At first glance, the story line seems almost familiar. He left his hometown in Hunan just after high school, at the same time as other young people in his town.
He arrived in a new city, lived in dorms and spent four years on a large campus with thousands of others dressed in matching blue shirts.
But instead of leaving home to attend college, the 24-year-old man spent most of his time at the Supercap factories in Zhongshan, a city in southern China named after Dr. Sun Yat-Sen, who is often called the father of modern China.
When describing life at the factory, he repeats the phrase “zai qiang li,” or “within the walls.”
The Supercap factory grounds are surrounded by thick stone walls and monitored by guards scanning the faces of everyone who enters and exits. From the sidewalk out front, it is impossible to see into the compound because of a few feet of foliage planted around the walls.
It cost the worker 35 yuan ““ a little more than $5 ““ to complete a health check before he could start working.
He worked at a machine that presses pieces of cloth together to make them sturdier. Most often, the hats and visors were for huge orders from Adidas, Nike and Reebok.
But when shown a BruinCard, he recognizes that logo, too. He said the order for UCLA caps was much smaller, but he remembers working on them.
For a while, he lived in the crowded dorms on the Supercap grounds, sharing a room with seven others.
The management holds monthly meetings to hear workers’ complaints, and he attended several years ago to complain about bedbugs in the dorms.
Factory owners began spraying the rooms weekly, but replacing the workers’ thin mattresses would be too expensive, so the pests have never been completely eradicated.
“Factories are just thinking about themselves,” he said. “Right now business isn’t easy to do.”
He ate his meals on the compound ““ 100 yuan was deducted from his salary every month to cover the cost of food.
Even during periods of high capacity when workers can earn bonuses for extra hours, his monthly wages never topped 1,500 yuan, about $220.
Within the walls, he said, there are large rooms where karaoke is held nightly and dances are arranged on the weekends. There are also Internet cafes with slow connections.
“It costs 3 (yuan) for an hour, and it takes a minute for a page to load,” he said.
His sister also works in the Supercap factories, doing quality control checks.
At Supercap, she works and collects her salary under an assumed name, her brother said.
She wanted to enter the factory at age 17 two years ago, so she borrowed documents from an 18-year-old friend already working in a different factory.
In China, regulations allow 16-year-olds to work, but for fewer hours and with more safety restrictions.
Once, his sister called him crying after a supervisor scolded her.
“If you didn’t get hit, then it’s OK,” he told her.
He left Supercap about a month ago and has been looking for work since.
“It’s hard to find work now; it feels like they’re all looking for girls,” he said. He thinks management finds them easier to control than men.
Before Supercap, he had worked in other factories for a few months at a time.
“Before I go (into any factory), I think it’s going to be really good, but once I get in, I don’t want to be there.”
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Workers’ rights organizations face numerous obstacles when trying to organize or educate workers, sometimes facing difficulty even winning over the very people they hope to help.
Tony Fung works in Hong Kong for the Worker Rights Consortium, an independent labor rights monitoring organization.
As the field director for China, Fung said he encounters problems specific to the country’s traditions and history that make the situation different from those in other places such as Latin America, where strikes and unions are more common.
Workers here have a sense that past organizing efforts have not worked, he said.
“They see too many failures,” Fung said. “They know if you take the lead, you pay the price.”
At the governmental level, too, changes are slow. Fung said that though legislation exists to protect workers, the difficulty of enforcing fair labor conditions makes those laws effectively impotent.
Fung therefore sees the challenge of organizing workers in terms of the individual, personal level.
Economic opportunities are scarce in China’s rural villages, and a lack of available capital drives migration toward industrial centers, where teenagers and 20-somethings can easily find work in factories eager for young, cheap labor.
Fung described the diversity of migrant workers and their shifting conceptions of identity; the workers are from agricultural backgrounds, he said, but would not know how to farm if they went home.
“Their worker status for them may not be the same for us and how we see them,” Fung said.
“How do we go about telling them they have rights? I think about how to get workers to start that kind of thinking and start asking those kinds of questions.”
But at the same time, Fung said, labor activists cannot force a worker to do something: “We don’t have the role to tell them what to do.”
Right now, Fung is also concerned with the effects of the financial crisis, which have revealed what he called “questionable investment methods by Hong Kong bosses.”
