Translated by China Labor News Translations

Transcription

1 Translated by China Labor News Translations Women Workers Repeatedly Fired for Applying to Set Up a Union: the pains of a grassroots foreign-enterprise trade union defending workers rights (Part One) The Shandong Evening Press 19 February Note: (After this article was published, it was re-printed by the All-China Federation of Trade Unions {ACFTU}, but the original text reporting the Fushan District Trade Union s criticisms of the Ole Wolff Trade Union was deleted.) Because of a series of illegal firings, 57 female workers such as Liu Meizhen from the foreign-invested firm Ole Wolff in Yantai made a mass report to the local Labor Department. After returning to work at the company, Liu Meizhen began to set up a trade union in order to have an organization that could protect her interests. Finally, under the support of the ACFTU the union was set up, but Liu Meizhen was fired by the company for the third time! After this, under heavy pressure from the company, both the union chair and deputy-chair resigned one after the other. The deputy-chair who filled their place, named Jiang Qianqiu, was also fired by the company. Although this dismissal of Liu Meizhen and Jiang Qianqiu was deemed illegal and a case of retaliation by both the local court and Labour Department, they never enjoyed any fruits of their legal victory except for some written statements. They are still at home waiting for employment. The misfortune of Liu Meizhen and others like her reflects the current awkward situation faced by the grassroots trade union that represents these women s interests, and the painful struggle to protect their rights. 1 Translated from Chinese. Original article available in two parts at: Part One: Part Two: 1

2 Time s up! The company is firing you! On 7 June 2007, facing the strong company, the deputy union chair Jiang Qianqiu who had fought to improve working conditions was fired because she had not accepted a change in her position within a five-minute time frame allowed to her. Jiang Qianqiu is a rank and file worker at one of Yantai s foreign invested companies, Ole Wolff (Yantai) Electronics Company Limited (henceforth referred to as Ole Wolff). Not long before Jiang Qianqiu was dismissed, this company s union chair Wang Zhaori had quit her job under pressure from the company. This blow to these two rank and file women workers is not an isolated case. At the beginning of the establishment of the company union, worker representative Liu Meizhen was dismissed by management four times successively. The night before the union was set up, she lost her job once and for all. Right up until 24 January 2008 when journalists met with Liu Meizhen and Jiang Qianqiu, both of them were still at home, out of work. 57 Women Workers Fired After Their Probation Periods Were Up Liu Meizhen is the founder of the Ole Wolff trade union. At the start of 2006, Liu Meizhen along with Jiang Qingguang and others began working at Ole Wolff. Their probation period lasted two months, and wages were according to the local minimum wage standard (530 RMB per month). Ole Wolff, a Danish owned enterprise, mainly produces loudspeakers and microphones, and the factory is located in Fushan s New Hi-tech Industrial Zone (gao xin jishu chanyequ). Liu Meizhen recalls, After we had only been working a month, our salaries fell to 480 RMB. And after ten or so days, they dropped again by 30 RMB a month. The repeatedly drops in their salary rate meant that their confidence in the company was shaken. After the probation period was over, they approached the company leader and demanded that they sign an employment contract and provide workers social insurance. But the company refused. On the eve of May Day 2006, the company demanded that 57 women including Liu Meizhen go to the finance department, collect their wages, and get out. These Photo: Liu Meizhen displays the documents they prepared to apply for the union in women thought they had already passed their two month probation period without doing anything in breach of company rules. So they demanded the company give a fair reason for the dismissals. Jiang Qingguang remembers, At the time a manager with the surname Su replied to us: If I don t like you then I don t have to explain. I don t have any reason! On 29 April, the 57 women, including Liu Meizhen, went together to the Fushan District Labor Inspection Department, and collectively reported Ole Wolff s illegal dismissals. Through the Labor Department s mediation, Liu Meizhen and six other women refused 2

