By Andreas Lorenz and Wieland Wagner
Advertising campaign: Global brands fear for their reputations.
Pingshan is best known for its "people's hospital." Or to put it more precisely: the hospital's fourth floor with its 40- bed ward devoted to hand surgery. Workers wait in the corridor, their hands swathed in bandages. Six specialists work here, mending the mutilated fingers of some 70 people every month. Most of the accidents are caused by antiquated machinery, particularly in the infamous plants run by entrepreneurs from Hong Kong and Taiwan.
Zhang Hua, the hospital's friendly associate director, is proud of his skilled surgeons. Nonetheless, he is pressuring the companies to focus more on accident prevention by providing better jobsite protection. By the time the people come to him, it is generally too late -- and too expensive. The doctor raises his index finger and makes a cutting motion in the air: It costs about 10,000 yuan (960), to sew a finger back on and about 6,000 yuan to get a mangled hand back into some sort of working order.
The next stop along the highway is Huizhou. It is another of these new artificial towns near Shenzhen that seem to consist of nothing but factories and housing for their workers. Here, 65 employees are currently suing a major battery manufacturer from Hong Kong. Wei Xuexiu, 34, and some of her former colleagues are keen to talk about the years of torment they experienced on the job. But it is difficult to find a secluded spot. In a park, a forewoman approaches to eavesdrop. The workers are afraid of the local police.
They labored for up to 10 years in the nearby factory, which they call the "powder house." There they often endured unbearable heat as they produced the small plates used in batteries. The vapors of brown cadmium oxide were frequently so thick that the workers could hardly see. Their masks, made of thin paper, afforded little protection. The women say that the poisonous powder gradually infiltrated their bodies. At first they thought they had come down with colds. Their noses ran constantly and their throats itched. Later more troubling symptoms appeared: shortness of breath, nausea, muscle ache and dermatitis.
When the factory finally sent its workers to a local clinic for tests, it was already too late. Some of the workers had elevated levels of cadmium in their urine. Although the doctors recommended further testing, the company -- with the aid of the police -- forced the workers to leave. "They packed our toothbrushes and drove us back to the factory," one of the women says.
It took a strike to secure additional tests. Most of the victims have since quit and are demanding compensation to cover treatment that could at least partly restore their health. "And we want to tell the world about our plight," adds Ze Nanxiong, the only man in the group.
A new self-confidence
Tell the world? For Chinese workers, such talk is tantamount to mutiny. Yet the exploited masses are increasingly standing up to their profit-hungry bosses, above all in the province of Guangdong, with its sweatshops of Shenzhen and Dongguan. Many factory gates sport red help-wanted signs. Some studies show that at least 100,000 low-wage workers are needed in the export region. But rather than ruining their youth, many prefer to head for Shanghai, where the minimum wage is up to 100 yuan higher and working conditions are not quite as abominable.
Graphic: Employment in China
But strikes are prohibited in the realm of the communist capitalists. In 2003, for instance, workers Yao Fuxin and Xiao Yunliang were tried on charges of "subversion." The verdict: prison terms of seven and four years for allegedly organizing illegal "meetings, demonstrations and protests" in the northern Chinese province of Liaoning. Other activists are regularly convicted on charges of "disrupting the social order" and sentenced to "reeducation through work."
However, keeping the widespread exploitation under wraps is proving a problem. Local protests and spectacular suicide attempts by workers forced Prime Minister Wen Jiabao to intervene late last year. The government-controlled press reported that, in order to forestall widening social unrest, migrant workers throughout the country were to be paid outstanding wages totaling about 11.5 billion yuan.
Time for action from the government
A series of ghastly accidents in China 's coal mines has also put increased pressure on Beijing to act. Criminal negligence, encouraged by the overheated Chinese economy's voracious appetite for energy, is becoming increasingly harder to cover up: 2,672 men died in the first six months of this year alone in mining accidents, according to a report by Li Yizhong, Minister for Industrial Safety -- 85 more than in the same period last year.
But how can the Beijing government stop local officials from protecting the mine operators as long as it bans independent controls like free labor unions? Minister Yizhong politely thanked SPIEGEL for a question to this effect, but did not deign to respond. Li did concede, however, that not even the toothless governmental unions are active in many of the private or semi-state-owned mines, and that "the miners' legal interests are not secured."
Independent labor unions? The communist rulers stubbornly cling to the motto of the ci-devant Great Chairman Mao Zedong: that China's workers and peasants already rule the country. Why then, the official line goes, do the workers need anyone to represent their interests? After all, they already have the Pan-China Federation of Unions.
On Beijing's Chang'an Boulevard -- the Boulevard of Eternal Peace -- the Federation is currently building a new 30-story headquarters. But many of its 134 million members are unaware they belong to the organization. Their dues are deducted automatically from their paychecks. And in many companies, the powerful union officials serve as personnel directors -- and simultaneously represent the interests of management.
All the same, China is coming under renewed pressure to relieve the hardships endured by migrant workers -- at least cosmetically. Ironically, the pressure is being applied by the very parties that make the biggest profits from Asia's sweatshops. Western department store chains such as Wal-Mart and KarstadtQuelle have realized that winning a price war no longer guarantees winning over the customer. For more and more consumers are starting to query the working conditions under which the bargains are being produced.
