Emerging Patterns of Workers’ Protest in South China

Emerging Patterns of Workers’ Protest in South China1 Chris King-Chi Chan Abstract China has become a global manufucturing centre with its ‘unlimited’ supply of low cost and unorganised peasant workers (Lewis, 1954) The potential of Chinese workers to change this condition has significant meaning for global labour politics Through ethnographic case studies, this paper examines the extent of the rise of working class power in South China in recent years The author contestes with the dominant current in labour studies, which declares ‘the death of the working class’ and priviledges non-class identities, and argues that the expansion of global production into China has intensifed class struggle in the workplace and beyond, although workers’ class formation has been dislocated by the state strategy of labour regulation Without class organisations, the emergence of a labour movement is unlikely, but the unstable workplace relations and labour market also present a challenge to both state and management and lead to steady improvement of general working conditions Keywords: China, Class, Identity, Workers’ Protest, Strike Introduction The defeat of the labour movement in the West and the rise of ‘sweatshops’ in the newly industrial countries (NIC) has made labour studies a theoretical turn from 1980s onward A big strand of intellectual works implied that workers and their organizations have lost the historical role promised by Marx in social change and its role is replaced by the nonclass-based identity movement (e.g Gorz, 1980; Aronowitz and DiFazio, 1994; Casey, 1995; Rifkin, 1996; Castells, 1997; Aronowitz and Culter,1998; Bauman; 1998; Beck, 2000) The subordination of class identity was further reinforced by the poststructuralism which was rooted in the ‘linguistic turn’ According to this school, the dominance of class analysis among the old generation of labour studies was a project of ‘modern discourse’ (Cannadine, 1999; Day, 2001; Skeggs, 2004) In recent years, however, scholars (e.g Wood et al., 1998; Waddington, 1999; Hutchison and Brown, 2001; Silver, 2003) had showed evidence of labour movement revitalization in the newly industrized countries (NIC) like Brazil, South Korea, South Africa and Mexico Silver A German translated version of this paper was published in Peripherie (Vol 111) August 2008 The earlier version of this paper was presented at a joint seminar by the Centre for Comparative Labour Studies and Industrial Relations Research Unit: ‘Class Conflict in Post-socialism?’ at the University of Warwick on 29th November, 2007, and the 13 th International Conference “ALTERNATIVE FUTURES and POPULAR PROTEST” at Manchester Metropolitan University on 17-19 March 2008 Gratitude was given to Prof Simon Clarke for his guidance on the author’s PhD research, to Prof Michael Burawoy for being a discussant at the Warwick seminar, to other anonymous commentators The author bears full responsibilities on the error and mistakes in this article The author’s corresponding e-mails are: k.c.c.chan@warwick.ac.uk; chankingchi@graduate.hku.hk (2003: 5) argued fiercely that ‘while labour has been weakened in the locations from which productive capital emigrated, new working classes have been created and strengthened in the favored new sites of investment.’ This study attempts to strengthen up this position by providing evidences of emerging labour protest in South China, the new ‘global factory’ It is argued that the expansion of global production into China has intensifed class struggle in the workplace and beyond, although workers’ class formation has been dislocated by the state strategy of labour regulation Without class organisations, the emergence of a labour movement is unlikely, but the unstable workplace relations and labour market also present a challenge to both state and management and lead to steady improvement of general working conditions Migrant Workers’ Idendity and Class in China China’s open and reform policy since 1978 have dramatically restructured the country’s labour force A household-based production contract system (Jia Ting Lian Chang Ze Ren Zhi) was introduced in 1978 to liberate and release a huge number of peasants from the collective and forced labour of communes According to the national census in 2000, the number of rural–urban migrant workers in China was as high as 120 million Peasant migrant workers now represent 57.5% of the manufacturing and 37 % of service sector workforce (Lee, 2007a) From the middle 1990s to the early 2000s, State-owned enterprises were privatized and caused millions of state workers to be laid off or retire early (Cooke, 2005; Lee, 2007) Some of these redundant workers also joined the rural migrants to compete for employment opportunities in blooming coastal cities, where the first industrial zones with foreign investment came up While the permanent urban workers have been remarkably downsized, the number of migrant workers plays a more and more significant role in China’s political economy The working conditions of migrant workers in foreign-invested firms were appalling: low pay, long working hours, despotic management and unsafe environment (Lee, 1998; Chan, 2001; Pun, 2005) Constrained by the Household Certificate System (Hu Kou), which was originated in 1958 as a mechanism to stop the peasants moving to the city, workers were denied urban citizenship and supposed to settle in the cities temporarily Most of them settled in factory provided dormitories The rural Hu Kou, however, guarantees them a piece of farming land in their home village As far as the migrant workers are concerned, scholarly attentions have paid to the ‘working daughters’ in froeign-invested electronics factories in Shen Zhen, China’s first and most flourishing Special Economic Zone (SEZ) (e.g Lee, 1998; Pun, 2005), inspired by the feminist and cultrual orientation of labour sutides in the West (Lee, 2007b) Their studies illumilated us that the integration of the young woman rural workers into a modern labour regime involved coercion but also encountered resistance Tam’s (1992) earliest study recorded that the young girls wrote graffiti on the backdoor of the toilet to show their frustration with working life but was perceived by the management as an act challenging their authority Lee (1998:135) found that both control and resistance were organized on the lines of locality and gender, and for the worker side, an identity of ‘maiden workers’ was developed to resist the ‘class domination’ of the management Pun Ngai (2005) incorporated the issues of bodily trauma and transgression into micro workplace control and resistance She highlighted Dagongmei (working daughter) as a class and gender identity Pun quoted a da gong zai (a man selling labour to the bosses) saying: We are not treated as human beings…We work like dogs and never stop When the superior asks you to work, you have to work no matter when and where…Who cares who you are? We are nobody, we are stuff….What is dagongzai? Dagongzai is worth nothing Dagongzai is only disposable stuff (feiwu).” Pun (2005:23-24) On the basis of workers’ self understanding like this, Pun (2005: 24-25) argued that ‘a new generation of migrant workers has rapidly developed a range of examples of class awareness and understanding in the workplace.2’ These studies provided fruitful insights into working life and power relations in the global workplace In recent years, the literature has begun to suggest a rising form of labour protest among migrant workers Lee updated us that migrant workers in the late 1990s are more politically active than at the beginning of the decade: ‘an emerging element in Chinese labor politics which is likely to play a larger role in the coming years but which was totally absent during the early 1990s’ (Lee, 2002: 63); ‘by the late 1990s, incidents of worker unrest had become so routine that government and party leaders identified labor problems as the “biggest threat to social stability”… accelerated reforms have triggered both a proliferation and a deepening of labor activism’ (Lee, 2000: 41) Sargeson (2001) and Smith and Pun (2006) documented stories of women migrant workers’ protests developing in dormitories Sargeson (2001) presented a story of women migrant workers who started off a campaign for equal wage and promotion opportunities with their local counterparts Sargeson (2001: 51) emphasize the transitory potential of migrant’s place-loyalty: ‘Yet my observations suggest that even organizing that appears to centre on place-of-origin might actually aim to educate workers politically and pave the way for more inclusive arrangements.’ Smith and Pun’s (2006) dormitory study also found that kinship, original place and peer networks which prevail in factory-provided dormitories provide a base for workers’ protest In their case, hundreds of women workers in an electronics factory joined hands to demand lay off compensation by a series of actions, including a demonstration outside the government building A more forceful effort was Lee’s (2007a) comparative account for collective protests of laid-off state workers in the North and migrant workers in South China Referring to migrant workers, she observed ‘three major types of workplace grievances that often lead to labor arbitration, litigation, and protests…(1) unpaid wages, illegal wage deductions, or substandard wage rates; (2) disciplinary violence and dignity violences; and (3) industrial injuries and lack of injury compesation’ in South China (Lee, 2007a: 165) According to her, it was only after the ‘rationalization’ of the administration and But at the same time, she also pointed out, ‘the “new working class” …is often deformed, or even killed, at the moment of its birth’ by state mechanisms (Pun, 2005: 20) arbitration procedure failed to protect workers’ legal rights, that the victims were then forced to ‘radicalisation’ by walking out onto the streets ‘Worker solidarity peaks at the point of collective exit from the factory, occasioned by plant closure or relocation,’ Lee (2007a: 175) elaborated Depite the higher level of solidarity workers showed in this sort of cases, the migrants would disperse to different places after the protest without proper maintenance of contacts Lee argued that ‘Chinese workers can hardly be described as having much marketplace, workplace, or associational bargaining power’ (Lee, 2007a: 24) and ‘class identity is more muted and ambivalent among migrant workers than among rustbelt [northern state] workers’ (Lee, 2007a; 195) Lee’s argument is a part of an intellectual current to downplay class analysis in China as in the West since late 1970s (Pun and Chan, 2008) Lee (2007a: 195; 204) pointed out that migrant workers rarely used the term of gong ren jie ji (working class) or gong ren (workers) to describe themselves, as the state workers did Instead, they identified themsleves as: gong (non-state workers), nong gong (peasant workers), wai lai gong (outside workers) or da gong (selling labor to the bosses) Meanwhile, state workers had better organizational resources such as the trade union, workers’ congress or a stable urban community so that they could stage a joint factory campaign, which was much more difficult for migrant workers to achieve However, as Thompson inspired, class formation was a ‘historical phenomenon’ which was influenced by ‘traditions, value-systems, ideas, and institutional forms’ and embodied in a real context of numerous struggles in workplace, community and society (Thompson,1980: 10-11) Thompson suggested a notion of ‘class struggle without classes’ which continues to inspire contemporary workplace studies (Edwards, 2000: 142): …people find themselves in a society structured in determined ways (crucially but not exclusively in productive relations), they experience exploitation (or the need to maintain power over whom they exploit), they identify points of antagonistic interests, they commence to struggle around these issues and in the process of struggling discover themselves as classes Thompson (1978:49) Thompson’s intellectual insights to the studies of migrant workers’ politics were twofold First, workers’ slef-idenfication should interpreted in their political and cultural context Politically, gong ren jie ji and gong ren were political rhetorics imposed in Mao’s era, while mig gong, nong gong and wai lai gong were the social stigma attached to the new workers after the reform Culturally, da gong is a term more attached to the Cantonese context with a very similar meaning to gong ren Second, class formation can only be understood by a historical perspetive Instead of comparing migrant workers with their state employed counterparts, whose historical and material foundations were very different, the possibility and limitatation of a more inclusive class conscioness should be explored with a historical comparision of migrant workers themsleves during their struggles in workplace and comunity On the basis of this approach, this study compares two cases of workers’ strike in 2004 and 20073 To situate them into the historical context of labour conflicts in South China’s export processing zone (EPZ) since 1978, it first gives a brief overview over the labour relations and the legal regulatory framework developed since the end of the 1970s Chinese Labour Relations in Transition The workplace relations in She Kou Industrial Zone (SKIZ), the first export processing zone in Shen Zhen, showed that the mediation role of socialist trade unionism still prevailed in the 1980s (Leung, 1988; Wong, 1989; Tam, 1992) One of the labour dispute cases in SKIZ took place in a Hong Kong-invested toy factory, Kadar The factory employed 1,600 workers in 1983 Workers were discontented with the long working hours A complaint was lodged with the trade union The She Kou Industrial Zone Federation of Trade Unions (SKIZFTU), with the support of the local state, advised the factory to restrict overtime work Twenty workers supported the union by refusing to work overtime on the first evening after the negotiation between the trade union and management, but the management fired one of their leaders SKIZFTU demanded that the company re-employ the dismissed worker Kadar responded by threatening to withdraw investment Supported by the SKIZ government, SKIZFTU represented workers to sue Kadar and finally forced the management to accept their request In this case, the trade union and the local state took a proactive role in protecting the workers, while workers were relatively passive in defending themselves Leung (1988) portrayed a strike which was described as the ‘worst case’ in the city at that time In this case, 21 migrant workers This research was conducted in the city of Shen Zhen Selection of this city was not only because it is a ‘powerhouse’ of the “global factory” (Lee, 1998), but is also the city most prone to labour conflicts The number of cases handled by labour dispute arbitration committees of Shen Zhen was reported as high as one tenth of the total national figure (Nan Fang Ri Bao, 28/10/2004) Departing from previous ethnographers who worked in a factory as an ordinary worker (e.g Lee, 1998; Pun, 2005), I applied a method of community participant observation supplemented by documentary research I conducted one year’s fieldwork in Bao An District of Shen