DONGGUAN, CHINA, April 30 — On April 15, one of the largest strikes in this country’s private sector saw 45,000 workers, mostly women, shut down Yue Yuen, the world’s largest manufacturer of sneakers and footwear. The company produces 300 million pairs for Nike, Adidas, Puma, New Balance, Reebok and Timberland, among others. Yue Yuen, a $5.6 billion conglomerate, employs 423,000 workers.
Riot police played their usual strike-breaking role. They detained rank-and-file leaders and arrested scores of workers, forcing them back inside the factories. When once inside, those workers refused to work, and then were beaten for “not working.” One worker told Agence France-Presse (4/28) that “the factory is controlled by police.” A 17-year-old who earns around $500 a month working on Nike Air Jordans said she went back because she feared losing her job, saying, “Factory officials have warned us that those who make a fuss will be sacked without compensation.” A 45-year-old sanitation worker surnamed Li added, “The government is forcing us back to work.”
Massive crowds surrounding factory buildings carried banners reading, “Give me back my social insurance, give me back my housing benefits!”
The grassroots uprising was led by workers approaching retirement. They reported that the company had fallen way behind on payments for pensions, housing funds, unemployment and medical insurance — social welfare benefits which are supposedly mandated by Chinese law. “If you don’t have social security, your life’s work will be useless when you return home,” said Li, who, like nearly all the factory’s workers, comes from a poor rural village to which he plans one day to return.
The strikers were focusing on what will happen if many of the companies move elsewhere. Nike and Adidas have begun shifting operations to lower-wage areas like Indonesia, Cambodia, Vietnam and Bangladesh.
Carrot and Stick:
Bosses Promise,
Cops Attack
As the strike continued, the bosses promised some retroactive payments to the state-mandated social insurance and housing funds, but one worker, Xiang Feng, 28, told Bloomberg News, “Workers may end up with a take-home salary almost unchanged or maybe even lower than before.” Many are demanding a 30 percent pay hike, saying that their wages can’t keep up with the rising cost of living. As of today, most of the strikers have returned to work based on the “carrot-and-stick” concept: company promises and police action.
How much longer this struggle will continue and what the workers may win remains to be seen. But one thing is certain: the betrayal of China’s revolution is blatantly revealed in the actions of its leaders in keeping tens of millions of workers in near slavery. While passing labor reform laws, they flagrantly ignore them as they use the state apparatus to break this strike.
Millions of workers and peasants still remember being freed from some of the oppression of the pre-revolutionary days. Now that the present traitors to that revolution have reinstituted full-blown capitalism, fertile ground exists for the emergence of a true communist party that would learn from past errors — that there is no such thing as a “two-stage” revolution, that socialism only brings workers back to capitalism.
One of the lessons of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution is that our class must be won directly to communism, a society without a wage system, without bosses, without profits, without money — a society run by and for the workers, governed by workers’ state power. This is the goal of the Progressive Labor Party. Our fight is international and can eventually help the emergence of such a party throughout the world.