28 October 2004
China Labour Bulletin has learned that five workers of a Taiwanese-owned shoe factory in the southern city of Dongguan, Guangdong Province, have been sentenced to terms of between two years’ and three and a half years’ imprisonment by the Dongguan Municipal People’s Court on charges arising from a mass protest by workers at the factory in late April. All five of those convicted were workers at Stella International’s Xing Ang Shoe Factory, one of seven shoe factories operated by the company in southern China.
The sentences, which have not yet been publicly announced by the court, were as follows. Wan Jiafeng was sentenced to three and a half years’ imprisonment; Chen Nanliu, Ma Changwei and Qu Pengtao were each jailed for three years; and an under-aged female worker, Chen Suo, was given a two-year prison sentence, suspended for three years.
All five defendants were convicted on criminal charges of “intentional destruction of property” following a closed-door trial on 25 August that lasted only 66 minutes. Three of the five workers were defended at their trial by the Beijing Zhi Sheng Law Firm, headed by Gao Zhisheng. (For further details of the trial, and the text of Lawyer Gao’s defence statement on behalf of one of the defendants, Chen Nanliu, see Eight Arrested Workers from Stella International Shoe Factories Go on Trial in Dongguan.)
“These five workers have been unfairly singled out and punished by the Dongguan court for what was a mass worker protest against clear violations of the Chinese labour law by Stella International,” said Han Dongfang, the director of China Labour Bulletin.
“Instead of scapegoating these five workers, the Dongguan legal authorities should be investigating the abusive employment practices of Stella International in all seven of its China-based shoe factories,” Han added. “The government’s failure to enforce China’s own labour laws is the real source of the growing labour unrest in many parts of the country today.”
Background to the Case
On the evening of 23 April, around 1,000 workers staged a mass protest at the Xing Ang Shoe Factory over low wages, wage arrears and the poor meals provided at the factory’s canteen. Some machinery and other items of company property were damaged in the course of the protest action, and several managers were assaulted. The five recently convicted workers were detained by police shortly after the protest, together with five other workers at the neighbouring Xing Xiong Shoe Factory, also owned by Stella International, who had staged a similar protest action along with 4,000 fellow workers at the Xing Xiong factory only two days earlier. The latter five defendants went on trial on the same charges in a separate court hearing on 8 September, and three of them were also defended by lawyers from the Zhi Sheng Law Firm. The verdicts in this second trial are not yet known.
In reaching its verdicts on the five Xing Ang workers, the Dongguan court appears to have taken no account of defence counsel’s powerful statement on behalf of Chen Nanliu, which pointed out that the prosecution had failed to provide any actual evidence linking any of the five worker defendants to specific acts of property damage, or to any other form of criminal behaviour, on the night of 23 April. Similarly, defence counsel pointed out that not a shred of evidence had been produced in court to substantiate the prosecution’s allegation that Chen Nanliu and the other four worker defendants had “instigated” or “led” the mass protest at the Xing Ang shoe factory.
According to numerous witness statements presented at the court hearing on 25 August, the rowdy protest action at the Xing Ang factory was directly sparked off by the workers’ intense anger and resentment towards the Stella International management for having withheld or seriously underpaid their wages for a several-month period; for the allegedly low quality of the food provided in the factory’s canteen; and for the excessively long hours (11-hour shifts on four successive days a week, with only one weekly rest day) that the workers had to put in at the factory. These long working hours were in clear breach of the PRC Labour Law, which specifies a maximum normal working week of 44 hours, plus a weekly average of no more than nine hours’ overtime.
During the trial on 25 August, it emerged that some workers at the factory had been “working like brute animals” all month long but had received a salary of only around 450 Yuan, a large proportion of which went to pay for their accommodation and food at the factory. Moreover, for the two months of March and April, Stella International had apparently paid many of the workers only 50 Yuan per month in wages. None of the factory’s workers, it transpired, had had the slightest idea as to why they were suddenly being paid only a fraction of their normal monthly wages.
While acknowledging that some of the Xing Ang workers had damaged company property (according to the court, totaling around 150,000 Yuan, or some US$ 20,000) and that therefore the mass protest had been an “inappropriate collective action”, Lawyer Gao nonetheless boldly argued in court that the mass protest action by the Xing Ang workers on 23 April “was the result of certain clear and pressing social causes: namely, the fact that our society today permits and encourages the most naked forms of social injustice, together with an unrestrained level of gross and inhuman exploitation of the workers that has reached truly reactionary proportions.”
It is likely that some or all of the five workers will lodge appeals against their sentences, leading to a second court hearing on the case in the near future.
For further information, please call China Labour Bulletin: Tel: +852 2780 2187