Zhen from September 2005 to Auguest 2006 based on an NGO run labour service centre in an industrial zone During the first half year, I widely interviewed workers with strike experience to grasp the general pattern of labour conflict and strikes Then I chose a Taiwanese invested factory for deeper investigation A strike in this factory in 2004 had given rise to a wave of strikes in the community In the second half year, I moved to observe the working and social life in this factory by living together with workers in a private rented room, paying visits to their shop floors and conducting indepth interviews with some of them In December 2006, August 2007 and January 2008, I returned to the field sites to observe the new developments In August 2007, I encountered another wave of strikes led by a German-owned factory in the same town Sources from labour NGOs documents and publications were used to trace back the historical development of labour conflict in the region before 2004 The documentary data on strike and labour conflict was generally brief To address the ‘authenticity, credibility, representativeness and meaning’ in regard to the private source data (Bryman, 2001: 361-367), editors or publishers of some documents were invited to clarify information and double-checked the reliability and validity The author is very grateful to HKCTU, AMRC and HKCIC’s permission to my free access to their internal databases and to Apo, Au, Ah Tat, Bing Kwai and Ying Yu’s information provision on the documents This case was documented by Wong (1989) The information was provided by SKFTU in Wong’s fieldwork in Shen Zhen in a Japanese factory in SKIZ stopped work for ten hours while union and party officials followed them all day and night during the strike This case also highlighted that workers’ strike activism was weak in 1980s and the official trade union and the party had a very active role in workplace, comparing with what I elaborated in later cases However, upon the sudden inflow of both foreign capital and inland migrant workers to the region after 1992, the official trade union was unable to maintain this position of mediation in workplace as most of the foreign invested enterprises [FIE] did not establish a trade union After the Tiananmen democratic movement, some student activists tried to organize and establish independent trade unions Yet they were all mercilessly suppressed (Leung, 1995; Lee, 2007) Responding to these new challenges, a new version of the Trade Union law was announced in 1992 to consolidate trade union collective consultation rights, but meanwhile heighten control of higher-level trade unions over their affiliates In 1994 alone, 17, 293 trade unions were set up in FIEs, nearly double the total figure of the previous ten years Yet, as many researchers pointed out (Jiang, 1996; Chan, 2001; Cook, 2005), most of them were controlled by the management and were not even able to perform the socialist ‘transmission-belt’ role In FIEs especially, most factory trade unions were formed to satisfy the request of local state or transnational buyer corporate in paper and no union committee election is held Usually a trade union chairperson is a vice general manager or human resource management manager and committee members are managerial and supervisory staff assigned by the management As a result, ordinary migrant workers did not aware of the existence of a trade union in their factory and if they were a union member5 Without an effective collective bargain mechanism, wild cat strikes also became common form of labour protests Leung (1995: 38) reported ‘a momentous rise in the number of labour protests …during the years 1992-4.’ In the words of Jiang (1996: 139), it was an ‘unprecedented strike wave in FIE concentrated in south China’, while Taylor et al (2003: 175) described it as ‘the third wave of strikes’ in the history of the People’s Republic In many large scale strikes, workers demanded wage rises, responding to high inflation and the new legal minimum wage policy During this period, on the one hand, the local state’s attitude to independent trade unions was very strict In one of cases in Shen Zhen in 1994, workers in a Taiwanese shoe factory formed a ‘temporary trade union’ during a strike, but it was declared ‘illegal’ after the strike ended7 Most of the workers did not know who the initiators of the ‘temporary trade union’ were, but all the over ten interviewed workers expressed that they wanted a trade union, but the only problem was the management did not allow them to so On the other hand, the central government responded to this wave of strikes by labour rights legislation Li Bo Yong, the head of the Ministry of Labour, expressed this: See Chan (2006a) for the development of trade unionism in China The first and second waves were both in the 1950s The case was documented in AMRC (1995), the author interviewed a main researcher of the booklet before formulating this article This year’s labour and employment condition is very bad, and the labour conflict cases have a trend of rapid increase; last year the number of strikes, work stoppages, collective administrative complaints (Shang Fan), petitions, marches and demonstrations was not lower than 10 thousand, among them the foreign invested enterprises were most evident …The Ministry of Labour is actively preparing for legislation and setting up related policies There will be a series of regulations and policies to be announced It is hopeful that the above problems can be controlled or regulated to a large extent (Kuai Pao, 14/03/1994) As a result, a legal regulation framework was basically established by mid-1990s to replace the ‘socialist’ administrative regulation (Ng and Warner, 1998; Taylor et al, 2003; Clarke et al, 2004) In 1993, the ‘Enterprise Minimum Wage Regulation’ was issued by the Ministry of Labour Under the regulation, local governments are given the autonomy to formulate their own legal minimum wage More significantly, a Labour Law was legislated in 1994 The law laid down a foundation for workers’ legal and contractual rights, a system for solving labour disputes as well as collective contract and collective consultation between the trade union and management This new institutional framework for regulation of industrial relations drew on the example of the western capitalist countries However, without an effective trade union to represent the interests of workers, especially in foreign Invested enterprises (FIE), tripartism, collective contract and collective consultation can hardly be implemented (Ng and Warner, 1998; Clarke et al, 2004) The local labour authorities under the Ministry of Labour and Social Security, especially Labour Bureau in county/district and Labour Station in town level, suppose to enforce the implementation of the labour law Labour officials should make investigation after they receive a complaint from workers, and in case the factory infringes the law, they can impose a fine penalty The local labour authorities, nonetheless, were passive in enforcing the laws and workers were often paid below the legal minimum due to patronclient relations between local government officials and business (Chan, 2001; Cook, 2005) The arbitration procedure, then, became the last legal channel to solve individual and collective disputes between migrant workers and their employers The total number of registered labour dispute cases increased from 19,098 in 1994 to 226,391 in 2003 (State Statistics Bureau, various years) However, the arbitration procedure is very timeconsuming and complicate for workers Moreover, for a migrant worker, they would be dismissed if they came to sue their employer In reality, most