OK. I’m making an excuse now; I have not posted in two weeks… life sort of ran ahead of me for a while. Now on “vacation”, I can try to keep up with my online commitments. There have been many interesting things going on in the “China blogs” (suicides at Foxconn, labor unrest, etc), which everyone is already focusing on. I want to try to post about somethings a little bit different this week. But then I saw this article in the NYT, “In China’s Honda Factory, Two Unlikely Labor Leaders”. Why is another article about the Honda strike interesting? I look at it this way…what was NOT said in the article I find very very interesting:
[Tan Quoqing, a "labor leader" in the Honda strike] He moved in 2006. After high school, he had studied at a vocational school in Changsha, Hunan’s capital city. A job placement agency allied with the school found work him at a Honda factory nearly 500 miles away in Guangzhou. [...]The agency kept a percentage of his salary — a fairly common practice, Mr. Tan said. But he found that employees who were hired directly by Honda were making up to four times his monthly salary of $175.
What is not said here is that the job placement agency most probably pays the headmaster of the school a fee for sending the graduating class into the arms of the agency.
What is not said here is that the students, who are conditioned to obey teachers, do not question if this the best job-placement channel.
What is not said here is that the employees directly hired by Honda are regular employees, and very likely have seniority and are employees of related Joint Venture partners. Furthermore, those employees are quite possibly resentful of the fact that Mr. Tan receives $175 per month at the age of 23, while the senior employees only achieved that pay-level recently, after working years in the factory
I would really like to see a good scientific, data-supported study about the structure of the job-placement channels for laborers. Everyone knows that this is how factories find their labor. But I have not seen anyone actually investigate typical practices with a good value-stream analysis. I would do this study myself, if I had time.
But the pay was meager, he says, and inflation ate away at his earnings. And last January, when Honda offered to increase his $175 monthly salary by a mere $7, Mr. Tan, who planned to marry soon, was distraught. It was not enough money to buy a house or raise a child.
Furthermore, what is not said is that $175 / month for a fresh graduate of a vocational school – anywhere in China – is rather high (unless said graduate also has good English / foreign language skills). The income of his rural family per year ($2500) is also high. A 23 year old from Hubei, destraught that he will be marrying soon and does not have enough money? Sorry… The expectations described here are so wildly outside of China’s economic and social norms that I cannot believe this on face value. He may be distraught. He most definitly wants more money. But this is not the real story.
“This is a remarkable development,” said Anita Chan, a labor expert at the University of Technology in Sydney. “Most strikes in China tend to be about not being paid or being mistreated. This was different. The workers were demanding very high salaries. And they want to elect union leaders democratically.”
Around the “China blogs” lately, everyone has been making connections between strikes, suicides, and rising wages throughout China. Here we have one of the most rediculous assertions yet. I’m not saying that they don’t want to elect union leaders democratically. I believe Chinese people would love to elect their union leaders. However, saying this is akin to saying that one supports Taiwanese secessionism. I do believe someone in the government, somewhere once said something that sounded like “Workers of the World Unite!” Independant labor unions in China will be stopped quicker than F-L-G protests in Tian’nmen Square.
What conclusions can I draw from this? Well, first of all, the situation on the ground is far more complicated than the narrative “rising wages / more powerfull labor / bad-for-business” that I have been reading about in newspapers and blogs. From this, I state my position; the Honda strike does not reflect labor power shifts in China, but definitely does reflect the complexity of labor issues in Honda’s factories.
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