As a result, KarstadtQuelle has joined an association of other European companies and introduced regular audits at its 100 main suppliers. Stock is taken of issues such as adequate pay and occupational health hazards. In the initial evaluation alone, some 80 percent of the suppliers were rated "critical," reports Maren Böhm, director of corporate policy at KarstadtQuelle. Böhm avers that concrete timelines are being prescribed for companies to improve questionable practices. "We are prepared to drop suppliers who refuse to cooperate," she says.
The audits, however, are only conducted every three to four years. And KarstadtQuelle too assumes that its Chinese business partners will monitor their own sub-suppliers -- which run into the thousands.
The reality is often radically different, particularly in the garment industry. Many producers set little or no store in "social standards." Companies regularly keep two sets of books, as one manager of a mill near Shenzhen noted in reference to the irksome visits from auditors working for western customers. "Just about everybody in our business does it this way," she says.
Garment manufacturers use questionnaires to drill their workers on the possible trick questions that may be posed by the auditors. Workers who play this cheating game receive a 100 yuan bonus -- whereas candid answers are likely to cost them their jobs. The law bans young people under 16 from working. "But what are we supposed to do?" the manager asks. "It's the western companies that ram tight delivery schedules down our throats."
From sweatshop to model factory
A few heartening exceptions stand out. Among them is Yue Yuen, the world's largest shoe factory based in Dongguan. The plant's 70,000-strong workforce turns out products for such global brands as Adidas, Nike and Reebok. Just a few years ago, the Taiwanese company had been denounced as a sweatshop.
Jerry Lin is associate director at Yue Yuen. He manages a factory complex in which 35,000 Chinese produce brandname athletic shoes exclusively for Adidas. Lin well remembers Yue Yuen's notorious past. Back then, the Taiwanese manager says, things were much more primitive. "Most of our workers came straight from the farms. We even had to teach them how to use the toilet."
Fifteen years of reform have since passed in China, and when Lin takes visitors on a tour of his factory, he wears a broad smile. The openness at Yue Yuen is largely the result of the pressure applied by Adidas: The global player -- based in Herzogenaurach, Germany -- does not want its reputation sullied by reports on wage slavery.
The workers at Yue Yuen average upwards of 1,000 yuan a month, more than elsewhere. On the other hand, no one here is working just for the fun of it, either. The job is mind-numbing. In the halls the workers cut, stitch and punch parts for sports shoes, performing the same movements over and over again, 53 hours a week -- or even 60 during peak periods.
They are still better off than they used to be. Lin says he intends to work closely with Adidas experts on a plan to cut the average working week to 48 hours. Sundays are off as a general rule, he says.
Everywhere you look in Yue Yuen, placards announce the day's production targets. One team is slated to turn out 70 pairs of shoes on this particular day. "Not a single pair more than the target," stresses Horst Stapf, Adidas' permanent representative in China, "and not a single pair less, either." This policy is not due to consideration for the workers, but to Adidas' lean production schedules designed to cut superfluous warehousing costs.
Around 11:30 a.m., people pour into the streets between the factory buildings in Yue Yuen. The town, which boasts its own fire department, hospital, movie theater and night school, is having lunch. Each of the plants spews out 5,000 workers who head for the company cafeterias. Some 20,000 live in 15 housing complexes; the rest commute.
Conflicts are inevitable, and more than once the managers of Yue Yuen have seen tempers fray in the workforce. Their therapy is prophylactic; workers can air their problems in the so-called complaint room before they mushroom out of control.
Lee Luke, who comes from Taiwan, is officially in charge of human resources at Yue Yuen. But in reality, he is a social worker of sorts. Suicides, brawls, thefts -- he's seen it all. Work is not the issue in many of the clashes, he says. More often it's about personal matters of the heart.
Most of the female workers are young and single. They have left their backward villages for the gold rush fever of the Pearl River delta. The factory walls at Dongguan are plastered with ads from quacks who tout cures for sexually transmitted diseases or offer abortions.
Western management practices, along with a little more human compassion, can improve the lot of Chinese workers in the long run, as Yue Yuen's example illustrates. But for many of the wage slaves, the pressure being applied by western companies on Chinese suppliers is too little and much too late. For people such as Li Weizhong in Shenzhen. The man with the mustache and the pinstriped jacket had the Chinese symbol for "cloud" tattooed on his forearm. "Life is a cloud," Li says with a smile and the melancholy wisdom of a man who has little more to lose.
Li used to work at Lucky Jewellery, a Hong Kong company. There he cut stones -- and filled his lungs with poison. Doctors diagnosed silicosis, a potentially fatal condition also known as "lung dust disease" in China. For years, Li and 46 other victims fought for compensation. Lucky Jewellery initially denied that it even knew the plaintiffs. It then changed locations and its name, and said it was no longer responsible.
In March the company capitulated and agreed to an out-of-court settlement granting each victim 200,000 yuan. But for Li that is not enough; his medication alone costs more than twice that amount. Li has not yet resigned himself to death.
"My doctor," he says, "gives me maybe three more years."
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