Hong Kong.– La ola de huelgas que
desde hace varios meses inquieta al gobierno de China
paralizó ayer las plantas de las automotrices japonesas
Toyota y Honda, lo que alimentó el temor entre los
inversores extranjeros.
 |
|
Obreros en huelga de una fábrica de
autopartes de Honda en Zhongshan
hacen piquetes en sus
puertas |
Los trabajadores migrantes, la columna
vertebral del sector productivo chino, han comenzado a
exigir aumentos salariales cada vez más abiertamente y
amenazan con volver menos competitiva la industria del país.
Toyota se vio paralizada por una huelga
en la proveedora japonesa Denso, que la abastece de equipos
de inyección y otras partes.
"El salario es sólo de 1300
yuanes (191 dólares) por mes, incluyendo subsidios por
comida, mientras que mi alquiler es de 200 yuanes al
mes", dijo un trabajador de apellido Zhang, de la
provincia Hunan, a la agencia oficial Xinhua.
Como resultado de la huelga de Denso,
una planta de Toyota en la provincia de Guangdong que puede
fabricar más de 360.000 autos por año ha estado paralizada
desde anteayer. Honda dijo que había paralizado dos plantas
de Guangqi Honda, una de las empresas conjuntas en China,
después de que una huelga en una fábrica china, en la que
la japonesa NHK Spring es socio, se quedó sin
abastecimiento de partes.
Varias compañías extranjeras, se están
viendo afectadas por una ola de huelgas en fábricas de
China para reclamar aumentos de sueldos y mejores
condiciones laborales.
Según los analistas, estas protestas
están encabezadas por trabajadores jóvenes que no están
dispuestos a aceptar las mismas condiciones que sus
predecesores, que soportaron jornadas de trabajo
interminables y bajos sueldos porque éstos suponían una
mejora con respecto al trabajo en el campo del que muchos
venían.
La ola de huelgas se está extendiendo
a medida que éstas se van resolviendo con aumentos
salariales, por lo que se vaticina que este descontento de
los trabajadores se traducirá en un generalizado aumento de
sueldos en el sector industrial chino, que durante años se
ha caracterizado por bajos sueldos y largas jornadas.
De esa manera, la "fábrica del
mundo" china podría dejar de ser rentable para muchas
industrias de todo el planeta que actualmente concentran allí
su producción y los grandes beneficiados podrían ser los
países del sudeste asiático, adonde se espera que se
trasladen algunas de las plantas que ahora están en China.
As
China Aids Labor, Unrest Is Still Rising
Beijing
— On a hot morning in late May, while some 2,000 workers
at a Honda parts factory were striking in China’s south,
100 irate employees at a hotel in the heart of the capital
staged their own protest.
The
Honda workers got lots of publicity. The hotel employees
were mostly ignored. But the undercurrent was the same:
labor disputes are becoming a common feature of the Chinese
economic landscape.
Chinese
workers are much more willing these days to defend their
rights and demand higher wages, encouraged by recent
policies from the central government aimed at protecting
laborers and closing the income gap. Chinese leaders dread
even the hint of Solidarity–style labor activism. But they
have moved to empower workers by pushing through labor laws
that signaled that central authorities would no longer
tolerate poor workplace conditions, legal scholars and
Chinese labor experts say.
The
laws, enacted in 2008, were intended to channel worker
frustrations through a system of arbitration and courts so
no broader protest movements would threaten political
stability.
But
if recent strikes and a surge in arbitration and court cases
reflect a rising worker consciousness partly rooted in
awareness of greater legal rights, they also underscore new
challenges in China. The labor laws have raised expectations,
but still leave workers relatively powerless by Western
standards. The Communist Party–run legal system cannot
cope with the exploding volume of labor disputes. And legal
enforcement by local officials loosened when the global
economic crisis hit China and resulted in factory shutdowns.
If
the expected revaluation of the renminbi, the Chinese
currency, makes exports less competitive, then local
officials and mainland companies may collude to ignore laws
and ensure that labor costs stay low.
“It’s
not enough simply to rely on laws,” said Liu Kaiming, the
head of the Institute of Contemporary Observation, a labor
advocacy organization in Shenzhen. “Laws only provide the
bare minimum required.”