3 to leave the factory, with the Labor Department s help signed employment agreements with Ole Wolff and went back to company to continue working. Liu Meizhen Fired for Opposing the Company about Overtime This dismissal incident made Liu Meizhen and others aware of the importance of setting up a trade union and having an organization to protect workers rights. In mid-july 2006, employees made an application to the company to set up a union. At the time, our company leader said he would consider it later, said Liu Meizhen. And then later, we raised the issue of the union again many times with our company, but the company continually said the time was not right and things were not mature enough as a reason to stall. According to the requirements of the Trade Union Law, after an enterprise begins production it must establish a trade union. In Fushan District where Ole Wolff is located, 50 normally operating foreign enterprises have already successfully set up unions. About the question of setting up a union, the difference in opinions of Ole Wolff and its employees makes relations between the two parties more tense with each passing day. And following the problem of overtime work at Chinese National Day (1 October), these tensions became even more like a fuse ready to cause an explosion. On 29 September 2006, the company posted a notice saying that, out of the seven days holiday in golden week, only three of those days would be holidays, and overtime would be enforced on the other four days instead of Sunday work for the month of October. Liu Meizhen was the leader among the six women who again stood up and argued with the company, maintaining opposition to the company s arrangement. In the midst of the dispute, workers ended up taking holidays as normal. Then, early in the morning on 8 October, when employees went to work they discovered that, without providing any reason, the company had posted a public notice announcing the dismissal of worker representative Liu Meizhen. At around 10 o clock a.m., the relevant leaders of the Fushan District Trade Union and Labor Department heard the news, and hurried to Ole Wolff. They instructed the company to amend the decision and only then did Liu Meizhen receive permission to enter the factory and work. 50 Employees Strike to Establish the Union This incident only strengthened workers resolve to set up a union. On 8 October, 108 workers collectively signed their names and submitted a trade union application to the Fushan District Trade Union. Liu Meizhen assumed the role of workers representative, and was the first to sign her name. The workers demand once again met with refusal from the company. More than 50 employees went on strike. On 12 October, staff of the Fushan District Trade Union and Fushan District Labor Department once again rushed to Ole Wolff to mediate. In mediation, the company promised to set up a union, and responded to requests from workers for some 3

4 improvements. But after district union and Labor Department staff left, the company once again claimed that conditions are not mature in order to postpone the establishment of the union. On 13 October, because she had been the leader of the strike, Liu Meizhen was fired from the company yet another time. Early in the morning that same day, the company posted a public announcement: six women workers were dismissed, including Liu Meizhen and Jiang Qingguang. They were all the ones who had signed their names at the top of the trade union application form. Locked Outside the Factory Gate while the Trade Union was Established On 20 October 2006, with direct involvement from the ACFTU, the trade union was finally established. But six workers including Liu Meizhen were not allowed to take part in the election. The aim of the strike was precisely to set up a union. Now that the union is in sight, we can accept it if they won t let us take part in elections, said Liu Meizhen. Then on the exact day that the union was established, the company pasted a notice on the cafeteria window which once again fired the six women workers, including Liu Meizhen (Translator s Note: There appears to be some error in the report here). That night, in the founding ceremony of the union, 116 union members took part in elections to create the first union committee, the union financial inspection committee. Worker Wang Zhaori was elected as the union chair. As this went on, four-time fired employee Liu Meizhen and five companions were locked outside the factory gate. Every Time Workers Defend Their Rights, Outcome Almost Always a Tragic Triumph : the pains of a grassroots foreign-enterprise trade union defending workers rights (Part Two) Trade Union Chair Dismissed Eight Months After Assuming Office Female worker Wang Zhaori, who thinks of herself as ordinarily quite loyal with a strong social conscience, was put forward by 116 workers for the position of union chair at the union founding ceremony on the evening of 20 October The first task of the Ole Wolff trade union was to defend the rights of the six fired women, including Liu Meizhen. But Wang Zhaori immediately discovered that this position as union chair was not going to easy. Just after she became the chair, she was reassigned from the position of production line to preparations where work is relatively dangerous and it is easy to get injured. As she tried to get the six women reinstated, she repeatedly ran up against brick walls, and the union s finances were never up to scratch... Perhaps abstract words cannot recreate the pressure that woman had to bear at the time. On 25 January 2008, when Wang Zhaori was telephone by journalists, she had already lost her job and was preparing for her wedding in two days time. Her happy mood was clear from her words and in her manner. But when asked to think back to her unhappy 4

