The Tonghua Incident: Five years on

The Tonghua Incident: Five years on

Five years ago today, Chen Guojun, a senior manager at the Tonghua Iron and Steel Works in Jilin was killed during a protest by workers angry at the takeover of the plant by the Jianlong Group, at the time China's largest privately-owned steel company, which Chen represented.

The "Tonghua Incident" became one of the most talked about events of the year. It focused attention on the volatile state of labour relations in many workplaces in China and the need to find a more effective and peaceful way of resolving labour disputes.

But while government officials, policy makers and commentators were debating the issue, China's workers themselves were showing everyone the way forward.

2010. Workers at the Nanhai Honda automotive components plant in Foshan went out on strike for higher pay. The remarkable determination and solidarity of the workers in the face of tremendous pressure not only won a 35 percent pay increase but showed workers all over China how effective peaceful strike action could be.

2011. Workers at the Citizen Watch factory in Shenzhen went out on strike in October in protest at management's non-payment of overtime dating back five years. The strike was not initially successful so the workers hired a local law firm to act as their advisor in collective bargaining with management. The following month, the two sides agreed on a deal whereby Citizen would pay 70 percent of what it owed.

2012. More than 700 workers at the Ohms Electronics factory in Shenzhen went out on strike, which led to a modest pay increase. The workers had also demanded new elections for their trade union representative, and, just two months later on 27 May, with the help of the Shenzhen Federation of Trade Unions, they got just that.

2013.  After dozens of strikes and protests by sanitation workers in Guangzhou, the local authorities agreed to increase their monthly wages by 400 yuan. The determined and organized campaign by some of China's lowest-paid and most marginalized workers received tremendous support from civil society, students and ordinary members of the public.

2014. Around 40,000 workers at the Yue Yuen shoe factory complex in Dongguan staged the largest strike in China in recent history. The workers were successful in getting the company to pay social insurance contributions in full and forced the provincial trade union federation to reorganize the factory trade union so as to make it more representative and effective in the future.

A lot has changed in China's workplaces over the last five years, and it is the workers' movement that has been largely responsible for generating that change. China's workers have shown that they are not rabble-rousers: They are determined to stand up for what is rightfully theirs but crucially they are also willing to sit down with management and work out their differences in peaceful, face-to-face negotiations - as was shown just this week in the Shenzhen QLT factory strike.

Five years on in the city of Tonghua, the privatization deal that triggered the Incident is history. The plant has been integrated into the Shougang Group, one of China's big three iron and steel corporations, and currently has a production capacity of 5.2 million tons of steel per year. And a scapegoat for the incident has been found: Ji Yigang, an employee at the Tonghua No.2 Power Plant with a criminal record, was as found guilty intentional wounding by the Tonghua Municipal Intermediate Court on 15 April 2010 and sentenced to life in prison.

No one talks about the Tonghua Incident much these days but it is important to mark the anniversary, if only to remind us of how far the workers' movement in China has come.

Yue Yuen shoe factory to be focus of Guangdong’s trade union building

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21 July, 2014

The Yue Yuen shoe factory in Dongguan, site of the largest strike in China in recent memory, will be the nucleus of efforts by the Guangdong Federation of Trade Unions to institute a system of democratic trade union elections across the province within the next five years.

The head of the provincial federation, Huang Yebin, told the Southern Workers’ Daily that developing a democratic and representative trade union at Yue Yuen was the key to providing a “stable environment for management, reducing labour disputes as much as possible, and building harmonious labour relations.” Moreover, he said, the goal should be to “allow workers to raise their own demands or present their grievances to the trade union which can then negotiate with the employer.”

However, Huang acknowledged that Guangdong federation would have to overcome several obstacles in realising its ambitious plans, primarily the lack of trust or interest in the trade union among the workers. At present, only 1,500 of the 40,000 employees at Yue Yuen had joined the enterprise union, he said. A similar picture was found in factories in the surrounding township of Gaobu, all of which had very low enrolment rates. The Guangdong Federation thus plans to include 33 of the larger factories in the township in its pilot project.

The federation will send in organizing teams to encourage workers to join the union, ensure that democratic elections take place, and eventually create a stable mechanism for resolving labour conflicts and negotiating wage increases. Once this is done, the federation hopes, the project will gradually fan out to other regions in the province.

Making democratic trade union elections the norm in Guangdong, rather than the exception as is currently the case, is clearly a positive move. However, ensuring that the democratically-elected trade union chairman can effectively promote and defend workers’ interests will be an uphill task.

In this regard, it is important that the Guangdong trade union acknowledges and utilizes the skills and expertise that labour rights groups in the province have developed over the last few years in organizing workers and engaging in collective bargaining. Guangdong’s trade union officials are only just beginning to play a more active role and they still lack any real hands-on experience in organizing workers: They will have to learn from the grassroots activities of labour rights groups if they are to be effective.