Weaknesses
include the fact that Chinese workers still do not have the
right to form unions independent of the one controlled by
the government. The Labor Contract Law enacted in January
2008 tries to guarantee contracts for all full–time
employees, but leaves many details vague. Another law
enacted in May 2008 helped streamline the system of
arbitration and lawsuits, but civil courts and arbitration
committees, which are made up of government employees, have
been overwhelmed by a flood of cases. Meanwhile, because of
lax enforcement, companies dodge other labor laws by
cheating on minimum wage requirements and overtime pay.
The
leap in worker consciousness is best reflected in the rising
number of labor disputes that have gone to arbitration or to
the courts. In 2008, the year factory shutdowns surged,
nearly 700,000 labor disputes went to arbitration, almost
double the number in 2007, according to the Ministry of
Human Resources and Social Security. Last year’s numbers
were roughly the same as those in 2008. If arbitration
proves unsatisfactory, Chinese workers or employers can
appeal to civil courts. In 2008, the number of labor cases
in courts was 280,000, a 94 percent increase over the
previous year, according to the Supreme People’s Court. In
the first half of 2009, there were 170,000 such cases.
“Publicity
regarding the Labor Contract Law had a tremendous impact on
raising worker consciousness,” said Aaron Halegua, a
lawyer based in New York who is a consultant on Chinese
labor law. “Even if migrant workers still do not know the
specific details of each of their legal rights, far more
came to realize that they have rights and there are laws
protecting them.”
One
19–year–old worker on strike last week at the Honda Lock
auto parts factory in Zhongshan said: “We heard about the
new labor law, but we don’t know the details. We know we
should fight for our rights.”
In
many parts of China, there is now a backlog of labor
disputes awaiting resolution. Some workers have had to wait
up to a year for arbitration committees to address their
complaints.
Moreover,
government officials, perhaps to protect local employers,
have pushed for disputes to be solved through mediation
rather than reach the level of arbitration committees or
courts, and they have not enforced labor laws strictly,
especially in the aftermath of the mass factory closings,
legal experts said. In late 2008, officials in Guangdong
Province, where labor disputes are common, issued a report
saying that 500 or so unofficial lawyers who represented
workers were a source of growing trouble.
Western
experts say if Chinese leaders were to allow independent
unions, that could help defuse labor discontent. Under the
current system, only the government–run union, the All–China
Federation of Trade Unions, which has more than 170 million
members, is permitted. The union only nominally represents
workers; in practice, it has close ties with management.
The
union has a wide presence in state–owned companies and has
made a big push to establish branches in foreign companies
— its most notable victory was unionizing Wal–Mart
stores in 2006. Private Taiwanese, Hong Kong and mainland
Chinese companies often do not have branches of the official
union.
Early
drafts of the Labor Contract Law had clauses that would have
allowed for more independent unions, but those were excised
from the final version, said Mary E. Gallagher, a political
scientist at the University of Michigan who studies Chinese
labor. The final version also left out an earlier clause
that said companies had to get union approval on major
workplace changes.
“I
would doubt very much that the Chinese Communist Party
thinks that the benefits of an independent Chinese trade
union outweighs the costs or outweighs the risks,” Ms.
Gallagher said.
Workers
for Honda in Zhongshan made the formation of an independent
union one of their main demands, along with wage increases.
The
main goal of the Labor Contract Law has been to ensure that
full–time employees across all industries work under a
contract. It also tries to mandate severance pay for
contracted employees. But companies find ways around
contract guarantees or wage laws.
A
common complaint among laborers is lack of overtime pay when
a work schedule exceeds 40 hours. Mr. Liu, the labor
advocate, said his group had done a study of 210 factories
in the Pearl River Delta and the Yangtze River Delta that
showed 90 percent of those factories cheat on overtime: they
often reported employees as working eight–hour days even
when the hours were much longer. Thus, the salaries were
much more generous on paper than in reality.
At
the Gloria Plaza Hotel in Beijing, workers took their
dispute with management to the streets on May 27. The
company that owns the hotel plans to tear it down and lay
off the workers. Although the company had said the workers
would get the minimum severance pay required by law, the
employees complained that that was far too low. “They are
a state–owned enterprise, they have the money, but they
don’t care about us at all,” said one woman who declined
to be named for fear of retribution.
(*) Xiyun
Yang contributed reporting from Beijing, and David Barboza
from Zhongshan, China. Li Bibo and Helen Gao contributed
research.