The bosses are experiencing restricted cash flow, and enterprises have been collapsing since the beginning of October, he said, leaving workers scrambling for new jobs.
Though the Worker Rights Consortium focuses largely on collegiate apparel, Fung’s focus is broader.
“Colleges are just part of the story. If we really focus all of our energies on this … we’d become an auditing firm in a way,” he said, and he said he thinks there is more meaningful work left to be done.
“A code of conduct is a good thing when the workers want to do something,” he said. “But we should not depend on the code of conduct itself.”
Above all, Fung said, it is important to remain realistic when organizing
Chinese workers.
“It’s too demanding to ask the young people to get out of the capitalist reality of the world.”
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It has been months since she last saw her 10-year-old daughter.
The 30-something woman from Sichuan works on an assembly line at a factory in Dongguan that produces sewing machines.
Getting home would mean riding a train for more than 40 hours, and she cannot take time off work to make that trip.
“I want to go home to celebrate the New Year, but I can’t afford to,” she said.
In her 20s, she left Sichuan, hoping to be able to make money. The longest she has stayed in any factory is a year.
She left one shoe factory because the dorm conditions were unbearable.
There were no trash cans, so workers threw garbage into the hallways, and complaints to the
factory owners produced no changes.
Generally, she works for about six months, then decides to go home because she misses her daughter.
She stays in Sichuan for a few months, where her husband’s parents plant corn and help raise her daughter, but leaves again to find work and get back to city life.
“There’s nothing to do at home, so it’s more fun to be in the city.”
In the factory she works at now, she earns 1,200 yuan a month, just more than $175. She said she can get by on her salary, but wishes factories paid better.
“Even if it’s enough, it really isn’t,” she said about her wages.
She has also worked in factories that produce shoes and apparel.
None of the work was particularly difficult to learn, she said, since she was always part of an assembly line, although she did not like having to sew on zippers.
“It has to look good, and it’s hard, so sometimes you have to start over.”
At the factory she works in now, she clocks in a 7 a.m. every day and leaves work at 6:30 p.m.
If the workers need to jia ban, or add hours, they have another two hours of work in the evening.
If she could change anything about her work, she said, it would be not having to arrive 30 minutes before she clocks in.
The workers are required to attend a morning meeting, then wait in line to swipe their timecards before their shifts begin.
Sometimes when workers swipe their cards to clock in and out, the machines do not work, so the workers end up not getting paid for extra hours worked, she said.
One of her least favorite part of the factories is eating in the cafeterias.
“The food is terrible,” she said, but she cannot afford to eat anywhere else.
Sometimes supervisors scold employees for not working fast enough, or just for the sake of yelling, she said.
“When they yell, I just want to go back home.”
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She worked in factories for two years, mostly working on assembly lines that make shoes.
At first, when she had problems with the factory owners or supervisors, she would just find a new job in another factory. For young women, it is easy to move from one to the other, she said.
After a while, she realized that switching factories was not an effective way to seek improved conditions. She cooperated with China Labor Watch, an organization that seeks to contribute to the international discourse on labor rights and factory conditions.
Now in her early 30s, the woman from Sichuan works with the people who first helped her, entering factories under the guise of looking for work, so that she can take photographs and videos of otherwise cloistered environments.
She calls herself Ms. Li when speaking with media, to protect her anonymity and the work she does.
“We hear a lot of rumors,” she said, “but we don’t publish anything that we can’t confirm. Sometimes it’s hard to get information.”
Li tries to stay in contact with former co-workers, some of whom are willing to share stories about what they have witnessed in factories.
In late October, Li conducted a series of visits in Zhongshan and Dongguan, meeting with factory workers outside of the compounds and in the dorms.
She spoke with some male workers who she thought looked underage. They claimed to be 16, she said, but when she invented a 15-year-old brother and asked whether he would be able to get work, they responded that she should tell him to come, that he would be able to get in to the factories.
Li uses her cell phone to record the interviews she conducts. She also uses her phone to discreetly record what she sees when she gains entrance into factories.
To describe factories, Li uses the proverb “qi ruan, pa ying” ““ “bully what is soft, fear what is hard”; she sees her work at China Labor Watch as a way she can help protect others who, like her, did not know their rights.
