Labor activist Han Dongfang on the rise of Chinese workers, plus a Kellogg-Memphis update and soon-to-come tribute to jazz great Charlie Haden

 

(Han Dongfang at the Washington, D.C., panel)

WASHINGTON, D.C. - A democratic election by workers at a factory in Guangzhou to select trade union leaders and a promise by the Chinese government to provide better vocation training for migrant workers bring a new perspective to recent comments by Hong Kong-based labor activist Han Dongfang at a panel discussion here. Labor South covered the event.

Han, founder and executive director of the China Labour Bulletin in Hong Kong, said at the one-day “Chinese Labor Movement: Which Way Forward?” panel discussion sponsored by the Albert Shanker Institute that Chinese workers are increasingly asserting their rights and that the Chinese government is responding. He called on workers and activists to push for a “peaceful transfer” that could eventually transform China’s Communist Party into a social democratic party that recognizes and protects worker rights.

“Chinese workers are fighting back,” Han said. “They are no longer the victim. They don’t need sympathy. That makes you feel weak. … If you are afraid of the dark, and the dark knows this, it will be aggressive.”

Han served on the June panel with Human Rights in China Executive Director Sharon Hom and columnist and The American Prospect editor Harold Meyerson.

A correspondent with Radio Free Asia and arguably the most prominent activist for labor rights in China, Han served 22 months in a Chinese prison for his role in founding the Beijing Autonomous Workers Federation at the time of the crackdown at Tiananmen Square in Beijing in 1989. After contracting tuberlosis in prison, he was released and spent a year in treatment in the United States. He lost most of a lung as a result and was banned from returning to China and expelled to Hong Kong.

Despite his imprisonment by the Chinese government, Han sees potential for significant change and the promise for more worker freedom in the country. “I’m very politically incorrect,” he said. “I leave the door open for the Communist Party to walk out of its past.”

A “peaceful transfer” would mean that workers “pay less in human life and blood.”

Han pointed to several recent campaigns in China that have proven workers' growing clout. These include a strike by 40,000 workers at Yue Yuen Industrial, global supplier of Adidas, Nike and other shoe brands, in April as well as protests and strikes by workers at the Chinese operations of WalMart, IBM and Pepsi. “Walmart had to bow its head and recognize the union,” Han said.

In Guangzhou in southern China last month workers at the Japanese-owned Sumida electronics factory participated in a groundbreaking democratic election to select union leaders, an important first step toward a true grassroots union. Furthermore, officials at a government State Council executive meeting promised better vocation training and other improved conditions for the nation’s 270 million rural migrants who moved to urban areas to find work.

Han pointed to subtle changes in the language used by the Communist Party at its congresses in recent years that have opened the way to a “collective wage negotiation system.” The government is striving for legitimacy with workers, Han said. The government-sanctioned All China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU), which essentially operates like a company union, “does not know how to collective bargain,” Han said, but it could learn if it became independent from “management control.”

The brightest promise on the horizon is the workers themselves, he said. “Younger workers don’t remember Tiananmen Square or Mao, and they don’t have the fear. … I do think the term democracy can be a part of the future of the Communist Party.”

The others on the panel offered a more cautious view.

“It’s important to put labor rights within the context of human rights,” Sharon Hom said. “Fear doesn’t work any more. The unions are the core in protecting the workers.” Still, she said, “there are major disincentives to give up power. … The corruption is so widespread.”

In a later article for Talking Union, Meyerson said the Communist Party won’t relinquish power easily. “The truism remains true: Power seldom yields without a struggle,” Meyerson wrote, “If the transformation Han seeks ever arrives, it likely will be more wrenching and bloody than the gradualist one he sketched.”

In an interview with Labor South at his Hong Kong office in June 2013, China Labour Bulletin Communications Director Geoffrey Crothall said the Chinese government certainly wants foreign investment and the nation’s economy to continue to grow. At the same time, however, “the government realizes the workers’ demands are perfectly legitimate.”

(To the right, Geoffrey Crothall in the Hong Kong offices of China Labour Bulletin)

Labor South asked both Han and Crothall whether workers’ victories for better wages and conditions in China could eventually lead to a major exodus of foreign-owned companies there.  Both said that the huge industrial infrastructure already in place in China, the growing domestic market there, and simple size of the workforce make this unlikely.

(To the right, Han Dongfang and Labor South writer/editor Joe Atkins)

“A lot of these businesses discover that as soon as you try to relocate to Bangladesh or Cambodia on the basis of cheap labor, that labor is not going to stay cheap very long,” Crothall said.

Ultimately, Crothall said, “if wages in China are going up, that is good for workers in America, good for workers in Europe. That levels the playing field. It also means workers in China are much are more able and likely to buy products made in the United States.”

And back here in the U.S. South, a judge orders Kellogg to bring back Memphis workers

A U.S. District judge this week issued an order to the Kellogg Co. to allow more than 200 workers at its Memphis plant to go back to work and to negotiate contract issues with the Bakery, Confectionary, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers union.

The order from U.S. District Judge Samuel “Hardy” Mays came after a formal complaint from the National Labor Relations Board that the Battle Creek, Mich.-based cereal giant was in serious violation of federal labor law when it locked out 226 Memphis workers last October because of a union contract dispute.

The union opposed company plans to cut wages and benefits as well as hire new “casual” workers at lower pay. The locked-out workers have picketed outside the plant through snow and rain and summer heat since last October.

In another development, union workers in Memphis have filed a claim of racial discrimination in the lockout with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in Memphis. The locked-out workers are predominantly African American.

The workers’ picketing won widespread support from the local community and as far away as the Congressional Black Caucus in Washington, D.C.

And an upcoming tribute to jazz great Charlie Haden …

Expect soon a Labor South tribute to jazz great Charlie Haden, who died at 76 last month. The bassist, one of this writer's favorite musicians, helped change jazz forever when he and the rest of the Ornette Coleman’s quartet recorded The Shape of Jazz to Come in 1959. Haden was also revolutionary in his politics and once was thrown in a Portuguese jail for his provocative music, leftist politics, and support of liberation movements in Angola and Mozambique.