workers would only file a legal case after leaving a factory But the living cost in the city during the legal procedure is a cost workers cannot bear without a job The failure of the industrial relations framework to handle workers’ grievance gave rise to an emerging pattern of work stoppage, strike and protests, bypassing the trade union and See Lee (2007a) for the detail elaboration of the labour administrative complaint and arbitration procedure law The right to strike has not yet been recognized by the law since it was removed from the constitution in 1982 (Taylor et al, 2003), but any action to disrupt social order is illegal under section 158 of the Penal Code Studies revealed that strikes were ‘scattered, spontaneous and unorganised’ in the early 1990s (Leung, 1995: 44) and described as ‘decentralization, cellular activism, and legalism’ until early 2000s (Lee, 2007a:236) This study sets out to investigate the development of strike patterns after the emergence of a ‘shortage of labour’ in 2004 Changing Characteristics of Strikes In this section, I will portray two strike cases in 2004 and 2007 Both of the cases took place in Bao An district of Shen Zhen, and were within a broader phenomenon of ‘wave of strikes’ The 2004 case, documented here, happened in a Taiwanese and the 2007 case in a German owned business Both firms run two production estates in Bao An district and supplied electronics products for international market The two Taiwanese plants are within the same community with minute walk from each other, under the same management team and their workers lived in the same blocks of dormitories with all male in one and women within the another plant However, the two German plants situate in different towns with one hour bus distance and under different management teams, although supervisory staff are despatched to each other if need For convenience, I refer the workers of the Taiwanese firm as from the same factory, while workers of the German company as from two factories/plants The main German factory where strike was firstly organised in 2007 is in the same town with and just 20 minutes by walk from the Taiwanese factory As will be shown, a similar pattern of protest was witnessed in both cases, while there were some significant progresses in 2007 Although the two strikes were organised by different groups of workers in different factory, workers learned from each other and accumulated experience as a collective In fact, cross-factory informal network was well developed among workers, especially those from the same province and in the skilled and supervisory range The German factory was one of the factories that workers staged short stoppage for the implementation of minimum wage after the Taiwanese factory strike in 2004 In 2007, the German factories were only examples of similar strikes so that the city government was forced to raise the minimum wage 2004 strike in a Taiwanese Factory From 2004 to 2005, another wave of strikes broke out The main demand in this wave was for full enforcement of the law, especially the wage and social insurance regulations My selection of these two cases was based on there considerations First, workers in the strike showed a higher level of militancy and had larger impact in the community Strike was more and more common in workers’ experiences, but some other cases were less organized and militant than these two cases Selection of these two cases was to explore the possibility and limit of radical workplace in China’s global factories Second, the two cases happened in two of the largest factories in the same town which workers struggle experiences transferred to each other so that a historical comparison of the pattern of strike was possible; Third, rapport was developed with workers in these two factories so that more reliable in-depth data could be collected One of the strikes happened in a Taiwanese household appliance factory with 9000 workers It was set up in 1992 with only 20 to 30 workers In 2004, workers had to work 12 hours per day, seven days a week In 2004, the minimum wage was 480 yuan per month with a 40-hour working week The legal weekday overtime pay was 1.5 times and weekend overtime was two times the normal rate But workers were paid below the standard As an ordinary worker, one’s basic salary was 450 yuan, covering eight hours a day working from Monday to Saturday Overtime work out of the eight hours and on Sunday was paid at an hourly rate of 2.4 yuan In the late 1990s, a Taiwanese listed company took over fifty-one per cent of the shares of the factory The original sole investor, who kept the remaining forty-nine per cent of shares, acted as the general manager running the factory; the listed company, on the other hand, contributed its global distribution and sales network to the joint venture Wal-mart is the factory main customer In this way, the factory was expanded into a giant producer with three plants, two in Shen Zhen, and one in the city of Hui Zhou which is adjacent to Shen Zhen 60% of the workers in the Shen Zhen plants were male workers, as men occupied most of the managerial, supervisory and skilled position, and the management preferred male workers with physical strength in menial work Women workers then were employed mainly in the routine, simple and dirty work Ordinary female workers were quieted by the control strategy based on place and gender politics, but physical conflicts among the stratum of experienced and skilled male workers in the line of original place were very common Gui Zhou and Si Chuan provincials were mostly notorious for their violence The factory provided dormitories for all of the workers, and deducted 50 yuan from their monthly salaries for rent and bills But as living conditions in the dormitories were terrible, with four pairs of bunk beds for eight workers per room, more than 30% of the workers rented private rooms outside the factory The rent ranged from 150 to 250 yuan per month There were many corner shops in the community workers lived, most of which were run by workers or ex-workers The corner shop was one of the meeting points for Laoxiang (fellows from the same homeland), who spoke their own dialects with each other Locality based identities were prominent While workers from the same province described others as ‘wai sheng ren’ (out-provincials), except Guang Dong people who were described as ‘ben di ren’ (locals) However, workers’ social life was more complex than a single native place line There were many cross-provincial peer groups Peer groups were formed on the basis of age, gender, position in production, economic status and consumption pattern as well as the original place For example, male workers with higher income spent their leisure time in the hair salon, massage shop, disco, Ma Jiang (a traditional Chinese game with four players), restaurant and bar, while younger and ordinary workers with lower income played snooker, skated, watched movies and surfed the internet or simply enjoyed free performances in the street While there were many working couples in the community, most of them left their children at home villages to be looked after by their parents due to low pay, high living cost and unstable employment in the city In April, 2004, the factory began a new policy of requiring workers to punch attendance cards during the half-hour lunch break twice, in and out The policy was to prevent the technicians and auxiliary workers who did not work on the production line from staying outside after lunch The policy caused trouble for some workers It took those who worked on the upper floors 10 minutes or more to wait for the punching The strike began in the lacquering