A forwarded short essay which may be useful for some of your
econ/development classes for undergrads...
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It occurs to me that some of the members of the ESRC-China email group
might be interested in what is going on in the Asian-invested factories
in China. Below is an article that I published a week and a half ago in
the Sunday edition of The Washington Post of November 3rd, based on my most
recent fieldwork in Guangdong. Best, Anita Chan
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BOOT CAMP AT THE SHOE FACTORY:
REGIMENTED WORKERS IN CHINA'S FREE LABOUR MARKET
By Anita Chan
DONGGUAN CITY, China -- If you doubt that many Asians think
business is a lot like war, consider a gigantic shoe factory in
one of south China's busiest industrial zones. Here, where
athletic shoes for export to America and other countries are made
by young Chinese peasant women supervised by Taiwanese bosses,
the myth of the Confucian ideal of worker-management harmony has
been overtaken by a model straight out of the military textbooks.
One evening recently, I watched as two platoons of workers
marched in a floodlit courtyard and shouted in unison, "Be
respectful toward my work; be loyal; be creative; be of service".
Behind them forklifts were weaving back and forth between
buildings, as production continued round the clock.
The enterprise, called Yu Yuan, is not exactly a sweatshop
-- the living conditions are decent and the pay adequate compared
to other nearby Taiwanese-owned factories, though the hours are
very long. Yu Yuan, which produces 10 brands of shoes including
Nike and Reebok, is simply the on-the-ground reality of the
latest phase of the Asian 'economic miracle': giant factories in
places like China and Vietnam, built with off-shore Asian
capital, staffed with the rural poor and managed with ruthless
efficiency to gain maximum competitive advantage.
Popular wisdom has it that the success of overseas Chinese
and Korean businesses can be traced to a Confucian culture in
which mutual trust, flexibility and interpersonal relationships
predominate. What is taking place in many of these factories in
China that arerun by Taiwanese and Koreans is incompatible with
that image. What prompts the chairman of the Taiwanese Business
Association in Dongguan to order his security guards to salute
and snap to attention every time he passes through the factory
gate? Not any Confucian beliefs but a hankering for modern army
standards of discipline and unquestioning loyalty.
In Taiwan and South Korea, all young men have to undergo
military training, and until recently an unusually rigid
discipline was instilled by regimes that considered themselves
besieged. It is an experience shared by almost all of the
Taiwanese and Korean managers now working in China. In some
Taiwan-owned factories the owners fly in retired Taiwanese army
officers to impose a similar martinet discipline. As Taiwan
becomes more democratic that special skill is no longer in demand
outside the military; it is being exported to these labour-
intensive factories abroad where managers feel a need to control
a discontented workforce.
One evening I stood outside the gates of a newly-opened
factory in Dongguan. Any new factory holds out the possibility of
higher pay and better conditions, so at 6 PM, a few dozen young
workers, all of them speaking in the accents of poorer regions of
China, waited eagerly at the factory gate for security guards to
let them in to take the recruitment test.
There is the normal check on IDs, education certificates,
and certificates from their hometown government attesting they
are unmarried. What is new at this particular factory is that the
female applicants are ordered to stand at attention as if they
are applying to join the army, are told to run a mile and then to
do as many push-ups as they can within a minute.
The young women emerging from the gate are suspicious. The
more experienced workers know that screening for strength and
stamina and military-style obedience portends nights of enforced
overtime in a shoe industry already notorious for its long work
hours. They'd better stick to the jobs they've got, several told
me. Leave this new factory to the green migrant workers.
The Taiwanese are the largest investors in Dongguan City
and, second only to Hong Kong, the major foreign investors in
China, having poured more than US$20 billion into the Mainland
during the past decade. With labour costs rising in Taiwan, they
have moved Taiwan's labour intensive industries such as shoe
manufacture into China lock, stock and barrel. China today
produces almost half the world's shoes, along with a vast array
of garments, household gadgets and electrical appliances that not
long ago were assembled in Hong Kong, Taiwan and South Korea.
