Reforms Leave Out China’s Workers
America is preparing to embark on a great congressional battle over trade with China. Once again, as in smaller skirmishes of the recent past, China’s leading opponent will be the American labor movement.
Organized labor already is working hard to stop Congress from giving China normal trading rights permanently--thus eliminating the requirement of the last 20 years that these benefits can be extended to China only one year at a time.
American scholars and the business community often dismiss labor’s complaints about China as self-serving, thinly disguised protectionism. They scoff that the AFL-CIO cares only about minimizing job loss to Chinese workers and competition with Chinese products.
Is that claim really accurate? Or might there in fact be plenty of other, legitimate reasons for the American labor movement to be concerned about China?
In fact, the right question to ask might be this one: Why is it that American politicians and intellectuals who once cheered on the AFL-CIO in pressing the cause of free labor in the Soviet Union and Poland won’t give similar support when it comes to China?
China’s treatment of labor unions is no better, and in some ways worse, than that of traditional Communist countries.
Independent unions are not permitted. The only organization that may represent workers is the All-China Federation of Trade Unions, which is run by the Chinese Communist Party. The federation’s president, Wei Jianxing, is a member of the Politburo Standing Committee and helps run the party’s security apparatus.
One of the contributing factors behind the Tiananmen Square crackdown in 1989 was the leadership’s fear that factory workers were beginning to join the demonstrations. A Chinese-style Solidarity movement is probably the Chinese regime’s worst nightmare.
But hold on, say China’s American defenders. China is changing. It is in the midst of implementing economic reforms.
True. And there’s evidence to show that while these reforms may help the Chinese economy and foreign investors, they also make things even worse for Chinese workers.
A study last year by scholars at Australian National University compared the labor policies of China and Vietnam. Its conclusion was startling:
“The Vietnamese government has been more willing to grant trade unions some space to defend workers’ interests, whereas the Chinese government has chosen to keep the unions under a tight rein.”
Think of that for a minute: Vietnam is at least a decade behind China in reforming its Communist economic system. Yet when it comes to labor unions, China is more repressive.
Why? Because the process of economic reform means that enterprises must be profitable to survive. And when free unions are prohibited, one way of ensuring profits is by pushing labor to work for long hours at low pay.
That’s what’s happening in China. These economic “reforms” mean that migrant workers from the Chinese countryside are traveling to the southern and coastal areas to work 12 hours a day or more in factories that pay $30 a month or less.
We rarely get to know much about these migrant workers. The Chinese regime and the U.S. business community would much rather have Americans think of China as a bunch of entrepreneurs chatting on cell phones.
But one of the Australian scholars who worked on the China-Vietnam study, Anita Chan, managed to get a glimpse of the lives these migrants lead.
A few years ago, 87 Chinese workers, all young migrant women, died in a factory fire in southern China. Chan managed to obtain the letters that these women had been receiving from friends and relatives working in similar factory jobs elsewhere.
“Illegally low wages and very long work hours were the norm in the factories that hired these migrant workers,” Chan concluded. Of the 25 who mentioned wages, only six were getting the prevailing minimum wage of $35 a month.
“Got December’s pay on March 15,” says one typical letter-writer. “Got 140 yuan [less than $20].”
“Here the work hours are like this,” explains another. “7:30 to 11:30 a.m., 1:30 to 5:30 p.m., 6:30 to 10:30 at night. Sometimes we also have to do overtime work.”
In 1931, the American writer Pearl Buck published a classic account of the lives of ordinary Chinese peasants titled “The Good Earth.” Chan’s research suggests that the updated version today could well be called “The Bad Concrete.”
Perhaps the Clinton administration can explain to us why China’s refusal to allow independent unions is any more morally acceptable than was the repression of unions by the Soviet Union or Communist Poland decades ago.
Was America’s avowed concern for free labor unions overseas merely a ploy to win the Cold War? Or was it a matter of principle that applies to China too?
