China saw a dramatic increase in wage arrears protests in run up to New Year // China on strike
The extent of China’s
chronic wage arrears problem became clear in the run up to the Lunar New Year
as workers all over the country staged protests in a bid to get paid before the
8 February holiday. Between 1 December and
8 February, CLB’s Strike Map recorded
1,050 strikes and collective protests by workers, about 90 percent of which
were related to the non-payment of wages.
The highest
concentration of unrest was in Guangdong, Henan, Shandong and Hebei, with
multiple protests by construction workers occurring in several major cities
such as Zhengzhou (23 incidents) and Chengdu (21 incidents). Beijing, Guangzhou
and Chongqing all had 14 construction worker protests in this period.
The construction
industry, in which the non-payment of wages is an endemic and systematic
problem, accounted for about 55 percent of all protests between 1 December and
8 February. Manufacturing accounted for 23 percent of the strikes and protests
in the pre-New Year period and mining 5.6 percent, up from 4.0 percent during
2015 as a whole.
Given the Chinese
government’s stated plans to lay off 1.8 million workers in the coal
and steel industries alone over the next few years, there is a danger that the
number of worker protests in these industries will only increase. The well-documented
problems of China’s shrinking manufacturing sector were reflected in the number
of worker protests related to factory closures. The garment and shoe industries
have been particularly badly affected and accounted for 40 percent of all
factory closure and relocation disputes in the run up to the New Year holiday.
Even before the New
Year surge in wage arrears protests, the Ministry of Human Resources and Social
Security admitted there was huge wage arrears problem in China and that it was
only getting worse. The Ministry reported in November last year that there had
been 11,007 “incidents
of migrant worker wage arrears” (发生涉及拖欠农民工工资问题的突发事件) in the first three quarters of 2015, an
increase of 34 percent over the same period in 2014.
The Ministry also
noted that wage arrears were no longer confined to the construction industry
but had spread to manufacturing and the extractive industries as well. Although not
explicitly stated, it seems that the “incidents” referred to by the Ministry
are collective protests, which would indicate that CLB’s Strike Map records
around 12 percent of all worker protests in China. The Strike Map, which relies
primarily on data from social media in China, recorded 1,350 wage arrears
protests in the first three quarters of 2015.
From 2011 to 2013,
China Labor Bulletin (CLB), a Hong Kong-based workers' rights group, recorded
around 1,200 strikes and protests across the country. In 2014 alone, there were
more than 1,300 incidents. The following year,
that number rose to over 2,700 — more than one a day in Guangdong province — a
pattern that has continued into 2016.
A glance at the map of
incidents shows no province of China unaffected by strikes or worker protests,
a far sight from the image of technocratic control and permanent growth that
the ruling Communist Party likes to present to the world. "The fundamental
cause has been the systematic failure of employers to respect the basic rights
of employees, such as being paid on time and receiving their legally mandated
benefits, and the failure of local government officials to enforce labor
law," according to CLB.
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