department, which was situated on the 5th floor, and spread to the whole factory the next day Workers requested that their basic salary and overtime pay rise in line with the legal minimum rate In the morning, a notice calling for a strike was stuck up in every department but the call for a factory-wide strike was unsuccessful More than 100 workers from the lacquering department then walked out from the factory to block a highway However, they were either persuaded back by their managers or driven off by the police A group of young men from the department then turned off the electricity in different departments As a result, most workers walked out from the factory and stood outside the factory The town officials and police showed up soon The factory requested the workers to elect representatives There was no formal election, but ten male workers stood out voluntarily to be representatives The negotiation was held in the afternoon However, at the end of the meeting, the ten disappeared A reliable rumour was that they were threatened and dismissed with huge compensation In the evening, some of the workers were annoyed enough to rush into the administrative office and they drove the Taiwanese general manager and local factory director off to the entrance of the factory, where thousands of workers gathered A witness described the scene: There were 2000 to 3000 workers on the scene of the factory entrance, and also a certain number within the factory complex, who requested the Taiwanese Lao (Taiwanese guy) [the general manager] to come out and explain The Taiwanese Lao finally came out at 9:00pm As soon as he appeared, those standing out of the entrance pushed inwards, while those inside crowded out, all were screaming with a “wow, wow” sound Someone shouted, “kill him! kill him!” …The Taiwanese Lao was then beaten by somebody Four or five security guards promptly dragged the Taiwanese Lao and the director into the factory, and closed the gate of the factory …some angry workers managed to climb over the iron gate Others flung out cigarette butts, water bottles, and rubbish onto the body of the Taiwanese Lao Half a bottle of water was just thrown down on the head of the Taiwanese Lao The Taiwanese did not lose his temper; by contrast, he said, “don’t throw this stuff, don’t throw stuff Wages can be raised ”One of the workers cursed, “you the Taiwanese guys did not treat us as human”….Around 100 workers stayed on overnight to block the factory and stop the factory sending goods off.’ On the third day, two to three thousand workers walked from their factory to the highway again They were stopped after they had walked 10 minutes along the highway by hundreds of police, military police, and security guards The labour bureau officials persuaded them to return to their factory: ‘as long as you go back, we can talk about any conditions on the table.’ Workers, then, walked back to the factory When workers came back to the factory, the Taiwanese managers all escaped to a neighboring Taiwanese factory The gate of the factory was locked Some militant workers forced the security guards to let them out by a threat of violence Discontent was widespread among workers In the evening, a bigger mobilization was fomented In the morning of the fourth day, a message was widely spread among workers ‘In dormitories, private buildings, and even street corners, there were people asking others “go to the city government” ’, a worker recalled Two big banners stated slogans: ‘return our ten workers’ representatives’ and ‘factory XX violates the labour law, doesn’t raise wage!’ At 8:00am, 4000 to 5000 workers then departed the village to the highway Workers also prepared amplifiers, cameras and fund-raising boxes on which they wrote: ‘for our common interests, please put in your money!’ The boxes were soon full of money Younger ordinary workers held the amplifiers and led the slogan, some middleaged skilled and supervisory workers walked along and voiced the sounds of ‘wow wow’ to push up workers’ morale The cameras were only used to take pictures when workers were beaten by policemen, but not vice versa More and more workers from other factories joined in At 1:00pm the protestors, whose number had reached as high as 7000 to 8000, arrived in the immigration control station 10 More than ten fire engines and over thirty water cannons stood in front of the station The police used the water cannon to drive away the workers, while the workers lobbed stones and bricks at police Later on, the police sent out plainclothes officers to mix with the protestors They suddenly strongly attacked workers After the workers in the front fell down, those standing behind screamed and others retreated Some workers were arrested and soon released Thirty workers were sent to hospital and treated well Their medical expenses were all paid by the police The head of the district police bureau came to visit them, and gave each patient, workers and policemen alike, 100 yuan On the fifth afternoon, a general meeting was held where the general manager reassured workers that both lunch and dinner times would be extended to one hour, and promised the factory’s policy would fully comply with the law The strike then finished The wage concern was settled, but workers’ discontent over the punishment system and intensive work pace continued For example, the factory set a daily output target for workers If one could not finish the quota, her/his wage would be deducted The target was increased after the strike Some inexperienced workers were deducted as much as more than 200 yuan from their monthly income To avoid a deduction of wage, workers were forced to work evey hard Some went to the Labour Bureau to make a complaint but it was not accepted At the end of the year, around 3000 workers resigned from the factory in order to collect the two years’ social insurance which they successfully demanded in a collective complaint to the district Labour Bureau after the strike A trade union was established after the strike, but it remained a typical management trade union without any democratic committee election and union activities After the strike, struggles to demand full implementation of the legal wage took place in all of the eight large factories (with more than 1000 workers each) in the community 10 The station was built in 1979 to separate the first SEZ from the outskirts with spiky metal fence When there was a sign of a strike, the management informed the government as soon as possible, then the main gate of the factory would be locked and the factory estate surrounded by police Without any negotiation, the factory owners responded positively to increase wages in line with the law In late 2004, the company opened a giant factory in the neighboring city of Hui Zhou Workers’ strike experience was soon transferred to the new factory by hundreds of supervisors and skilled workers who were dispatched to help set up the new factory The first factory-wide strike took place in Hui Zhou in December 2004 I visited the Hui Zhou factory in March 2006 and found workers there knew well the stories of the strike in Shen Zhen Department-based stoppages then became an endemic culture in both factories In both factories, the quitting rates were very high 2007 Strike in Two German Factories Shen Zhen has two legal minimum rates, for workers inside and outside the SEZ respectively The outside rate, which was 419 yuan per month in 2000, increased slightly every year to only 480 in 2004 But it was boosted to 580 in July 2005 and 710 in July 2006 As a result, for two consecutive years, workers in most large factories enjoyed big pay rises and expected a similar adjustment in July 