The organization taught her to type two years ago. With the skills she’s learned, she hopes to continue fighting for workers’ rights.
At first, her husband didn’t understand her job, she said. He was worried that she would get into trouble and make their lives difficult.
“His attitude has changed now. He understands how important it is,” she said.
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“I have no wen hua. I can only rely on my hands to make money.”
The 42-year-old man from Sichuan has spent most of his life making furniture, a skill he learned as an apprentice in his 20s. His own parents were peasants who worked in rice paddies, but his children, he hopes, will have more choices available to them.
He left his twin son and daughter with his wife almost eight years ago so he could find work in Shenzhen.
“Factories are easier to get into here,” he said. Ah Xiang, as he asks to be called, worked for years building furniture in a factory. He said he doesn’t think he could learn a new trade very easily anymore, and he likes the work he does ““ sort of.
Though the hours were long and he faced problems with the factory’s owners ““ problems that pushed him to seek the legal help of the labor organization Worker Empowerment ““ he is eager to find another factory job.
He has been searching for work for almost two months now and has also spent time distributing educational materials to other workers.
Ah Xiang said he is only able to go home every two years or so, since the train ride is long and it is hard to take vacations from work.
“Of course I miss them, but there’s no other way,” he said about his children. He wants them to go to a good school and have a chance to study; he needs to be able to work so that he can support them.
Every time he calls his children, who are now 17, he tells them to study hard.
His daughter is a better student and more interested in her schoolwork. His son is interested in learning to style hair, he said, while shrugging.
“If they get good grades, they can get whatever job they want.”
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The Worker Empowerment office in the Longgang District of Shenzhen is unassuming, just a storefront with a few tables and walls lined with bookshelves. A smaller room in back has just enough space for a coffee table and a few places to sit, and an even smaller closet of a bathroom.
On the outside of the office, yellow Chinese characters read “tian xia da gong shi yi jia” ““ “all workers under the sky are one family.”
Worker Empowerment, a labor organization based in Hong Kong, seeks to educate workers in mainland China about their rights.
Several of its centers in industrial areas perform outreach to migrant workers and organize cultural activities to develop a sense of community among workers.
Ivy, who is in her 20s, works as a coordinator out of the Longgang offices. After graduating from college in 2006, she was open to any job. But once she began meeting with workers, she realized how much she could help others through the organization.
“Every day, there is an opportunity to help,” she said.
Ivy said that working in factories is not necessarily a bad path for young people to take.
“The problem,” she said, “is when factory owners think workers ought to be bullied.”
Ivy does some publicity work and distributes materials. People also call or visit the small office, and factory workers who have visited the center also hand out information to others.
“I want to get them to be able to solve their own problems,” Ivy said about her work. The organization distributes materials informing workers of their rights and legal steps they can take when wages are withheld. Ivy also helps workers with paperwork and obtaining necessary documents.
Generally, Ivy said, the organization is able to do its work in the community with little trouble. But last October, the Worker Empowerment offices in another part of Shenzhen were vandalized. A glass door was shattered and a table was broken. No one ever claimed responsibility for the break-in.
In November 2007, thugs attacked a representative for the Shenzhen Dagongzhe Migrant Worker Centre, a labor rights organization that works closely with Worker Empowerment.
Huang Qingnan was hospitalized with knife wounds and a broken left leg. He spent months in physical therapy.
“He still can’t walk properly,” Ivy said, bringing out a Worker Empowerment newsletter with an update on the case.
At the time, Ivy was scared, but she decided to stay with her co-workers as they searched for a new office. She wanted to continue helping workers, even as other attacks on labor organizers and acts of vandalism were occurring.
“It was a time when we needed everyone, and everyone stayed,” she said. Workers who heard of the incident also offered to help, and many signed a petition to the government to ensure the case would go to trial.
Eventually, police traced the attack to a landowner who was upset that factories on land he owned were shutting down. The trial has yet to take place.
Ivy sees herself continuing to work on behalf of migrant workers. She hopes that eventually, workers will be able to live well, to be able to make enough money to support their families, to do work that is fulfilling.
“It’s not bad working in a factory ““ they’re just not adhering to the conditions,” she said. “That’s the government’s job: to find a way to support factories following the rules and get rid of the others.”
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