5 experience as chair of the Ole Wolff trade union, her speech changed. Since I took on that position, I haven t felt happy. I ve cried many times. On 4 June 2007, Wang Zhaori who had been union chair for eight months chose to resign. Before that, Female worker Yu Liyan had already withdrawn from the role of deputy chair because of too much pressure. Deputy Chair Fired Again Four Days After Taking Office On the 7 April 2007, union committee member Jiang Qianqiu had been accepted as Ole Wolff union chair by the Fushan District, and began her union work on 4 June. But on the fourth day after she began to act in this role, Jiang Qianqiu lost her job at the company. This incident meant that the union was destined to defend workers rights yet another time. In May 2007 the company introduced a new cleaning shift. While working this shift, women workers without any protective measures whatsoever had to use their hands to handle toxic materials containing benzine. The previous union chair Wang Zhaori had negotiated with the company about this, but working conditions had not improved at all. On the afternoon of 6 June, the company assigned the production line workers on line E to do the cleaning shift. Among them were union committee members Lin Feifei and six new female members of the union. After working for five hours, these women starting showing symptoms such as dizziness, vomiting and watering eyes. At the time, Jiang Qianqiu was working on the second floor. She received a phone call from these workers, and hurried to the site to see everything for herself. On the following afternoon of 7 June, Jiang Qianqiu led the workers who had become unwell to the managers office to demand that the company distribute occupational safety equipment to them, such as rubber gloves and gas masks, and that they install ventilation. Otherwise, they demanded to swap work tasks. Jiang Qianqiu remembers, one of the foreign managers of the company pointed to the clock on the office wall, saying to Jiang: You go down and do cleaning too. I ll give you five minutes to think about it, otherwise your employment contract will be terminated. At the same time, the manager also pointed his finger at other employees: You re probably not feeling well because of something you ate at home. It has nothing to do with the company! Five minutes passed by quickly, but Jiang Qianqiu and the other women were not willing to give in. As Jiang Qianqiu recalls, at the time a manager from human resources said: Time s Up! The company s firing you! Go to the office and complete the relevant procedures! And this is how Jiang Qianqiu lost her job. Court awards a win, but it is hard to enjoy the fruits of victory In the months that followed, Jiang Qianqiu and Ole Wolff union advisor (guwen) Zhang Jun ran all over the place seeking help. Eventually this led to the local Labor Bureau deeming Ole Wolff s dismissal of Jiang Qianqiu to be retaliation against her work as union chair. But Jiang and the company could not agree on the terms of her return to work and compensation. 5

6 Although workers including Liu Meizhen and Jiang Qianqiu and the grassroots union they set up did eventually win most disputes in the last year in defense of workers rights, besides receiving some token things, they have found it hard to enjoy the fruits of their victories. To use the words of Jiang Qianqiu, almost every time has been a tragic triumph! After Liu Meizhen and the other six workers' cases had been through labour arbitration and two court cases, the company s act of firing them was judged to be illegal. But then new problems arose. The court s final judgment came out on 22 October By that time Liu Meizhen and the others had been laid off for over a year. Their employment contracts had expired in January and February Should their employment contracts have been temporarily frozen during the arbitration and trial? After all, negotiations about the central problems were still in progress. Liu Meizhen says: these two years have made me physically and mentally exhausted. I have been fired four times, and in the end lost my job. Now it is not very likely that I will return to the factory and take up the same position, and I don t know when I will get compensation from the company. What puts Liu Meizhen and the other six women in an even more awkward situation is that, even though they were dismissed, the company never completed the procedures to terminate their employment contracts. Three women - Liu Meizhen, Sun Qingying and Chu Shuang are still technically in an employment relationship with the company and their personal files (dang an) are still there. This has meant that they could not be formally employed anywhere else. Regarding the violation of the rights of deputy union chair Jiang Qianqiu, even though the upper levels of the trade union and the Labor Department ruled that the company had retaliated against her, Jiang still has no way to return to the company and resume work. She still retains her nominal title of deputy union chair, but has no ability to do anything for the union. Jiang Qianqiu can only wait at home to find a job. Photo: Although they had already been fired, three of the six women including Liu Meizhen - still have an employment relationship with the company. 6

