"Boss demands overtime work without pay"; riot police break up demonstration
August 24, 2007
Thousands of workers have gone on strike to protest against poor working conditions at a Nokia subcontractor's factory in Shenzhen in Southern China. The employees complain about long working days, unpaid overtime, and meagre salaries.
The strike at the factory of Friwo, a global mobile phone battery manufacturer, continued into a third day on Wednesday. On Monday and Tuesday, a few thousand workers gathered in a nearby street for a demonstration and sought to block the flow of traffic.
According to eye-witnesses, police in riot gear who were called in broke up the crowd and arrested a few people. "I saw a man, presumably a plainclothes police officer, beating our workers. On Monday at least four employees were arrested. Two of them have not been heard of since then", explained Ms. Chen Xiaojuan, who works at the factory.
Most of the 18,000 employees of the two large Friwo plants in the area took part in the strike and the protest, reports Students and Scholars Against Corporate Misbehaviour (SACOM) from Hong Kong.
The German-owned Friwo is the world's largest manufacturer of batteries for mobile devices. Its clients include the Finnish mobile phone giant, Nokia. One in four mobile phones is powered by a Friwo battery, the company states on its Internet pages.
According to the workers at the Shenzhen factory, their basic salary is the area's minimum salary of 700 yuans (around EUR 70.00) per month. But in order to get this, the workers have to reach certain production targets.
"One employee is given two people's workload. As we cannot complete the tasks during regular hours, the boss then demands that we do overtime without pay", Chen explains.
Another worker, Chen Huarong, says that everybody in the plant has to work overtime. "Sometimes we have two days off per week. But often it gets so busy at the factory that we don't get any days off at all."
In a written statement to the factory directors and the local work officials, the employees have demanded a salary increase, compensation for night-shift work, all the statutory insurance cover, and clean drinking water at the factory.
At the Friwo Shenzhen plants, the people answering the phone simply hung up when Helsingin Sanomat tried to contact them. By Wednesday night, the Friwo headquarters in Germany had also failed to reply to questions from Helsingin Sanomat.
According to the workers, the plant management has offered to negotiate about the situation, but the employees fear that if some of them are chosen as representatives, these individuals will later become targets of revenge.
China's Communist Party does not allow free trade unions, and the workers' chances of defending their rights are weak.
"Now that workers have started to recognise their rights, there have been more and more strikes", says labour expert Liu Kaiming, director at the Shenzhen Institute for Contemporary Social Studies.
More and more often factory managers and the authorities have to rely on the riot police to stifle expressions of opinion by the employees, estimates another workers' rights organisation, China Labour Bulletin.
In Shenzhen, there is also a factory belonging to the Finnish mobile battery manufacturer Salcomp. "None of the Salcomp workers are on strike", stated plant manager Pekka Kyyrinen on Wednesday.
Nokia itself has a large production facility in the city of Dongguan, near Shenzhen.