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| quote: | Originally posted by Dupz
Chinese labourers are getting paid peanuts compared to western standards yet their economic well-being is doubling every 5 years - faster than any other nation in the world. Exploitation?? i think not...
China is thankful for their low wages, and so they should be because it is the main driver in keeping the worlds economy afloat. |
 Go find out the minimum wage of an average Chinese labourer and tell me if you'd want to try it! Also let me know in your research a) how many Chinese people are still in poverty b) who is reaping the profits here - Chinese people or western companies c) standards of living of Chinese workers vs. standards of living of western workers in China. 5 cents is a miserable wage for an electronics worker making your Ipod. These slave workers often are forced to work overtime to make ends meet. To make your Ipod.
China’s ”McScandal” shows the need for real trade unions
http://www.chinaworker.org/en/content/news/169/
BTW, this is NOT a Chinese government article - read carefully:
Fast-food giants McDonald’s, Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC) and Pizza Hut have been caught underpaying their young workforce in China by as much as 40 percent below the – abysmal – legal minimum wage.
A series of exposés in China’s state-run media has shone the spotlight on rampant labour abuses at the US-owned transnationals. McDonald’s has 670 restaurants employing a total of 50,000 in China. KFC runs more than 1,500 restaurants in China and Pizza Hut – part of the same concern as KFC, Yum! Brands Inc. – has over 200, totaling around 100,000 employees between them.
Investigations into alleged legal violations by the companies were initiated by the southern newspaper, New Express. The newspaper discovered that part-time workers accounted for about 80 percent of the total staff of the foreign fast-food restaurants, although their definition of ’part-time’ turned out to be a cover for underpaying the workforce and denying them their legal rights to such things as written contracts of employment, medical insurance and more. As Beijing Review reports, ” In order to earn money to support themselves, the students sometimes had to work long hours, on occasion 13 hours in one day.”
As this newspaper points out, ”According to labour regulations in China, the average daily working hours for part-time employees cannot surpass five hours, and their weekly working time cannot surpass 30 hours [or] the employer is bound by law to make them full-time employees and take on the responsibilities that go with that.” [Beijing Review, 3 May 2007].
The average pay for part-time staff in a dozen investigated McDonald’s restaurants in Guangdong Province was four yuan per hour – around 50 US cents – plus a subsidy of 1.3 yuan per hour. The province’s minimum wage (minimum wage levels are set by provincial governments in China) for part-time workers is 7.5 yuan – around 98 US cents – an hour.
”Even the so-called minimum wage is a joke,” university student Qu Yun, told China Worker. ”Most people have never heard what the minimum is. It’s never enforced so no one really knows.”
Minimum wage rulings are ignored at more than 60 percent of China’s workplaces, he says, showing that US companies are not the only villains. Many Chinese employers act in exactly the same way.
Mostly poor students
University students from poor families make up a large part of the workforce at foreign fast-food chains. These youth and their parents rely on the low pay from ’McJobs’ to help ease the cost of a college education, which has rocketed after years of ’market reforms’ in the education sector. The average yearly cost (tuition fees plus other charges) of a place at a public university is 10,000 yuan (1,300 US dollars). This is almost the equivalent of a year’s disposable income in the most developed parts of China, as China Daily (17 May 2007) points out. At this rate a student working at McDonald’s must work 38 hours a week, all 52 weeks of the year, in order just to pay their university fees. Of course that would be impossible, and many students from poor families finance their education by taking out loans, saddling them with hefty debts at the start of their working life.
“Many part-time workers in McDonald’s and KFC who are working as many hours as full-time employees can only get paid as part-time workers without any benefits or social security subsidy,” complained a female university student and McDonald’s employee to New Express (28 March 2007).
“I have worked in this KFC outlet for over a year, but still haven’t got a work contract with the restaurant,” grade-four university student Wu Juan told Beijing Review (3 May 2007). “But I dare not to ask for the work contract that I am entitled to since I cannot afford to lose this job.”
Government intervenes?
The March report in New Express attracted government attention at the provincial level in Guangdong. The province’s Labour and Social Security Department launched an investigation. On April 10, the department published its investigation results, which confirmed that the fast-food restaurants had violated China’s labour code in several areas, but failed to find them guilty of violating the minimum wage. This incident speaks volumes about what is happening in China today, where the organs of the ’communist’ government in nine cases out of ten, if not more, support the capitalists against the workers. Only when subjected to huge pressure and the threat of destabilising protests, do the authorities intervene to compel management to offer concessions, or obey the law.