7 Fushan District Union: work style of grassroots union leaders still not mature The Ole Wolff enterprise trade union was set up out of the persistence of workers, but after it was set up, the union s work in defense of workers rights progressed with great difficulty, and the tense relations with management would never calm. The union lost a large number of members, and the leadership team was never left intact. It was very difficult for the union to do its work As far as the upper level of the trade union the Fushan District Trade Union in Yantai City sees things, there is a strong relationship between this string of problems and the immaturity of the work model of this self-proclaimed first union in China to be set up through strike. In January 2008, the administrative department of the Ole Wolff company organized an Ole Wolff Electronics Co. Ltd. union committee by-election. The human resources department manager s name, Li Yulan, was on the list of candidates. The way the company went about the election was deemed to be illegal by the Fushan District Trade Union. According to the relevant regulations, the leaders of grassroots unions should serve a term of two to three years. For the sake of convenience, the Fushan District Trade Union has standardized this to three years. The Ole Wolff union, set up in October 2006, had obviously not reached the end of its term. The question of Li Yulan joining the union created divergence in the opinion between the Ole Wolff union and the district unions. The Fushan District Trade Union thought that Liu Yulan could use a regular worker s identity to make the reasonable request to join the Ole Wolff trade union. But the Ole Wolff advisor Zhang Jun said: Even if she wants to join the Ole Wolff union, according to the ACFTU constitution her application must pass through discussion within the union. Zhang added: As regards people who have consistently persecuted the union, we have the right to refuse them membership. After the incident surrounding the election, Zhang Jun immediately composed and distributed an "Ole Wolff Union Workers' Decleration." Zhang Jun says that more then ten copies were distributed, but the company said that more than 200 copies were distributed. This angered the Fushan District Trade Union. The deputy chair of the district union Lü Zuguang said: In the process of us setting up this union and protecting workers rights, we have always done a lot of work, to the best of our ability. But the enterprise trade union often says a bunch of useless things, which are extremely detrimental to our efforts to mediate and begin work. Lü went on to say: Now the union has been established for more than a year, and the leadership is fragmented. The chair has even resigned, and most committee members have resigned or been dismissed. Out of the first intake of members, only 40 people remain. The fact that a union can develop in this manner shows that the leadership of this grassroots union is still immature in some respects. Precisely how the union should begin its work, and what kind of work methods it should use, these are questions that still need gradual and comprehensive study. Human resources manager says: union chair was repeatedly picking fights On 24 January 2008, journalists went to Ole Wolff to conduct interviews addressing the 7

