By Tom Mitchell in Dongguan
Published: March 4 2009 18:39
More than 1,000 young job seekers, most of them women in their late teens, were put through their paces one morning last month at a temporary residential and training “base” in Dongguan, a manufacturing town in Guangdong province, southern China.
“Left-face, left-face, right, right!” barked a drill leader for Shenzhen Quanshun Human Resources Development as his charges executed a series of turns. They then assumed an “at ease” position – squatting on their heels – as names were called out for a factory assignment in Xiamen, a port city to the north in neighbouring Fujian province. Shenzhen Quanshun had arranged for buses to take workers there.
“Is anybody else willing to go?” the recruiter asked. Shenzhen Quanshun was filling 300 positions.
“I want to stay in Dongguan,” Liu Fangli said as she chatted with her friends at the back of the assembly.
“I don’t know – maybe I’ll go,” said Song Qian. “Two friends from my home town are going. One of them worked there last year. The factories pay about Rmb1,000 [$146, €115, £103] a month.”
Ms Liu and Ms Song, both from Henan, a central province, left their families’ farms for the first time this year, travelling south with friends who had worked away from home before. Their move is an example of the resourcefulness and resilience of the world’s most flexible workforce.
They are, however, entering the labour market in what is probably the worst year since China established itself as the “workshop of the world” in the 1990s. The Chinese government estimates that 15 per cent of the country’s 130m migrant workers, or 20m people, had gone home by the end of last year after they had lost or quit their jobs.
Further darkening the outlook, overseas orders are coming in slowly. China’s and Guangdong’s exports fell, respectively, 17.5 and 23.6 per cent year-on-year in January, although the variability of the lunar new year holiday often skews January and February data.
Ms Liu and Ms Song will also find themselves working on factory floors where the balance of power has begun to tip back to management after years of worker gains.
These improvements had included repeated double-digit increases in local minimum wage rates, and culminated last year with the introduction of the labour contract law, which made it more difficult – and expensive – for factories to dismiss workers.
Now the pendulum is beginning to swing back as local governments attempt to minimise job losses in their own back yards.
“Before, we were penalised by workers going to the labour board and making claims that were sometimes false, but they sided pretty handily with the workers,” said one factory owner, who asked not to be identified. “Now, they will contact the company and really try to understand the issue. They will mediate rather than litigate. That never happened before. You were [presumed] guilty and you were going to pay.”
Recently, a group of workers successfully sued the owner’s factory, taking advantage of a regulation allowing them to claim unpaid overtime going back two years. “Two years can add up to a lot of money,” the owner added. “The burden of proof had been on the company to prove they hadn’t worked, rather than on workers to prove that they had. It’s a very obscure regulation and a lot of facts were distorted.”
The court, however, then oversaw protracted settlement negotiations between management and labour. The end result was an award the factory could live with.
“It used to be easy for workers to claim back two years of unpaid overtime,” said Huang Qingnan, director of a labour advocacy group. “But now courts are urging workers to accept less when they win. If governments want to support factories, they should lower taxes and administrative fees – not penalise workers.”
Some government officials appear worried that widespread worker grievances could coalesce into a broader movement. Guangdong province reported a 160 per cent increase in the number of labour arbitration cases over the first 11 months of last year.
Last month, Sun Chunlan, a vice-chairwoman of the official All China Federation of Trade Unions, spoke of “foreign and domestic hostile forces that seek to ... infiltrate and harm migrant worker ranks”.
Cai Chongguo, an editor at the Hong Kong-based China Labour Bulletin, wrote in a commentary: “The authorities have increasingly dealt with [protests and strikes] in a more progressive manner, since they realise their root causes aren’t about political systems or ideological doctrines.” But Ms Sun’s remarks “could give officials new licence to view things through a more overtly political lens”.