2007 However, the city government did not increase the minimum rate in August 2007 This provided the basis for another wave of strikes in August and September 2007 In one of the cases in August 2007, a joint factory strike took place in two electronics plants owned by the same German owner Both plants, which were half an hour’s drive from each other, had a similar size of 8000 workers The legal minimum wage and social insurance, two of the key concerns for workers after 2004, were basically enforced in these two factories The German owned business produces mobile phone chargers and other components to global market Since it was set up in 1993, it had expanded into two large plants in Shen Zhen and the other in Beijing Both of the Shen Zhen branch employed about 8000 workers with almost the same working conditions and management strategy Similar to the Taiwanese factory, the wage level are comparatively higher than some smaller factories in the area The factories operate in two shifts The day shift is from 7:00am to 7:00 pm with a one-hour lunch break from 11:30am to 12:30pm, while the night shift is from 7:00pm to 6:45am with a 45-minute mid-night break from 11:00pm to 11:45pm Ordinary workers usually work six days per week and their monthly salary is from 1000 to 1400 yuan But different from the Taiwanese factory, 90% of the ordinary workers are women between 18 and 30 due to less menial and skilled positions Most of the production workers were from provinces of He Nan and Guang Xi while the skilled workers were more from Guang Dong In both plants of this company, the segregation of skill and gender is very apparent Ordinary manual workers are called ‘yuan gong’ (employees), while others, including managers, supervisors, engineers, technicians, office clerks, are called ‘zhi yuan’ (staff) After two years’ pay rises, the company lowered costs by increasing the work intensity of ‘yuan gong’, and containing the overtime pay of ‘zhi yuan’ from late 2006 First, the work quotas assigned for each production line were increased steadily If workers could not finish the quota, their lunch time the following day would be shortened to the unfinished tasks Workers generally complained that work was too exhausting To tackle the problem of the high turnover rate, the factory restricts the right of workers to resign For those without proper ‘permission’ to leave, the factory will keep their last salary Second, the factory restricted the overtime working hours of the zhi yuan From July 2007, the maximum overtime hours of zhi yuan were set at 72 per month Like the Taiwanese factory, in order to discipline the poor attendance of the machine repair mechanics, a new punching machine was installed in August 2007 for zhi yuan Workers got their pay slip on a Thursday in August As the government did not increase the legal rate, workers’ salary was not raised Moreover, technicians and supervisors found their income was reduced due to the overtime restriction A strike was firstly organised in one plant and extended to the other on the first day of the strike In the evening of the Friday night, a public letter was posted in all workshops within the first plant The letter requested: To adjust our current wage standard … yuan gong [employees] : 1500 yuan or more; second level zhi yuan [staff] : 2000 yuan or more; third level zhi yuan: 2500 yuan or more; fourth level zhi yuan: 3000 yuan or more; the above figure should exclude any subsidy11 To raise the accommodation and food subsidy for those living outside To improve the welfare conditions, provide reasonable allowance for high temperature, toxic, outdoor and occupational disease-prone posts as well as regular occupational disease and body checks To provide night shift subsidy and snack allowance for those working on the night shift The company should buy unemployment, maternity, hospital and all of the other insurance requested by the labour law To solve the hygiene problem of drinking water To improve the reasonability of the overtime work … The trade union should function appropriately and its core members should include participation of grass roots employees and staff On Monday morning, some skilled workers switched the electricity off Thousands of workers walked out to the highway and occupied one half of the main road The town Party head, Labour Bureau officials and top managers persuaded strikers to elect representatives for negotiation The workers responded that they were all representatives or they had no representatives The police then drove off the workers by force Some young workers resisted in the front and several were arrested by the police In the 11 The demanded wage standard was an expectation from workers on their monthly income, including overtime payment but not extra subsidies such as for accommodation and night-shift work afternoon, the management decided to increase basic salary by 300 to 500 for staff, dependent on position level, and only 30 for employees The supervisory staff was mostly satisfied with this offer and went back to work from the Monday night On Tuesday, the production workers continued the strike A notice was posted by the factory to announce the above salary rise as well as a 50 yuan subsidy for those living outside and a yuan allowance per day for the night shift workers The managers and supervisors tried their best to persuade workers to go back to work But ordinary workers began to recognize that the staff had ‘betrayed’ them In the evening, pamphlets were thrown down from the dormitory buildings The pamphlet denounced the zhi yuan (staff) and called for unification of yuan gong (employees) as well as stating demands such as: Basic salary 810 yuan12 [for employee] No deduction of fees for living in dormitory; living outside should get appropriate subsidy Night shift should have a night snack allowance of 150 yuan paid on a one month base Give those workers in toxic and detrimental conditions an appropriate subsidy and subsidize the outdoor-working staff according to the Labour Law (150 yuan) The drinking water of yuan gong [employee] should reach the hygiene standard This list of demand was more concrete and specific to the interests of ordinary workers than the previous public letter It showed that instead of being passively mobilised by the supervisory and skilled staff, ordinary workers were also able to act for their own interests although their organising resource was much less due to their position in the production Staff could post public letter to the notice board in every workshop, but employees could only distribute pamphlets in the dormitory Encouraged by the pamphlets like this, the strike continued on the third day On the fourth day, the company announced that those who want to resign in three days could get back all of the compensation and wages immediately and workers who returned to work in three days could get an extra allowance, while the others would be seen as ‘absent’ and ‘quitting by themselves’ Three thousand workers then resigned At the same time, the factory provided distilled water in both dormitories and workshops They promised to install air conditioning in workshops as well as a rest room with a TV set on each floor of the dormitories The demand for rank-and-file members to join the trade union committee did not meet with a positive response Alternatively, the factory promised a regular meeting with the supervisors and encouraged more suggestions from the ordinary workers Workers in the other branch plant joined in the strike on Monday and its process was similar with their counterparts although in a looser organised way 12 Here only the wage demand of ordinary manual workers was listed and