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Shenzhen factory workers rally to support dead colleague

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21 July, 2014

On the morning of 17 July 2014, Zhou Jianrong, a 49-year-old worker at the GCL Footwear factory in Shenzhen, jumped to her death from the top of a four-story workshop inside the factory complex. Zhou was one of several GCL workers who had just been fired in a long-running dispute with management.

The blood stain on the cement floor had still had not been washed away when Zhou’s two daughters and other family members from Chongqing arrived in the evening. Around two hundred workers then marched silently to the scene of the tragedy with Zhou’s family to commemorate their friend and colleague.

Zhou Jianrong’s husband and daughter, together with her co-workers, gather at the scene of the tragedy on the evening of 17 July.

“I could not believe my ears when I heard the tragic news this morning. She was like a younger sister to me,” said Du Chunmei, a close friend of Zhou. “It was the company that pushed her to the limit. She must be heartbroken when she found out that her work station where she worked for the past 12 years was no longer there. For God’s sake, she entered the factory at 5:20 and jumped at 5:48, it must be the most horrible 28 minutes for her.”

A medical team tried to revive Zhou at the scene but failed. She was then rushed to the emergency room at a nearby hospital where she was pronounced dead. The family and Zhou’s co-workers demanded an explanation from the company and tried to get to Zhou’s body inside. They were quickly dispersed by hundreds of riot police who took the body by force and transported it to a funeral parlour.

The actions of the police and the callous attitude of the factory’s managing director Yang Xianying, led to hundreds of workers going out on strike again on the 17th and 18th. In addition, 626 people and 23 non-governmental organisations signed an open letter on social media that expressed condolences and sympathy for Zhou’s family, condemned the factory’s cold-blooded management, and demanded better enforcement of labour laws and real trade union representation. 

The tragedy was triggered by a long-running labour dispute in which GCL fired as many as 109 workers following a series of strikes in May. The last batch of workers was fired on 16 July for “staging strikes” and “impeding company production.” Zhou was among them.

The workers explained that they initially took industrial action because they were represented by an incompetent union. When a “long-term service compensation” deal was rescinded by the new owner of the factory, the workers feared that their pay and benefits would be cut too and decided that it was in their best interest to demand a one-off payment based on their years of service.

However management refused to negotiate and even hired thugs to intimidate and beat the striking workers, two of which were hospitalized. The local trade union turned a blind eye to the violence and failed to stand up for the workers and safeguard their rights even after the deputy chairman of the factory trade union was sacked.

“There were people from the Shenzhen Federation of Trade Unions here every day during the strike,” said Li Fengrong, Zhou’s husband who also works at GCL. “But they never wanted to represent us or negotiate with the company. All they did was to put pressure on us and tell us to go back to work.”

Many workers felt the local government too was siding with the company: “They were warning all of those who took part in the strike not to take similar action,” said Dai Qiang, a worker suffering from a work-related injury who was among those sacked. “Many people from the government shout out our names in the middle of the night and try to find out where we live. There was one time they even broke in my apartment building with a crowbar, trying to get me.”

Five days after the tragedy, Zhou’s family hasn’t been able to make any progress in negotiating with the company over compensation.

Guangzhou factory workers get their trade union but keep their feet on the ground

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16 July, 2014

It took nearly three months of relentless effort by around a hundred workers at the Japanese-owned Sumida electronics factory in southern Guangzhou but, on 10 July 2014, the factory held its first ever democratic trade union election.

Around 5,000 employees had earlier chosen 267 representatives to sit on a selection committee, and it was these representatives who voted for the new trade union chair and the 25 union committee members.

The election was undoubtedly a victory for the workers but no one was getting too carried away when workers from the factory met up with labour rights activists on the following Sunday to discuss the election and plan for the future.

Everyone knew that the election process had been flawed; many of the key activists who had pushed for the trade union had failed to win election or were not even on the ballot, but the workers were still in high spirits. “The union is like our son, and we are the mothers,” said 39-year-old worker Liang Zhengxian “Although it came out hastily and is not ideal, we will still embrace it.”

Workers representative Wang Zhenmei added:

It is just the first step in a thousand-mile-long journey, and the union chair is now sitting on the hot seat because thousands of people will be watching. We will exert our rights as union members to the fullest and will keep the organisation on the right track.

The veteran labour lawyer, Duan Yi, who attended the meeting, agreed:

This infant trade union might be a little deformed, and so many questions loom over its birth, but the workers and activists involved in the process should see the election as an encouraging sign. They are at the forefront of using a bottom-up approach to setting up factory unions and I hope this approach will be welcomed by the All-China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU).

