Forum on Factory Protests on NYT

The website of the New York Times has an interesting discussion on the recent problems at Foxconn and Honda in Southern China, and their backgrounds. NYT asked several specialists to give their opinions on what is happening in ‘the factory of the world’. Amongst them Yasheng Huang, professor of economics at MIT and author of the eye-opening book ‘Capitalism with Chinese Charactaristics’, about the role of the state in the Chinese economy.

Some quotes from Huangs comment on China’s labor situation:

The labor income share of Chinese G.D.P. declined from 57 percent in 1983 to only 37 percent in 2005. (…) This is to say that hundreds of millions of Chinese workers have lost relative to government and corporations, which, in terms of head counts, represent a tiny fraction of China’s massive population.

Some have argued that the U.S. firms need not worry because the labor component of their production costs is small. This is simply not true. U.S. firms themselves may not have a high labor component in their cost structure but their suppliers — and their suppliers — do. American firms, which sit at the top of the food chain, depend heavily on the labor-intensive operations down below.

Another specialist writing on the NYT forum is Leslie Chang, author of the famous book ‘Factory Girls‘, about workers in a factory in Donguan, Guangdong province. Some of her comments:

The new generation came of age when migration was already an accepted path to a better life. Younger and better educated than their predecessors, they are motivated less by the poverty of the countryside than by the opportunity of the city.

Although this generation of migrants is more demanding, that does not necessarily translate into more organized protests. Chinese workers are above all pragmatic, and the prospect of joining a large-scale demonstration seems risky and futile to most.

The universe of the factory can be a complicated place. Young people living away from home for the first time are learning to deal with co-workers, roommates, and bosses. They are adjusting to a world of material and sexual freedom, fleeting relationships and crushing loneliness. They face demands from families back home who often have little understanding of their new lives. These factors create a stressful environment from which, for a handful of workers, suicide seems the only escape. To boil this desperate act down to a protest against working conditions is to deny a worker’s complexity and humanity.

Read the whole forum here.