Defending his company’s actions, Cui Huanming, the marketing director of the Guangdong branch of Yum! Brands Inc., claimed, “The university students we have hired are neither full-time employees nor part-time employees. They are a special group of employees.” [Beijing Review, 3 May 2007].
The use of such legalistic sleight of hand, by unscrupulous bosses is unfortunately a very common practise in China.
The provincial government refused to take action against the company, but instead called in its trade union arm, the All China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU). In early April, the Guangdong Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU’s branch in the province) announced that a ”preparatory panel on setting up a trade union in McDonald’s Guangdong branch, consisting of labour and management representatives,” (our emphasis) had been established. The state media made a big thing about this ’breakthrough’ for ACFTU in the fast-food sector, but the above statement shows that what is happening has nothing to do with trade unionism, and will lead to few if any benefits for the workers.
Not a real union
The ACFTU is not a genuine, independent, democratically controlled trade union, but rather an arm of the authoritarian state. It has a proven record of opposing strikes and supporting repression against workers that organise to defend their rights. ACFTU officials, like every other section of the state apparatus, are ever on the lookout for ’business opportunities’. Union officials in the state-owned companies, for example, get preferential treatment when shares are distributed as a step towards company privatisation.
For some years, however, the ACFTU has been trying to beef up its influence in the fast-growing private and foreign-controlled sector as its membership has shrunk dramatically in tandem with the contraction of the once dominant state-owned sector. This process was especially rapid in the late 1990s. At its congress in 2000, the then ACFTU chairperson, Wei Jianxing, reported that branches ”have collapsed and their members [have been] washed away”.
For the ACFTU and the ruling ’communist’ party, this poses a vital issue of control over a large, unorganised and increasingly disatisfied workforce. In a report released last week, the ACFTU claimed it has now set up union branches at 60 percent of China’s foreign-owned companies.
”Sound labour-management relations in foreign companies will attract more foreign investment,” a union spokesperson said, in presenting the report. [China Daily, 16 May 2007].
The ACFTU’s ’corporatist’ doctrine – ensuring that management are integrated into union structures at the very top – has generally won over even sceptical foreign capitalist conglomerates such as Wal-Mart, which agreed to ACFTU representation at its China outlets in 2005 in what was seen as a ’landmark’ decision for the union’s turn towards the non-state sector. At many Chinese enterprises the chair of the ACFTU branch is appointed by management, usually this role is held by the personnel manager. The ACFTU sees its role as preventing conflicts and above all any steps by workers to organise themselves independently of the state. Nowadays, the ACFTU like every other section of the state apparatus, echoes president Hu Jintao’s confucian mantra about ”building a harmonious society”. This is meant to signify a rejection of struggle – something associated with the Mao era in China’s history and definitely not desirable in today’s environment.
What about Chinese capitalists?
China’s ”McScandal” case shows that foreign capitalists, rather than a force for improving workers’ rights and conditions, are among the worst abusers. These companies hypocritically sign ’codes of ethics’ in an attempt to disarm consumer activism and growing criticism in their main markets, only to continue a policy of brutal exploitation in China and other low-wage economies.
But this episode also exposes the hypocrisy of China’s state-run media, tilting at convenient ’foreign’ targets, as if the practises of McDonald’s and KFC were exceptional. This is of course not the case. The conditions ’exposed’ at US-owned fast-food outlets are standard in China. Even relatively privileged white-collar workers face an increasing workload and declining real living standards. The Beijing Morning Post revealed that 70 percent of China’s white-collar workers put in an average of more than 10 hours a day and are denied holidays. China Daily (9 May 2007) noted that, ”the number of professionals complaining of overwork and lack of sleep has soared” in the last three years. It is also significant that university students, previously a relatively privileged layer, are forced to sweat under such exploitive conditions, not far removed from those of the migrant workers who occupy the bottom rung of China’s new class order. This, and the increasing difficulty for graduates to get well-paid jobs, is radicalising many of these youth and opening their eyes to the realities of the ’market system’.
