Elderly sanitation worker’s death shows need for collective action and solidarity

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14 December, 2015

Sanitation workers in the southern city of Guangzhou have had considerable success over the last few years in taking collective action to improve their pay and working conditions.

However, the tragic death of Wang Shoucun, a 70-year-old sanitation worker in the northern city of Datong, underscores the fact that far too many elderly cleaners and street sweepers are still vulnerable and unprotected.

Although he was well beyond retirement age, Wang took a job two years ago at a refuse processing station in Datong in order to support his impoverished family. He earned just 1,500 yuan a month, was required to live on-site and be on duty 24 hours a day, seven days a week, whenever a delivery was made to the refuse station.

On the morning of 14 October, Wang reached for what he thought was a water bottle and drank the contents. The bottle contained an industrial solvent known as 1,2,3-Trichloropropane. Wang collapsed and was rushed to the local emergency room. However the hospital failed to realise the severity of the situation and released Wang the same evening.

When Wang started to vomit blood the next day it was already too late. The local hospital said he had serious liver failure and would have to go to Beijing, more than 350 kilometres away, for specialist treatment.

Wang Shoucun in hospital. Photo courtesy the Wang family.

Since Wang was not insured, his family had to borrow from relatives and loan sharks to pay the 140,000 yuan in medical bills charged by the Beijing military hospital he was taken to. Wang’s son and two daughters made repeated trips back to Datong to ask the sanitation company for help but they didn’t get a penny.

After eight days, the hospital stopped treatment because the family ran out of money. They were forced to take Wang back to his hometown in the countryside of Datong where he died on 28 October.

Wang’s family is trying to get compensation from the local social security authority, claiming that Wang’s death was work-related, and are seeking legal aid from the local trade union federation, but so far to no avail.

The family are unlikely to get work-related injury compensation however because Wang was well-over the statutory retirement age and many local governments and courts have argued that post-retirement-age employees are no longer protected by labour law. Instead, they claim that elderly workers are merely service providers.

In one case in the southern city of Foshan in 2013, five elderly sanitation workers who were demanding compensation for wages in arrears and years of unpaid overtime, social insurance contributions and other allowances were told by the courts that they were not eligible for compensation because they had already exceeded the statutory retirement age.

This is a serious problem because elderly workers make up a huge proportion all sanitation workers in China. Not only are they poorly paid and have to work long hours in hazardous conditions, they have next to no legal protection.

The number of street sweepers killed or badly injured in traffic accidents every month, for example, is startling. In November alone, CLB’s Work Accident Map recorded 13 incidents in which sanitation workers were killed or injured by moving vehicles. Many of these workers were elderly, came from poor families and had no medical insurance.

As individuals, these workers, like Wang Shoucun, are in a very vulnerable position. However, as the Guangzhou sanitation workers have shown, taking collective action can bring about positive results.

Most recently, a group of 40 sanitation workers in the district of Shatou were able to end their precarious agency labour existence and sign new contracts directly with the cleaning company that employed them. This followed a long-running dispute in the University Town area of the city in which around 200 workers took collective action to force the boss to come to the negotiating table.

In both these cases, it was the well-established and respected Panyu Workers Service Centre that was instrumental in helping the workers take collective action and defend their rights to decent pay and proper employment contracts.

The centre’s director Zeng Feiyang, and staff members Zhu Xiaomei and Meng Han are currently being held in police custody as part of sustained attack in labour groups in the Guangzhou area.

China promises rights to citizens born in violation of one-child policy

China promises rights to citizens born in violation of one-child policy

About 13 million people will be permitted to register for ‘hukou’, documents allowing access to education and healthcare long denied to them

 A slogan in Hebei province calls on residents to ‘pay attention to one-child policy’. China says it will now allow millions born in violation of that policy to get official documents. Photograph: China Stringer Network/Reuters

Agence France-Presse in Beijing

Thursday 10 December 2015 05.15 GMTLast modified on Thursday

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China will allow millions of unregistered citizens – many of them children born in violation of the one-child policy – to obtain documents vital to secure education and health services long denied to them, state media reported.

China reforms hukou system to improve migrant workers' rights

An estimated 13 million Chinese, or 1% of the country’s total population, do not have proper household registration permits, or “hukou”.

Some of them are orphans, but many more are people born in violation of the highly controversial “one-child policy”, which restricted most couples to only one offspring, and barred any extra from being registered unless their parents paid a hefty fine, which many could not afford.

Known as “black children”, they are unable to go to school or obtain formal employment, and often have problems travelling, among other difficulties.

