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Timid by nature, Shi Jieying took a risk last month and joined fellow workers in a strike at her handbag factory, one of a surging number of such labor protests across China. Riot police flooded into the factory compound, broke up the strike and hauled away dozens of workers. Only recently, she had learned she had the right to social security funding and a housing allowance - two of the issues at stake in the strike. More than three decades after Beijing began allowing market reforms, China's 168 million migrant workers are discovering their labor rights through the spread of social media. They are on the forefront of a labor protest movement that is posing a growing and awkward problem for the ruling Communist Party, wary of any grassroots activism that can threaten its grip on power. Images posted on Chinese social media show police with riot shields and dogs converging on the third day of a strike at a factory that makes shoes for popular name brands. Workers say their employer, Stella, hasn't paid their housing allowance as required by Chinese labor law. Feeling exploited by businesses and abandoned by the government, workers are organizing strikes and labor protests at a rate that has doubled each of the past four years to more than 1,300 last year, up from just 185 in 2011, said Hong Kong-based China Labor Bulletin, which gathers information from China's social media. That's prompted crackdowns by authorities, and factory bosses have fired strike organizers. Although authorities have long ignored labor law violations by companies, activists say authorities now dispatch police - and dogs, in at least one case - to factories to restore order or even restart production. They have also detained leading activists and harassed organizations that help workers. China's labor law, which went into effect in 1995, stipulates the right to a decent wage, rest periods, no excessive overtime and the right of group negotiation. Images taken by striking workers and posted on the Weibo microblogging site show a heavy police presence at a strike by about 5,000 shoemakers in Dongguan city on Tuesday. Workers are allowed to strike, but only under the government-controlled All China Federation of Trade Unions - which critics say is essentially an arm of the government that has failed to stand up for workers. Workers who organize on their own can be arrested, not for striking but on charges such as disrupting traffic, business or social order. In Shenzhen, worker representative Wu Guijun was charged with gathering crowds to disrupt traffic, but was released with no conviction after a year in detention. Migrant factory workers are perhaps the vanguard of this movement, but labor activism is slowly spreading among a working class that, all told, forms more than half of China's 1.4 billion.
Keywords
Migrant labour, China, labour rights, social security, unrest, factory strike, labour activism
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