The ACFTU, the world’s largest trade union, has traditionally set up factory branches in a top-down manner, negotiating with factory owners and managers but largely ignoring the workers. And this was indeed the initial response of the officials at the local sub-district (街道) union when the Sumida workers first approached them in April.

The officials were rude and condescending and attempted to humiliate the workers by making them read out the application form word for word. “They mocked us saying ‘you can’t even write properly, and you want a union!?’ but we bit our lips and did what it takes,” said Liang.

Following this meeting, the sub-district union officials immediately tipped off the managers at Sumida about the workers’ application.

However, the situation began to change in May when the Sunflower Women Workers Centre helped the workers file online complaints at the city and provincial level trade union federations, as well as create their own micro-blog to keep the momentum going.

Luo Hongmei, director of the Sunflower Women Workers Centre, discusses the trade union election with workers from Sumida Electronics.

The workers’ Weibo was crucial in that it made the entire trade union application process open and transparent. CLB Director Han Dongfang pointed out that the union could no longer hide behind closed doors and had no option but to respond to the workers’ demands for a democratic trade union.

Indeed, the higher level union federations did eventually invite ten workers’ representatives to a meeting on 9 June. “All of the federations sent their representatives from the sub-district right up to the Guangdong provincial union,” said Wang Zhenmei. “We were firing cannon balls on to the sub-district officials for their previous mistreatment of us and they could only sit there and take it.”

The union officials at the meeting promised to facilitate a democratic union election as soon as possible and the union newspaper even reported the event. The Guangdong union officials kept their word and quickly launched a high-profile campaign to get more than 5,300 workers to join the enterprise union and organized a preliminary election in late June.

The official media then reported on 2 July, that the Guangdong Federation of Trade Unions plans to make democratic trade union elections universal across the province’s enterprises within five years.  However, having a democratic trade union election is just the start of a long process. As Han Dongfang points out:

The fact that the ACFTU decided to hold the election in response to workers' pressure marks an important step. But it is just the beginning of the long journey for change. The next, more important, step is to make sure the elected union will represent workers and bargain for wages and benefits on the workers' behalf.

Police swoop on Hong Kong protesters

Hundreds arrested as police break up pro-democracy rally that organisers say was attended by more than 500,000 people. Last updated: 02 Jul 2014 09:06

Some protesters resisted and stayed on, but many were physically removed [Reuters]

Hundreds of protesters at a Hong Kong sit-in have been arrested after police moved in to break up the rally which organisers said saw a turnout of more than half a million. Hundreds of protesters had staged a sit-in on a street in the city's Central district and vowed to stay until 8:00 am (0000 GMT). But just after 3:00 am on Wednesday police began to move in and load them onto coaches.  Those who were removed were taken to a police college in the south of Hong Kong, according to the South China Morning Post. Police were not immediately able to confirm how many people had been arrested. Record turnout The confrontation followed a largely peaceful rally on Tuesday, which organisers said was a record turnout and the largest since the city was handed back to China in 1997. Waving colonial-era flags and chanting anti-Beijing slogans, protesters demanded democratic reforms, reflecting surging discontent over Beijing's insistence that it vet candidates before a vote in 2017 for the semi-autonomous city's next leader. The rally came after nearly 800,000 people took part in an informal referendum calling for voters to be allowed a say in the nomination of candidates. Beijing branded the vote "illegal and invalid". Despite soaring humidity and rainstorms, swarms of protesters poured onto clogged streets through the afternoon and evening, marching from Victoria Park to the Central business district. They carried banners emblazoned with slogans, including "We want real democracy" and "We stand united against China". "There is a strong desire for genuine democracy that offers choice and competition without (political) vetting," Anson Chan, a former number two official in Hong Kong who is now a pro-democracy activist, told reporters on Tuesday. The chairman of the Hong Kong post office union, marching in the muggy heat, said the city's government was kowtowing to Beijing. 'For our children' "This march is not for us, it's for our children. Without universal suffrage there's no way to monitor the government," said Ip Kam-fu. The city's Chief Executive Leung Chun-ying sought to strike a conciliatory note, saying his government would do its utmost to forge an agreement on implementing universal suffrage. He offered no details on the 2017 election when he spoke at a ceremony earlier on Tuesday marking the 17th anniversary of the city's handover. The poll, which ended on Sunday, gave three options for the election of the city's next leader - all of which included the public having some influence on the selection of candidates. China has promised to let all Hong Kong residents vote for their next leader in 2017 - currently a 1,200-strong pro-Beijing committee chooses the city's chief executive. But it says candidates must be approved by a nomination committee, which democracy advocates fear will mean only pro-Beijing figures are allowed to stand.