Vol. 73/No. 9      March 9, 2009

At least 20 million workers who left rural villages in China to work in urban factories have been laid off in recent months. These migrant workers—estimated to number at least 130 million—are the most exploited sector of the Chinese working class, and at the same time, one of its most combative layers. Lacking many rights in the cities where they sought work, and forced by the employers to work longer hours for less pay, they have launched spontaneous battles against their employers, police, and government officials as the economic contraction has worsened.

The ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was brought to power in 1949 by a victorious socialist revolution of the workers and peasants. Land was nationalized and given to poor peasants and industry was placed under state control, with a monopoly on foreign trade. Living conditions for toilers in the cities and in the countryside advanced qualitatively ahead of other semicolonial countries in the region. It was one of the great advances for workers and toilers against imperialist subjugation in Asia and the world.

From the beginning, however, the CCP was a Stalinist party whose leadership sought above all to preserve its material privileges and those of the rest of the petty-bourgeois layers in the government, at the expense of the workers and peasants. In the late 1970s the government began to open up the country to foreign investment and loosen restrictions on private businesses. Moving away from centralized planning, it increasingly allowed prices, wages, and production to be determined by capitalist market methods.

In the last two decades hundreds of millions of Chinese peasants have migrated to factory jobs in the cities, forging a far larger, younger working class with higher expectations and greater confidence. Their families in the countryside now depend on their remittances for 40 percent of their income. Today these expectations are clashing with the reality of the contraction of capitalist production worldwide.

The contraction has hit China with particular rapidity, with manufacturing taking a big hit. In 2007 the Chinese economy grew by 11.4 percent. It grew by at least 10 percent in each of the previous five years. This quarter, it could drop to as little as 6 percent.

When mass layoffs began last fall, spontaneous struggles broke out in industrial centers as workers were thrown out on the streets, often by employers who refused to pay all their wages. When the owner of a company supplying the fashion designer OmniaLuo in Shenzhen left town in September without paying wages, the workers refused to turn the garments they had sewn over to OmniaLuo until they got paid. The local government had to intervene and pay the back wages to get the clothing released.

There is only one union permitted in China, the All-China Federation of Trade Unions, which collaborates with the government and capitalists to maintain “class peace” in the workplace. According to Associated Press, Sun Chunlan, vice chairman of the federation, addressed union and government officials February 17, saying they should “be on guard for hostile forces from both home and abroad that use the problems that businesses are facing to infiltrate and undermine the migrant work force.” Sun added that the union needed to prevent the emergence of “illegal ‘rights protection’ groups” by urging workers to raise their demands with “rational and legal methods.”

Some 8,000 cab drivers in the city of Chongqing went on strike in November over the sharp drop in their income and called for the formation of an independent cab drivers’ union, which the government denied, the Wall Street Journal reported.

To try to keep the lid on social conflicts, the government is now urging employers to avoid mass layoffs if possible, and if not, requiring that they provide 30 days’ notice whenever planning to lay off more than 10 percent of their workforce. The government has also announced social programs to encourage migrants to leave the cities and return to their home villages for good.

But the government has also made clear it will use force if workers get “out of line.” New York Times reporter Keith Bradsher visited the railway station in Guangzhou as migrant workers were returning from New Year’s holidays. “Police officers were positioned every few feet along the walls and fences,” he reported February 6.

“At the nearby intercity bus station, loudspeakers … told arrivals over and over again, ‘Do not loiter or stand at the station. Move on quickly. Do not sit or squat.’”

The China Labour Bulletin, based in Hong Kong, reported that Guangdong officials “are willing to relax their enforcement of China’s labour laws during the economic crisis. “However,” the bulletin continued, “workers whose protests are deemed to jeopardize factory production will be prosecuted.”
 
 
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