A decade and a half ago, Dongguan City was a small sleepy
rural town set amidst rice fields. But it was located less than
half a day by road from Hong Kong, and Hong Kong manufacturers
began pouring in to take advantage of cheap labour and cheap
rents, followed within a few years by a wave of Taiwanese
companies.
Today, the entire county has been engulfed by frenetic
industrial activity. The rice fields surrounding Dongguan have
been transformed into seemingly endless concrete industrial
estates. Whole clan villages live off the rents of the factory
buildings that have displaced their fields. The local people can
afford not to work in these factories. They leave this to the
many tens of thousands of migrants from poorer parts of China who
have taken up temporary residence here, filling the dormitories
that have been thrown up alongside the factories.
The leaders of Dongguan City's Taiwanese Business
Association, which boasts 1,350 member firms, complain of the
job-hopping mentality of the workforce. 'A few years back,' one
of them explained, 'workers who were fired knelt down on the
floor begging us to let them stay; but now they feel they can get
work elsewhere'. The reason, he says, is that the hordes of new
applicants from the countryside who used to wait outside the
factory gates have shrunk.
The wages the factories are offering have not been keeping
up with inflation, and many rural Chinese have now decided the
money's not enough to make the long trip from the provinces
worthwhile. The golden age of inexhaustible cheap labour is
drawing to an end, and the Taiwanese businessmen are beginning to
talk about moving their manufacturing equipment onward to Vietnam
rather than raise wages..
In the meantime, they have instituted harshly regimented
labour conditions. Corporal punishment is part-and-parcel of the
management style of some of them. They scoff at what they
consider the local Hong Kong-owned firms' slack management
practices.
By far the largest of the Taiwanese enterprises in Dongguan
is Yu Yuan, the biggest of three factories in the region owned by
the Bao Yuan company. Reputedly the largest shoe factory in the
world, Yu Yuan employs some 40,000 workers, 70% of them female,
who work and live at a single enclosed site. The Nike logo "Just
Do It" covers the wall of one of the enterprise's cavernous
buildings. A huge "ADIDAS" sign sits atop an adjoining building.
Other sports shoe brands that are produced in the same plant
include Puma, Reebok, LA Gear, and New Balance.
Yu Yuan is run in a decidedly military style. New recruits
are given three days of 'training'. The first day, according to
one of them, is largely spent marching around the compound,
barked at by a drill sergeant. At 6:30 PM, commands could clearly
be heard in the background: "Left! Right! Left! Right! About
turn! March!..." Three formations, each of about forty workers,
were still being drilled, while thousands of other workers
scurried back and forth between factory buildings and messhalls
to take their meals in shifts.
"The factory management is precise down to the minute",
explained a worker who was taking a rest after dinner. "You see
those workers waiting outside the gate to go up to the third
floor for their dinner? The gate opens at 5:30 sharp. The workers
file up the stairs on one side, while those who have finished
their dinner descend on the other. When they get to the canteen,
they sit eight to a table and wait. Only when the bell rings can
they begin to eat. We have 10 to 15 minutes to finish the meal,
then we file downstairs again."
The factory compound is perched along a river where the
enterprise has built a pleasant promenade flanked by green lawns
and dotted with flower beds. It is an unusually quiet and serene
spot in a city that resembles a gigantic construction site. But
each of the evenings I was there only a relatively small number
of workers were taking advantage of it. They are too busy, I was
told.
Some work 12-hour shifts called 'long day shifts'; others
are on 'long night shifts'. Often these exceed 12 hours. As one
of the workers explained, "You work longer if you can't finish
the day's allocated quota. Another unpaid extra hour or so is
spent in preparation before the shift begins. In addition,
because there are long queues, you need to arrive early at the
gate so as to punch your card on time, do the drills, and then
line up to get to your shopfloor. You can't afford to be late
because there's a penalty equal to half a day's wages."
