China's workers gain power in labour shortfall

BEIJING - Xiao Li's eyes are sparkling but she says she hasn't been able to sleep for the past two nights.

This week, the 20-year-old tearfully farewelled friends and family in her hometown in a mountainous part of Sichuan province and boarded a bus bound for the Big Smoke. The hardest part was leaving her ailing grandmother.

"I won't be able to afford to visit home for at least a year. She'll have passed away by then, I'm sure, so we had to say our goodbyes."

Eighteen bone-rattling hours later, she arrived in the manic city of Shenzhen, across the border from Hong Kong, where she has dreams of finding fame and fortune.

In reality, she will be a foot soldier in China's 100-million-strong army of migrant workers, toiling on a factory floor for up to 12 hours a day, six days a week and earning less than 1000 yuan ($180) a month for the privilege.

But to her, that's a sizeable sum. She says if she's thrifty she'll be able to send home 60 per cent of it - and that will make her the undisputed empress of her extended family.

With two cousins who can't afford to go to school and a grandmother on expensive medication, it's vital she gets earning straightaway.

She has plenty of job options. From Hong Kong, you can drive north through the Pearl River delta region for hours passing an endless stream of factories pumping out clothes, footwear, domestic appliances, computers, mobile phones, cars, plastics goods, cigarette lighters, sex toys and anything else you care to mention.

Xiao Li has heard Foxconn, a huge Taiwanese electronics company, is hiring and that's where she's going to look first. Her motives are not purely monetary. More than 100,000 people work on its factory campus here "so I can surely find a boyfriend", she says with a shy smile. She's under some pressure on that front because if she doesn't hook up with a potential husband soon, her aunt will produce someone, a thought that fills her with dread.

Besides, the factory has a good reputation as an employer. The dormitories are simple but clean and the working conditions above average.

Factories like this one are fuelling China's meteoric growth and have earned it the moniker of "factory of the world", producing more than half of all finished goods.

This is where to look to see globalisation at work. Xiao Li's cousin works in Shanghai for another Taiwanese company called Inventec, which makes Apple's iPods, among many other products.

California plays a cameo role in the production. The iconic music player is designed in Silicon Valley and the chip is made in Hyderabad, India. All the other work is done in Shanghai and the finished iPods are shipped all over the world - more than 10 million to date.

To meet the insatiable international demand for low-priced, reasonable-quality products, China's rice paddies and corn fields have been eaten up by the industrial sprawl. The country's transformation has been radical and rapid.

Just over 25 years ago, former paramount leader Deng Xiaoping travelled south and, from the plains of Shenzhen, eyed glitzy, prosperous Hong Kong with envy. Mainland China was on its knees - crippled by isolationist policies and the madness of Mao. He needed a Plan B. His "to get rich is glorious" decree turned the nation's communist ideology on its head and overnight morphed Marxist-Leninist ideologues into hard-nosed capitalists.

Hong Kong and Taiwanese capital, in particular, poured in and tens of thousands of factories sprouted up.

It was the perfect combination: Plenty of foreign capital and business acumen, an enormous pool of cheap labour, ready access to deep-sea ports, and a desperate Government eager to encourage investment.

The belated industrial revolution here has devastated the environment. Forests of smokestacks belch acrid fumes into the atmosphere creating a permanent haze and, say some reports, 95 per cent of fish that once swam and spawned in the nation's rivers have gone belly up.

Environmentalists say six of the 10 most polluted cities in the world are in China.

But the process has pulled tens of millions of Chinese out of abject poverty, including Wu Jianli, a 33-year-old farmer from Jiangxi province.

His childhood memories are dominated by hunger pangs and neighbours dying of malnutrition. But now, he always has enough to feed himself and his family.

He earns 700 yuan a month packing shirts in a factory in the southern city of Guangzhou and preparing them for export to New Zealand, Australia, Europe and the United States.

Until a year or two ago, factories like this would have migrants begging for work. But now the unimaginable is happening: China's supposedly bottomless pool of extremely cheap labour is starting to run dry.

Wu says he will leave the factory soon and return to his farm and his wife and 9-year-old son. "I've had enough of this tiring work. I only get to see my family for one week a year ... and I'm fed up living in a dormitory [with 17 other men]."

He left the small plot of land he leases from the Government because he could not eke out a living on it, but now crop prices have risen and taxes have fallen, so it is viable again.

Another important factor is that workers these days have access to mobile phones and the internet, so they are armed with information like never before.

In southern Guangdong province alone, factory operators estimate there is a shortage of about two million migrant labourers, about 10 per cent of the work force.

In a country synonymous with sweatshops, the dearth of labour has finally given the migrants clout.

In recent years, some of the big factories, particularly those that work under contract for the major brand names, have improved the working conditions. But safety standards in many plants still leave an awful lot to be desired.

Government figures show there are more than 300,000 "serious" industrial accidents a year and more than 11,000 workers died in accidents in Chinese factories and construction sites last year.

In the southern Pearl River Delta region alone, an average of 30,000 workers lose their fingers each year.

The small city of Yongkang in Zhejiang province is nicknamed "finger-cutting city" because more than 1000 workers in the city's tool factories lose fingers or hands each year.

Now many workers have finally found themselves in a position of power and are able to negotiate for better pay and conditions.

"The factory bosses need us now and they know it," Wu said. "And if the workers do not get the deal they want, and the conditions they want, they will just walk out the door."