Chinese Workers Challenge Beijing's Authority
Unrest at Honda Parts Plants in Southern China
Poses Dilemma for Communist Party—Labor Rights or Central Control
By NORIHIKO SHIROUZU
JUNE 13, 2010
BEIJING—Some workers at a Honda Motor Co. plant in southern China pressed ahead with a strike Sunday as part of a wave of labor unrest that poses a political challenge for the Communist Party, whose authority in the workplace is being undermined by independent labor activists.
A number of workers at the plant agreed to a new wage-and-benefits package offered by the factory's management and returned to their jobs to resume some production Saturday, Honda spokesman Takayuki Fujii said.
An unidentified manager from the Honda Lock factory tries to persuade workers to go back to the factory in Zhongshan, Guangdong province, China.
But he said it was "far too early to declare an end" to the strike at Honda Lock (Guangdong) Co., which produces vehicle-key systems near the industrial city of Guangzhou. Many of the plant's more than 1,500 workers were still on strike.
The success of strikers at three Honda parts factories near Guangzhou in winning concessions is creating a dilemma for the Communist Party, which wants to be seen as supporting better conditions for workers yet is fearful that strikes led by militant workers could escalate into broader demands for more autonomous unions and pose a threat to its unchallenged rule.
All three strikes have been led by workers acting outside the state-sponsored All China Federation of Trade Unions, which, together with company managements, usually selects the leaders of state-controlled unions at such plants, according to labor experts.
Labor experts monitoring disputes in China said that one of the demands of workers at the key-systems factory is to elect their own leaders in their government-sanctioned union, according to Geoffrey Crothall, spokesman for China Labor Bulletin, a Hong Kong-based labor-rights group.
"Workers at the Honda parts plant are openly stating that the official trade union in their factory is useless," said Mr. Crothall. "That's what workers have told us. It is in the Internet chat rooms. They are very open about it."
Reports of such a move couldn't be independently confirmed by The Wall Street Journal, however.
Labor experts believe the party's leaders are very concerned about a scenario like that in Poland in the late 1980s in which an independent labor-union movement led to the overthrow of the Polish government and contributed to the dismantling of the entire Eastern bloc under the Soviet Union.
Labor experts say the question that the Communist Party needs to ask is whether suppressing the move toward allowing more independent labor unions also risks fanning more discontent. "The recent spate of labor unrest is the result of pent-up unhappiness among China's low-wage workers bubbling up to the surface," said Andreas Lauffs, head of law firm Baker & McKenzie's employment-law group in Hong Kong. "The fact that workers reportedly have started demanding the right to set up independent labor unions adds a political dimension to the labor unrest."
Last month, Honda gave striking workers at a gearbox supplier, who had paralyzed Honda's manufacturing operation in China for 10 days, a 24% increase in pay and benefits. The wildcat strike was led by a group of leaders who rivaled the factory's official, state-led and management-friendly union, which took the side of the company's management and tried to persuade the striking workers to return to work.
Tan Guocheng, one of the strike leaders who was fired along with another worker May 22, said that one of the group's major demands was that "the work union's representatives should be elected by workers." Mr. Fujii, the Honda spokesman, said the two workers were let go for violating the plant's in-house work and contract rules but not for leading the walkout.
Encouraged by the success of the strike at the gearbox plant, workers at two additional Honda parts plants near Guangzhou walked off the job last week. One strike was resolved midweek after the workers accepted a wage increase.
Mr. Fujii said the workers at the gearbox factory, which was established in 2006, were given a chance at the outset to select leaders for the official union but opted instead to receive a leader from a local chapter of the All China Federation of Trade Unions. "Some of the workers are so new at the plant that they apparently don't know that history," Mr. Fujii said. He declined to comment on the situation at the other two parts factories, citing lack of knowledge.
Labor experts say the federation has a target to start collective bargaining across the board in all companies around China by the end of 2011. Currently, wages and other conditions are generally set by management. However, the global economic crisis has derailed those plans, and there has been little progress towards that objective.
From the workers' point of view, "these state-controlled unions don't do anything. And where they exist, they are management-friendly and they don't really represent the employees," said a Western expert who declined to be quoted because of the sensitive nature of his comment.
Workers at the Honda parts plants in southern China decided, in the absence of help from the official union, to press the issues on their own, calling for higher wages, better work conditions and, in some cases, a new election to install their own leaders in the official unions.
At the gearbox factory, the strike leaders made their demands to management through the official state-controlled union. Honda executives said the union is trying to persuade the strikers to return promptly to work.
Many experts deem it highly unlikely that the government will allow workers such as those at the Honda Lock factory to install labor representatives of their choice. If China's workers were able to elect their union leaders democratically, it would mark a watershed in the country's labor movement.
Real change will come when "the Chinese government tolerates a more autonomous worker organization," said Mary Gallagher, a professor at the University of Michigan who is an expert on Chinese labor issues.
Beijing is reluctant to clamp down too hard on strikes for fear of appearing unsympathetic to the tens of millions of migrant workers whose relatively cheap labor has made China a preferred place for global companies to produce consumer goods.
The share of national income going to Chinese households has been declining for a decade, meaning that the benefits of China's growth have gone mainly to corporations and the government. Reversing that trend is crucial to achieving Beijing's effort to stem the widening disparity between rich and poor in China.
A growing issue for China's central government is the new sophistication of migrant workers.
They are clearly aware that the central government has let companies, both foreign-owned and domestic, get away with some illegal employment practices, according to Mr. Crothall and other labor experts.
One such issue is excessive overtime, especially since the Chinese economy started recovering last year from the global recession. Under national labor law, China limits overtime to 36 hours per month, according to the Baker & McKenzie lawyer, Mr. Lauffs. But at companies across China, workers routinely put in 60 to 100 hours of overtime per month, and many companies are in clear violation of the law, Mr. Lauffs said.
"I wouldn't recommend any multinational company just to assume that all this call for better treatment at the workplace will somehow stop," he said. "I think the workers have become so vocal that anything that is noncompliant will come out, and super-low wages will not be sustainable."
