Xiao Huazhong is one of 600,000 workers nationwide suffering from pneumoconiosis, the debilitating lung disease, with up to 10,000 new cases each year.
Xiao is demanding compensation from his former employer in court, one of a growing number of “public interest litigation” cases in which non-government organisations and lawyers are collaborating.
The China Labour Bulletin, a grantee of the National Endowment for Democracy, is helping Xiao after he was turned away by official agencies. The group’s Geoff Crothall says the main hurdle is often getting courts to hear workers’ rights cases:
“Local mine owners and government officials are often the same person,” says CLB’s Geoff Crothall. Even if there is no direct connection, “it’s in everybody’s interest to boost economic production” to keep mines open, regardless of health and safety hazards.
Much of China’s economic miracle has been secured at the expense of workers’ basic rights, says a new report from China Labour Bulletin and Canada’s International Centre for Human Rights and Democratic Development, commonly known as Rights & Democracy.
No Way Out: Worker Activism in China’s State-Owned Enterprise Reforms draws on five years of research and CLB’s extensive experience of litigation in defense of labor rights. The restructuring and privatization of state-owned enterprises have led to workers being denied access to official channels of redress – as in Xiao’s case, the criminalization of worker protests, and the denial of employees’ rights to social security, to freedom of association and to freedom from arbitrary detention.
“The Chinese government insists that the ‘right to subsistence’ takes precedence over human rights but the SOE reform program inflicted great harm on millions of citizens on both these counts,” said Han Dongfang, CLB’s Executive Director. “This is a major social problem, and a solution to it is long overdue.”
Growing labor discontent and the failure of official agencies to address workers’ grievances is causing pronounced shifts in the country’s labor relations. A new law in Shenzhen, the heart of China’s manufacturing sector, guarantees unions’ rights to free collective bargaining.
For the first time since Communist rule was imposed in 1949, trade union officials are openly insisting that union should represent workers’ interests alone. “The trade union is a matter for the workers themselves,” said Chen Weiguang, chairman of the Guangzhou Federation of Trade Unions, adding enterprise unions must change their role from “persuading the boss” to “mobilizing the workers.”
Communist orthodoxy insists that unions should be two-way channels, representing workers’ interests at the workplace level but also functioning as ‘transmission belts’ for conveying Communist ideology and enforcing the rule of the party.
“After three decades of economic reform, we’ve reached the point when something had to be done,” said CLB’s Han Dongfang. “Today in Shenzhen we can see the worst excesses of capitalism, but also the desire of the people for social justice and – with these new regulations – the willingness of the government to move towards capitalism with a human face.”
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