A large number of other workers are on eight-hour shifts,
but they are required to do considerable overtime work. I was
there during a slack period and a worker noted that he was
working only one or two hours overtime a day, seven days a week,
and got one day off work every second week. But during a busy
period, he said, he had to work his day shift from early morning
till 11 PM or midnight. The slow workers stay even later.
Workers get a bit over 2 yuan an hour (about 25 American
cents), which is just above the minimum legal wage. With about 80
hours of overtime work a month, their monthly wages hover around
600-700 yuan (US $75-80 a month).
The amount of enforced overtime is in violation of China's
labour laws, which stipulate a maximum of 36 hours of overtime
work each month. Yet, all things considered, conditions at this
city-sized factory are above average for the district. The meals
are subsidized, and there is medical care and relatively 'low'
density housing of 10 to a room. Signs screaming out slogans like
"Love your factory as your home" and "Be loyal, be obedient, feel
honoured to work here" are mounted everywhere.
Notwithstanding the signs, the factory's turn-over rate is
a high 7% a month, according to one manager I spoke with. Other
factories in Dongguan that offer poorer conditions resort to
increasingly extreme measures to keep workers from quitting. In
violation of China's labour laws, many of them demand a 'deposit'
of a few hundred yuan (from two weeks' to a month's wages) to
ensure workers cannot leave before their contract expires. They
also lock up the migrant workers' ID cards, without which they
cannot job-hop or even remain in the city. Anyone found without
the right papers can be rounded up by the police and sent back to
the countryside.
Yu Yuan does not demand a deposit or hold its workers' ID
cards, but those who quit before their contract ends will not
receive their last two weeks' pay. This is easy to enforce
because there is a two week time lag in wage payments. New
recruits who quit during the six month probation period will also
cause a month's loss of pay to the fellow worker who introduced
them to the factory and served as their guarantor, often a
relative or friend from their hometown.
The worst factories in south China do not even allow workers
to leave the factory compound after work. In extreme cases the
isolation and iron discipline are prison-like. The official press
has reported cases of unpaid workers enslaved in heavily guarded
compounds who have staged escapes. In the worst example that has
come to light in this region, a Taiwan-managed joint-venture
factory employs more than a hundred guards for 2,700 workers, one
of whom recently died in an escape attempt.
Some of the Korean-run factories in north China, which is
where almost all of Korea's investments are concentrated,
reportedly are even harsher and more unscrupulous in their
treatment of workers. During many months of interviewing in China
about factory conditions, officials and business people
repeatedly confided to me about Korean employers who resort to
beatings, tight military control, and public humiliation to cow
workers. In one case a woman worker was locked inside a dog cage
with a large dog and placed on public display in the factory
compound. So bad are the conditions that, according to a Chinese
newspaper, 9 out of 10 of the spontaneous strikes that broke out
in the large northern city of Tianjin in 1993 occurred in Korean-
managed enterprises.
The abuses have persisted because of extensive collusion
between such factories and the local governments. Many of the
Chinese partners of joint-venture firms are actually local
government organs and departments, which reap considerable
profits from these factories. They are as eager to make money by
overworking and underpaying the migrant workers as are the
outside investors, and look aside when cases of imprisonment and
other serious violations of law occur. Those who should be acting
as impartial overseers and law enforcement agencies are, instead,
management's accomplices.
Local officials in south China seem sympathetic toward these
factories' militaristic approach. Not so long ago under Mao
Zedong, the loyal discipline of the People's Liberation Army was
upheld for the entire nation to emulate. To a surprising extent,
conversations with various government officials and trade union
officials in China reveal that many of these 40-to-50-year-olds
had once been junior army officers, assigned to coveted positions
as junior officials when they were demobilized. They, too, see
military-like control as a quick fix to the problem of a migrant
labour force. The common underlying beliefs that they and the
Taiwanese and Korean managers share is not in Confucianism but
militarism and authoritarianism.
Some Western commentators suggest that China's
industrialization and modernization, spurred by flows of foreign
investment and by contacts with the rest of East Asia, will
gradually pull China in a more democratic direction. The
experience of Dongguan suggests otherwise.
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