8 problems raised by these women workers about defending rights and going about union work. Human resources manager Li Yulan granted us an interview in a company meeting room on the second floor. As Li Yulan sees it, the current abnormal state of the union and the work style of the leadership are not unrelated. The leadership casually accounts for the use of union feeds. They see it as pocket money. What s more, the union chair repeatedly picks fights. Now the union has no chair, only the deputy chair Jiang Qianqiu, and she has already been dismissed. She even specifically described a time when Jiang Qianqiu came to the meeting room for negotiation: At the time, Jiang Qianqiu sat on a chair besides the meeting table, with both her feet resting on the table. Just as we were discussing this incident, the interview was interrupted by the arrival of a foreign manager. After Li Yulan spoke with the manager outside the room for a minute, she returned and immediately informed journalists that the interview would end then and there. She too was only a worker. If the interview was going to continue, she would have to delegate to the big boss. But at the same time, Li Yulan told the journalist that the big boss had gone away on business to Shenzhen, and currently there was no way to contact him for an interview. Trade Union struggle alarms the ACFTU: one deputy chair personally leads mediation in Yantai Throughout the Ole Wolff union s difficult process of getting established and protecting workers rights, one unusual person was particularly active: Zhang Jun. To say he is unusual, refers to his unusual role. He is not a worker at Ole Wolff, but is the Ole Wolff union s advisor (guwen). But he has another identity too: he is the husband of Liu Meizhen, who was fired four times from Ole Wolff. This unusual identity has meant that, from the very start, Zhang Jun cared about the Ole Wolff union, and persistently busied himself defending his wife s rights, defending workers rights, and defending the trade union s rights. Zhang Jun used to be an electrician (note: Zhang Jun himself later corrected this, pointing out that he is still an electrician). He has passed through three years of specialized study of the law, and has in the past defended his own rights when, in 2002, he was a committee member of a dispute at his previous company. Several years later, Zhang Jun is walking down the same road, and defending workers rights again. This time, it is the rights of the Ole Wolff trade union. The emergence of Zhang Jun gave a lot of help to the women workers defending their rights at Ole Wolff. When workers went on strike in order to set up the union, Zhang Jun decided to appeal for the help of the central ACFTU. On the morning of 16 October 2006, he dialed the phone number of the ACFTU, and after hearing about the situation, the head of the Organizing Department named Chen took an interest in the case. On 17 October, Zhang Jun called the ACFTU a second time and expressed the seriousness of the situation. The response he received was: the ACFTU takes very seriously this case of workers striking to form a union. On the 18th, a deputy chair from the ACFTU flew to Yantai City with two department heads, specifically to mediate the matter of establishing the union at Ole Wolff. On 20 October, with the support of the ACFTU, the Ole Wolff union was formally 8

9 established. Following this, Zhang Jun was appointed by the union as an advisor, with full rights to represent the union to outsiders and resolve union matters. After the union was established, Zhang Jun had turn his attention to protecting the rights of Liu Meizhen and the six women who were fired. With the hard work of Zhang Jun and the Ole Wolff union, and through labor arbitration and two court sittings, the company s dismissal of Liu Meizhen and others was deemed illegal. On 7 June 2007, deputy union chair Jiang Qianqiu was fired from Ole Wolff. Zhang Jun yet again swung into action to defend her rights. Four months of persistence and hard work lead to the creation of an Order to Correct Labor Protection Inspection by the local Labor Department. It said: Jiang Qianqiu conveyed the problems of poor labor protection conditions on the cleaning shift, and represented the union and demanded that the factory improve its work safety standards and ensure the protection of employees health. This behavior was reasonable action taken to protect workers legal rights, but because of this, on the same day, your company re-allocated the cleaning shift to the production line workers, thus constituting retaliation against Comrade Jiang Qianqiu. Under Zhang Jun s guidance, the trade union received training in labor law. He emphasized that there was evidence that the experience of protecting rights has had a deep impact on the trade union members. Proper proof had been saved, in the form of various documents, public notices, and notes, that the six fired women as well as Jiang Qianqiu had their rights violated. He has gone to great lengths to compile thorough records of all negotiations between the government and management. Even when being interviewed by this reporter, Zhang Jun did not forget to bring recording equipment so that he would have record of what he had said. Zhang Jun has also started an Ole Wolff blog on the internet. He has meticulously put in order the details of the hard process of defending the rights the Ole Wolff women workers and the Ole Wolff union, and publicly appealed to the public for support. 9