the basic salary referred to monthly wage for eight hours per day and five days per week Their overtime pay would be calculated based on this rate The basic salary of ordinary workers in most of the factories was not more than the legal minimum rate which was 710 yuan at the time of strike It meant that strikers’ demand was 100 yuan on the top of the legal minimum Somebody unplugged the electricity switch and led ordinary workers to walk out to the strike Thousands of workers quitted after the announcement from the management on Thursday Workers in both plants returned to work on the fourth day The factory recruited new workers by extending the age restriction During the strike, there was a “rumor“ among the workers, which was proved to be true two months later, that the city government would increase the wage soon From 1st October, the minimum wage in Shen Zhen was increased to 850 yuan for inside SEZ and 750 yuan for outside It was announced that the rates would be effective until 30 th June 2008 On 1st January 2008, when I revisited the informants, workers in some departments told me that the new-year day was their first rest day after the strike as the factory could not hire enough workers Like the strike in 2004, the knock-on effect of this strike was very obvious Many large factories around this factory staged short strikes to raise wage demands or prepared to so, and the management responded rapidly to satisfy their demands Discussion and Conclusion Although cases of strike were reported in the region as early as 1980s, their impact and scale were very small comparing with the waves of strike since 1993 A series of commonalities was evidenced across the pattern of strikes from 1993 to 2007 First, the occurrence of strike waves had a direct relation with the expansion of global capitalism and state intervention in production and reproduction of the labour force Second, there were discontents deeply embedded in the labour process which were hard to be solved through existing formal channels Third, there was an immediate cause negatively affecting workers’ interests as a touching point of the strike Fourth, some hidden leaders acting underground to lead the strikers were important conditions of a strike Fifth, violence was usually used to force others to strike or show discontent towards the top factory management Sixth, a strike will exert a knock-on effect in other factories However, detailed analysis shows evidence of significant development: The workers’ demands were more and more radical, from within the limit of the law to beyond the law In 1993 and 1994, when the management responded to the workers’ wage rise demand by charging or increasing food, accommodation or other fees, workers failed to resist the acts as they were legal (AMRC, 1995) In 2004 and 2005, however, workers demanded real implementation of the minimum wage without any deduction In 2007, strikers asked for a reasonable and decent wage as well as a proper working and living environment They learned from past experience and from each other and so their struggle became strategically more sophisticated over time In 1993 to 1994, the strikers contained themselves within the complex of the factory (AMRC, 1995) In 2004 and 2007, workers began to walk out to the highway to attract public attention and state intervention For the 2004 case, workers transferred struggle experiences to the new factory in another city In 2007, two factories under the same company coordinated with each other to stage a joint strike The ‘shortage of labour’ had increased the confidence of the workers Despite that the supply of migrant workers seemed to be unlimited in early 1990s (Lee, 1998), the further expansion of global capitalism into China promptly pushed up the demand for, but no wage of labour (Lewis, 1954) One of the key characteristics of the 2004 and 2007 strikes was the large scale of quitting following the strike Workers could easily get a job soon after the strike Edwards and Scullion’s (1982) study suggested that quitting itself is a form of industrial conflict This study showed quitting, as an individual form, increased in parallel with the strike as a collective form of struggle Although workers’ wages were mostly raised after the strikes, their discontent with the management could not be removed Skill workers in particular was not in fact ‘unlimited supplied’ when the economy was in the process of rapid growth (Lewis, 1954) The high turnover rate exaggerated the ‘shortage of labour’ and lowered productivity The strike further strengthened rank-and-file workers’ confidence and increased the conflict between workers and management ‘Voice’ and then ‘quit’ or ‘voice’ again became a common way to express their discontent, borrowing the terms from Hirschman (1970) This new pattern of workplace conflict brought a big challenge to the management, whose first concern is productivity, and the state, which was keen to maintain social order and a favourable investment environment The emerging patterns of workers’ protest had forced the state to improve labour protections (e.g new labour legislation and higher minimum wage rate) and the management to adopt new business strategies (e.g production relocation to other part of China and outsourcing) But workers’ struggle strategy also changed over time due to a new legal, social, economic and political context The challenge from workers’ protest forced the government to improve workers’ legal protections For the 1993-1994, strike, the speech of Li Bo Yong was very clear evidence For 2004 to 2005, a Labour Contract Law was legislated in 2007 to strengthen workers’ individual and collective rights, alongside a Dispute Mediation and Arbitration Law and an Employment Promotion Law At the local level, the legal minimum wage rate was dramatically increased after the wave of strikes in 2004 and 2005 It seems that the state also recognized the deficiency of an individual rights based framework and the need for a ‘collective’ instrument in the workplace to solve the conflict and stabilize the labour force The new Labour Contract Law was legislated in 2007, under which the role of the trade union is strengthened With strong state support, the ACFTU has launched a historical high profile campaign to unionise migrant workers in foreign invested factories since 2006 by targeting transnational corporations like Walmart, McDonald and KFC (Chan, 2006b) Under this reform, provincial and local branches of the ACFTU in Guang Dong province, where this study was conducted, seems to take a more active role in the defence of workers’ rights and interests For example, trade union officials in Guang Dong Federation of Trade Unions acknowledged that the most effective way to protect wage is through direct negotiations between labour and management (CLB, 2008) However, as Clarke and Pringle (2007) pointed out, Chinese trade unionism should be understood in the context of the state socialist legacy The dynamics of trade union reform indeed came from the political pressure of party-state to prevent social unrest As almost all of the workers’ protests bypassed the trade union, there was strong pressure from the party-state for the ACFTU to reform itself and expand its coverage in the workplace All these state and official trade union initiatives could be regarded as political concessions to workers and so provided a new enviroment for workers’ activism But the real barrier to collective bargaining and domocratic trade unionism remained unchanged Workplace trade unions, especially in the FIEs, not have active membership and union committees were generally controlled by the management rather than workers (Clarke et al, 