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NEWS & LETTERS,
August-September 2002
Workshop Talks by Htun Lin
China’s Liaoyang 5 and U.S. workers
I attended a demonstration on July 10 outside the
Chinese Consulate in San Francisco to support the five unionists arrested in
Liaoyang, China—Yao Fuxin, Pan Qingxiang, Xiao Yunliang, Wang Zhaoming and Gu
Baoshu. They were elected by their fellow workers who were demonstrating by the
tens of thousands protesting massive layoffs, unpaid wages and unfulfilled
promises of unemployment benefits. Instead of negotiating with them, the authorities
charged them with organizing “illegal demonstrations.” Other workers who
tried to prevent their arrests were beaten. This human toll is due to Chinese rulers’ massive
privatization as a requirement of China’s government joining global capital.
The small demonstration in San Francisco should have been much larger,
considering what is at stake for American workers. President Bush dreamed up a new “axis of evil”
between Iran, Iraq and North Korea to pump up his plans for permanent war. There’s
plenty of evil in those countries but no “axis.” One true organic “evil
axis” is between U.S.-led global capital and China’s despotic
state-capitalist rulers who, according to Business Week, have made China into a
“manufacturing superpower.” Global capital is now even fleeing from its
other favorite low-wage locations like Mexico and the Philippines to go to
China, where workers are paid a third as much. The watershed event that sealed this axis was Congress
passing Permanent Normal Trade Relations (PNTR) with China during the Clinton
administration. PNTR lifted all restrictions and high tariffs imposed in
response to China’s continued human rights violations. This paved the way for
China’s entrance into the WTO under the present administration. RACE TO THE BOTTOM This decoupling of human rights from trade was an
affirmation of capital’s right to move where it can practice the most
unfettered despotism and exploitation over workers. This is what put downward
pressure on conditions of life and labor for U.S. workers. Capital here has been
emboldened to force workers off welfare and into low wage sweated labor. This is
what they mean by “free” markets. The success of Wal-Mart comes not only from importing
Chinese goods made by slave wage-labor. It is an equal opportunity exploiter.
Wal-Mart has paid most workers less than $8.50 an hour, but extracted even more
unpaid labor by forcing those workers to work off the clock. Class action suits
against Wal-Mart on behalf of workers charge that Wal-Mart managers literally
lock workers in after they have signed out on their timecard, making them
perform unpaid overtime work. Wal-Mart is a favorite on Wall Street where investors
are learning the hard way that cooked books by CEOs can’t create value. Only
workers can do that. Wall Street’s profit squeeze means workers are being
pushed to the extreme. Capitalist “reformers” now want to institute “honesty”
in the corporate boardrooms. Bush and Congress are now “outraged” at CEOs
who commit fraud to rob from shareholders the surplus (unpaid) labor they robbed
from workers’. While capitalist reformers are now worried that the
financial sky might fall on them, it would take deep digging under the trading
floor to see the foundation of all this exchange-value—production floors all
over the world, where millions of workers toil to create value. BUSINESS ‘RIGHTS’ Ten years ago, Chinese human rights advocate Harry Wu
came to a Wal-Mart convention to urge shareholders to divest themselves from
Chinese-made goods and products sold at Wal-Mart and made by prison labor.
Clinton, flanked by former presidents in May of 2000, told Congress with a
straight face that if they didn’t pass PNTR it would be a “serious
impediment to further democracy, freedom and human rights in China.” Harry Wu, who spent 19 years in a Chinese labor camp,
was outraged. He said “Don’t lie to me...They’re concerned about business
rights, not human rights. That’s fine...but don’t lie to the American
people.” For Wu the truth is in a report calling Chinese workers making
American goods indentured servants who are paid less than subsistence wages,
packed into dormitories with one day off a month. Bush’s praise for China as a partner in the “war on
terror” gives China carte blanche to brutally suppress opposition such as the
Uighurs who have been fighting for genuine autonomy in Xinjiang for half a
century. However, the crux of this “evil axis” between China’s rulers and
U.S.-led global capital is the continuing plunder of the veritable gold mine of
Chinese labor. All the human rights violations threaten our conditions of life
and labor, with more takebacks and attacks on our civil rights. Bush and
Ashcroft have already made significant headway towards that kind of future for
us. |
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