These conditions are preparing a torrent of demands for genuine trade unions in China, which are of course illegal today. Manoeuvres by officialdom, like the present efforts by ACFTU to ’organise’ in private and foreign-owned companies, will not succeed in cutting across this process. On the contrary, the pro-management line of the ACFTU is further exposing this organisation among layers of workers and youth that had no direct experience of its role in the past. Many young workers are scathing that the only change when ACFTU sets up a branch is that more money is docked from their salary – for union membership!
China Worker calls for:
A national minimum wage of at least 1,500 yuan!
Nationalisation without compensation of all companies – foreign or domestic – that violate the labour code, on working hours and levels of overtime, wages, child labour, and holiday entitlement!
Genuine fighting and democratic trade unions, and elected workplace committees!
Solidarity from the international labour movement – ”an injury to one is an injury to all!” Chinese workers should not be left to struggle for democratic and trade union rights alone, they need material and political support from trade unionists in other countries, in the best traditions of the international trade union movement!
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BTW, I worked at a McDonalds here IN CANADA, I know full well how the employer cheats you out of benefits and health premiums - 90% of employees at my former busiest store in the city are part-time. Only the "senior" managers can get any benefits whatsoever. If you work full-time nightshifts, you dont get any benefits.
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Guangdong Province Raises Minimum Wage Level
http://www.chinalaborwatch.org/en/w...rticle_id=50226
As part of the recent propaganda, the wages have been "slightly" raised in China, but how does that reflect on worker's well-being???
The Guangdong provincial government announced this late November its decision to raise the minimum wage level for all workers and staff members within the province. The new minimum wage standard, with an average increase of 8.61% , was implemented in December 1, 2004.
It is reported that this is the sixth time for the Guangdong province to raise the wage level since the beginning of the minimum wage standard measure back in 1994.
The new minimum wage standard is divided into the following categories: the first category is 684 Yuan/month, the second category - 574 Yuan/month, the third category - 494 Yuan/month, the fourth category - 446 Yuan/month, the fifth category - 410 Yuan/month, the sixth category -377 Yuan/month, and the seventh category - 352 Yuan/month. Each region within the province can choose its own minimum wage standard, which should not be lower than the seventh category, based on its specific situation. The different districts within a city can also carry out different wage levels.
New Standard Includes Social Security Fee
The current minimum wage standard was formulated on the basis of “Regulations on Enterprises Minimum Wage”, enacted by the Ministry of Labor, and the local government’s “Regulations on Enterprises Minimum Wage in Guangdong Province”. It does not include workers’ social security fee.
The new minimum wage standard includes workers’ minimum social security fee, which used to be paid separately by employers to workers who in turn pay the relevant government agencies. This new measure prevents employers from referring to all kinds of excuses and from not to paying workers’ social security fee, thus this measure can, to some extend, protect workers’ rights.
Actual Increase Rate is Low
On the other hand, because the new minimum wage standard includes workers’ social security fee, the actual increase rate is not high at all.
Take Guangzhou, the provincial capital of Guangdong province, for example.
Under the new standard Guangzhou’s minimum wage level is increased from 510 Yuan per month to 684 Yuan with an increase rate of 34%. However, after deducting 155 Yuan as the minimum social security fee, the actual wage increase is only 19 Yuan, indicating an increase rate of only 3.73%.
“I work 8 hours a day and receive 800 Yuan per month. Little will be left after paying 82 Yuan for gas and more than 300 Yuan for water, electricity, rent, and phone bills. For a mother who has to raise a child, even 800 is not enough”, says Liu Yongli, a woman from Hunan province currently working as a street cleaning worker at Guangta Street, Yuexiu District. (Source: Information Daily).
Guangdong is one of the most economically developed provinces in China.
Since the 1970s when China launched the economic reforms, Guangdong province has been developing many industrial sectors, such as export, foreign investment, where the province is now leading, per capita income.
However, workers’ wages in general, with migrant workers’ wages in particular, have not witnessed any significant increase since the 1980s. Many private employers do not even implement the minimum wage standard at all, and never pay for their employees’ medical insurance and social security. Workers’ already low wages are not enough for them to make a normal living, which is made even worse due to the continuingly increasing prices.
China Labor Watch strongly urges the government to formulate a monitoring mechanism and a system of rewards and penalties to fully carry out the minimum wage standard. If employers offer a wage that is lower than the minimum wage level or, as very often, delay the payment, government departments in charge should take effective measures to make them comply with the regulations, or even fine them if necessary.
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