ECONOMY: China’s Growth Bypassing Workers

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Aaron Glantz

HONG KONG, Dec 21 2005 (IPS) - China’s government kept a low profile at last week’s WTO meetings although they were held in its own backyard, the “special administrative region” of Hong Kong. Its negotiators held no media briefings during or after negotiations and of the 1,100 NGOs and business groups accredited for the event, only five were from China.

But that does not mean the world’s most populous country is not having a huge impact on the global economy nor itself escaping the biting winds of globalisation.

Fay Yee Chen, 40, flew more than 18 hours to get to Hong Kong. The unemployed garment worker was one of a handful of California immigrants sponsored by San Francisco’s Chinese Progressive Association to attend the World Trade Organisation meeting.

“Globalisation and global trade have really impacted the economy in San Francisco, where there are a lot of garment and electronics factories that have closed down and moved to other countries,” she says, adding that the number of garment industry jobs in the city fell from 24,000 when she immigrated in 1998 to less than 2,000 today.

“It’s made it really difficult for new immigrants who come to the U.S. to find work,” Fay says. “A lot are unemployed. So life for low wage workers in San Francisco is getting harder and harder.”

Fay first went to the United States to be near her family, which had immigrated earlier. She almost immediately got a job as a seamstress. When that factory closed a year later, she got a job in an electronics assembly plant. But then that plant closed too.

“I live in one of the small residential hotels,” she says. “For a year now, I’ve relied completely on my unemployment (payments). My mother and sister are also garment industry workers who have been victims of globalisation.”

Since U.S. President George W Bush came to power in 2001, more than 350,000 U.S. garment workers have lost their jobs and another 400,000 jobs are likely to disappear by the end of the decade.

Alex Tom of the Chinese Progressive Alliance says that in San Francisco a few of the laid-off workers have been lucky enough to land union jobs as janitors in hotels, but most remain on the dole.

“A lot of folks are trying job retraining,” he says, “butà getting a job in this new economy is very unrealistic.”

Tom says globalisation has lead local civic leaders to push for high paying jobs, which have become more plentiful in California as the global economy grows. But, he adds, such policies do not help many immigrant workers: “Biotech, clean-tech, all high wage jobs are good, but if you only create jobs that aren’t for the blue collar workers they’re not going to get the jobs.”

Tom says most of the solutions to this problem are local. For example, he is trying to pressure San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors to pass a resolution giving companies with factories in the city preferential treatment in getting government contracts.

The Chinese Progressive Alliance also held multiple demonstrations outside outlets of the Gap, a San Francisco-based retailer, in an effort to embarrass the image-conscious company into keeping some of its production jobs in the city.

Ironically, many of the blue-collar jobs leaving San Francisco are heading for China, the country Fay Yee Chen and many other laid -off garment workers are from.

In fact, the worldwide lifting of garment industry tariffs in December 2004 is expected to leave China with 50 percent of the world textile market. Already in 2002, it had surpassed Mexico as the largest supplier of foreign-made apparel to the United States. And in the first six months of this year alone, China’s textile shipments to the U.S. soared 61 percent over the same period last year, according to Washington.

But Chen says that when she calls her family in Canton, they tell her life is not getting better.

“One of the observations that my family has is that in China the people who are rich have gotten richer,” she says, “and people who are 40 years old and beyond, it’s really hard for them to find jobs in the new China.”

“My brother and my brother’s wife are both over 40. He used to work in a hotel but when the hotel closed, he wasn’t able to find another job.” Chen says her brother’s family now subsists on his wife’s work as a nanny.

According to a report by San Francisco-based NGO the International Forum on Globalisation, the top 10 percent of Chinese people now earn 45 percent of the country’s national income, while the bottom 10 percent earn just 1.4 percent. The report also notes that from 1996 to 2003, China lost 15 million manufacturing jobs, as it dismantled its national network of government-owned factories.

“At state-owned enterprises, workers enjoyed lifetime employment, health care, education and other social benefits,” the report reads. “Today, under the mantra of market competition, Chinese workers now have lower wages in terms of purchasing power, fewer benefits, longer work hours, increasing work related injuries and other associated problems.”

According to the report, by the end of the Maoist era in 1978 almost the entire urban population had public health care and 85 percent of the rural people were covered by some kind of collective care. Now only 50 percent of urbanites and a few rural residents have health care.

Such problems were obvious to a small delegation of workers who got permission to travel from Mainland China to Hong Kong for the WTO meeting.

Yang is a 40-year-old jewellery worker who suffers from an acute form of the rare lung disease sarcoidosis.

In 1992, he left his wife and two children to take a factory job in Shunchen. “I was in the cutting department and there was a lot of gem-stone dust and there was no protection mechanism at all, no ventilation. The workplace was very small and there were a lot of workers and the dust was very heavyàThat’s how I got sarcoidosis.”

When other workers started to get sick too, the local Chinese factory owner closed shop. Less than a year later, he opened again in a new city with a new set of workers. Then those workers also got sick, so he closed that plant. In 2004, the owner opened a third export factory with a third group of workers in a third city, which still operates today.

“There’s a big wealth gap in China now,” Yang says. “The rich are very rich and the poor are very pooràFor example, in my family, I’m the only son and now I’ve got the disease so I can’t work and I can’t support my parents.”

Yang says his situation would improve if China had better workplace health and safety standards and a compensation system that gave more money to those injured on the job. It is precisely the lack of such protections, however, that has export companies moving their production to China in this global economy.