2004; CLB, 2008) Thus, the ambiguity and dilemma of the state’s policy on class organisation dislocated and obstructed working class formation Without an effective class organisation, workers’ struggles are confined to the level of the workplace or community, so a significant labour movement is unlikely While the state and the ACFTU not support ‘illegal strikes’, and civil society, if any, is too weak to provide help, the leaders of strike were isolated and risked revenge from the management This accounts for the hidden form of leadership and lack of collective bargaining in the strike When there was not overt leadership, and law could not continue to function as a solidarity base as their demand had gone beyond that, different sections of workers were vulnerable to being divided While the hidden leaders, who were mainly skilled or senior workers, had more imagination of the trade union as a class organisation, the younger ordinary workers had a very limited understanding of that Following these considerations, I agree with Lee (2007a) on the contradictory role of the state on maintaining legitimation and accumulation and the capacity of the state to constitute workers’ interests in ‘labour regulation and social reproduction of labour power’ What I cannot agree with Lee is her theorization of class and identity Lee tended to define ‘class’ as a discourse or language that workers use or don’t use: ‘the discourse of class, Maoism, citizenship, and legality as the repertoire of standards of justice and insurgent identity claims ’(Lee, 2007a: 29) But as this paper showed, as a language, ‘class’ is not reliable to make a judgement of class consciousness and workers’ behaviour For example, in the 2004 case, workers called their boss Taiwan lao (Taiwanese guy), implied themselves as mainland Chinese; in 2007 workers called themselves tong bao (country fellow) against a German manager In both cases, no single word of gong ren (worker) or gong ren jie ji (working class) was used But workers who worked for other capital source factories in the community, including those owned by local mainland Chinese bosses, also followed them to strike with similar demands Obviously workers would not perceive that the strike was against Taiwanese or German, but the boss While class as a discourse or language can not explain this spreading of the strike in the community, class as social relations can The purpose of studying the usage of discourses such as Si Chuan people, mainland people, tong bao (country fellow), yuan gong (employee), zhi yuan(staff) and zhi yuan gong (staff and employees) in the protest is to explore how a basis of solidarity is constructed or deconstructed in a specific context of class struggle As Clarke (1978) illuminated, class relations and its political and ideological forms cannot be separated from each other in class analysis, although the concept of class as a social relation should be analytically prior to the latter Lee concluded that ‘decentralization, cellular activism, and legalism’ are characteristics of not only labour protests but also collective mobilization of other social groups (Lee, 2007a: 236) This adjustment was unconfirmed by the new development presented in this study It reminded me of the importance of the historical dimension in class struggle As Thompson (1980) implied, class formation is a historical process involving numerous struggles First of all, legalism is just an institutional tool workers used to protest their interests As soon as the law was basically enforced, and their interests could not be reflected within the law, workers naturally asked for more than the law as in the 2007 strike It is unambiguous that their struggle is interest based, rather than rights based Second, the data I showed was also different from Lee who claimed that workers’ protests always began from legal procedure and it was only when the local authorities and court could not satisfy workers that the latter went to the street Strikes and then road blockages had become a very effective form of struggle in workers’ experience As both the 2004 and 2007 cases showed, the intervention of state authorities was only after a huge number of workers appeared on the highway Third, although workers’ protests were still within the boundary of a factory, a company or a community as explained above, it showed a historical tendency of better planning, coordination and connection Fourth, while the migrant workers’ demand was directed to the factory owners, the peasant and laid-off state workers’ targets were the state bureaucracies Lee concluded their commonality by their forms, but I saw their differences in relations Not all of the workplace conflict had a class nature, but as workplace conflict had exerted a bigger impact on the policy of local authorities and the legislation of the central government, which in turn help to improve the workers’ condition in general, I preferred to analyse the pattern of social struggle by a lens of ‘class’ even although an effective class organisation was absent As far as class consciousness is concerned, it was uneven Mature skilled workers were more conscious of the importance of class organisation, while many young workers did not know what the trade union is But the development of the labour movement in the West was also begun from privileged workers like artisans and mechanics (Thompson, 1980; Katznelson and Zolberg, 1986) Stories of the Chinese migrant workers’ struggles contest that work, factory and working class are far from ‘ended’ Instead, they are reconstructed in different spaces in different forms Although the locations of production and forms of employment were dramatically changed, the basic logic of accumulation of global capitalism remained unchanged (Harvey, 1990; Cohen, 1991; Wood et al, 1998) A new agenda for social scientists is to understand how class struggle is unfolded in different local contexts, and how the pattern of the struggle is changed over time Author’s Biography: Chris Chan is completing his PhD in Department of Sociology at the University of Warwick, UK, and going to take up a post of Post-doctoral Fellow at Department of Applied Social Science, Hong Kong Polytechnics University After working years as a labour organizer in Hong Kong, he came to Warwick where he gained a MA in Comparative Labour Studies with distinction and began his doctoral research in 2005 His PhD on globalisation and workplace relations in South China is supported by the Warwick Postgraduate Research Fellowship and Overseas Research Student Award He also contributes to the ESRC research project: Post-Socialist Trade Unions, Low Pay and Decent Work: Russia, China and Vietnam Bibliography AMRC (1995) Condition of Workers’ Rights in the Pear River Delta (zhu jiang san 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" Social History 3: 133-65 Waddington, J (1999) Globalization and Patterns of Labour Resistance London:Mansell Wood, E.M., Meiksins, P and Yates, M (ed.) (1998) Rising from Ashes? Labor in the Age of “Global” Capitalism New York: Monthly Review Press  ... by providing evidences of emerging labour protest in South China, the new ‘global factory’ It is argued that the expansion of global production into China has intensifed class struggle in the workplace... violences; and (3) industrial injuries and lack of injury compesation’ in South China (Lee, 2007a: 165) According to her, it was only after the ‘rationalization’ of the administration and But... study compares two cases of workers’ strike in 2004 and 20073 To situate them into the historical context of labour conflicts in South China? ??s export processing zone (EPZ) since 1978, it first gives