The policy’s replacement with a two-child rule for all was announced in October, and the government promised to “fully resolve the hukou registration problem for unregistered people” at a meeting chaired by president Xi Jinping on Wednesday, according to a statement released by the official Xinhua news agency.

Call for China to free labour activists or risk backlash from frustrated workforce

“It is a basic legal right for citizens to lawfully register for hukou,” the statement said. “It is also a premise for citizens to participate in social affairs, enjoy rights and fulfil duties.

“We will deal with and protect every citizen’s rights to permanent hukou registration according to the law,” it added.

Enforcement of the family planning policy has always varied across China, and a few local authorities have already said they will start granting hukou to people whose parents have not paid the fines.

But the new policy will still have to be implemented area by area, and some families have previously complained that no changes have been made “on the ground” no matter what reforms were promised by higher officials.

Pregnant women workers struggle to defend their rights in China’s factories

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1 December, 2015

Yin Jing was one of the lucky ones: A Beijing appeals court ruled on 5 November that she had been illegally fired because she was pregnant, and ordered her employer to pay her 62,237 yuan in compensation.

Yin had been employed at a Beijing shopping mall since 2009 and had even been promoted to counter manager because of her outstanding performance. But in 2014, soon after she told her supervisor that she was pregnant, she was transferred to another shopping mall way out in the suburbs on the other side of town.

“It takes three hours to get there using public transport. That would be unbearable while pregnant,” she told Labour Midday News (劳动午报). When she refused to take up the post she was dismissed for disobeying company directives.

Yin refused to back down and sued her employer for illegal dismissal. Yin was lucky because she had clear documentary evidence in the form of text messages that proved her employer was aware that she was pregnant when they transferred her to another store.

For the court, the evidence was incontrovertible and the law was very clear. Article 27 of the Law on the Protection of Women’s Rights and Interests states that:

No entity may, for the reason of matrimony, pregnancy, maternity leave or breast-feeding, decrease a female employee's wage, dismiss her or unilaterally terminate the labour (employment) contract or service agreement, with the exception that the female employee requests to terminate the labour (employment) contract or service agreement.

And Article 29 (3) of the Labour Law clearly states that an employer may not rescind a labour contract of female employees “during pregnancy, childbirth or while nursing.”

Despite ample legal protection, most women who are fired when they become pregnant still struggle to defend their rights because, unlike Yin, they cannot produce concrete evidence that they were fired because they were pregnant or simply cannot afford the time and money needed to go to court.

Sacked workers from the Gaoya Jewellery factory take their case to the Guangzhou Federation of Trade Unions.

Employers can very easily appeal rulings against them and prolong the legal process for months, even years, in the hope that the plaintiff will eventually give up or accept a reduced offer.

Moreover, as labour activist Zhu Xiaomei explained, many factory bosses are already very adept at getting around the law and making life difficult for pregnant workers:

“Pregnant women workers face three main problems,” Zhu said. “First; factory managers often force them to leave by using tricks like transferring them to positions not suitable for pregnant women, or finding fault with everything they do. Eventually the workers just leave because they can’t take it anymore.”

Secondly, many pregnant workers only get paid their basic wage because the boss refuses to let them work overtime. Factory workers in Guangdong rely on overtime and bonuses just to get by, Zhu said. No one can survive in the Pearl River Delta on just a basic wage of 1,500 yuan per month.

Finally, women having a second or third child are often denied their statutory 98-days maternity leave by their employer because they cannot obtain a family planning certificate for that additional child.

Many women workers want to take a stand against their employer’s intimidation tactics but they lack the time and resources to do so. One middle-aged worker, Xu Yanqing described how:

They started picking holes in everything I did; being harsh to me in order to make me quit so they didn’t have to pay any compensation. They only granted me one week’s leave. I told them it was impossible to complete the whole maternity process in one week but they just said that was not their concern.  

Xu thought about going to labour arbitration but that could have taken months to complete and even if she was successful, she said, the compensation she would get was unlikely to be more than a few months’ salary.

Eventually, Xu decided to accept the three and a half months' salary being offered by the factory and left. "What else could I do? The best thing for workers like me is to get the compensation," she said.

Meanwhile, Foxconn, the world’s largest electronics manufacturer has reportedly introduced anexpectant mothers’ production line at its Shenzhen factories. Pregnant workers do not have to wear uniform; they can set their own work hours and their own production targets. See photo below. However, very few other manufacturers offer such facilities, and even at Foxconn, it is not clear how much the workers on the expectant mothers’ production line will actually get paid.

Foxconn’s production line for expectant mothers. Photograph from the Guangdong Provincial Trade Union