Many workers had no idea if they would still be in Beijing during the Olympics, most said they would go wherever the work was. For those who were confident they would still be in the capital, most did not think they would ever be able to enter the facilities they had built. "Attending the Olympics? That is for rich people! We can watch it on television, we can't expect any more than that," said thirty-year-old Zhu Wanming from Sichuan.

Zhu Wanming and hundreds of millions like him will be faced with great hardships for a long time after the Olympic closing ceremony, and it is the Chinese government's responsibility not only to ease those hardships but to give ordinary workers the power and the right and the ability to improve their own lives.

Back to Robin Munro's Testimony at the CECC Hearing: "The Impact of the 2008 Olympic Games on Human Rights and the Rule of Law in China."

Back to Main Page of the CECC Hearing: "The Impact of the 2008 Olympic Games on Human Rights and the Rule of Law in China."