As an unprecedented wave of strikes rolled across China this month – shutting car plants and electronics component makers – the staff at the Gloria Plaza Hotel in Beijing decided they, too, had had enough.
The four-star Gloria Plaza, which had done a thriving trade during the 2008 Olympic Games, unexpectedly announced it was shutting its doors for extensive renovations at the end of May, putting 400 people out of work – almost all of them poor migrants from the countryside. The hotel’s management said it would pay the minimum severance package required by law. But the staff decided they wanted more.
After years of donning smiles for guests who stayed in luxury suites while staff slept 20 to a room in a building over the parking garage, Gloria Plaza workers drew up placards reading “We Want Fairness” and “We Demand a Reasonable Offer.” Then they marched to the office of the company that owns the hotel and, when that didn’t work, they did it again, and again. Eventually, their protests brought the concession they were demanding: a severance payment of up to several thousand yuan each, depending on length of service.
“The workers had not been treated fairly. We worked for a long time for such small payment. We needed to take action,” said a 22-year-old electrician from Hebei province who would give only his family name, Chang. Though the hotel is now closed, Mr. Chang was still living in the squalid Gloria Plaza dorm – which reeks of urine and uncollected garbage – while he searched for another job. The hotel workers typically earned between 1,000 yuan ($155) to 1,800 yuan a month.
The labour action at the Gloria Plaza went almost unnoticed amid a series of strikes that have forced the likes of auto giants Honda, Toyota and Nissan to stop production at factories in China until they met worker demands. But the protests by the receptionists, bellmen, electricians and cleaners at the Gloria Plaza were motivated by the same discontent that led those working assembly lines in the south of the country to walk off the job: a sense among China’s tens of millions of low-wage workers that the time has come for them to share in China’s economic success.
China’s workers have not only been striking with new frequency in recent months, they’ve been getting their way. The strikes have forced double-digit wage hikes at Honda and Toyota, and more than 20 Chinese provinces and cities have moved to raise minimum wages since a watershed strike began in May at Honda’s plant in the city of Foshan in southern Guangdong province.
Workers rest during a strike at Denso (Guangzhou Nansha) Co. Ltd. in Nansha, Guangdong province, on June 23.— REUTERS
Though the Chinese government, for now, seems content to let the strikes happen, they have the potential to upend the low-wage economic model that has made China the “workshop of the world” and underpinned the country’s astonishing economic growth over the past two decades. It could also drive up prices for the ubiquitous made-in-China goods on store shelves in Canada and elsewhere, as manufacturers pass rising labour costs on to the consumer.
But Beijing apparently sees greater risks in allowing worker grievances to fester. A recent editorial in the state-run People’s Daily said the “made-in-China” model is “facing a turning point.” The paper came down on the side of the workers, arguing it is time to rectify the country’s widening gap between rich and poor, which some Chinese academics have argued is approaching the point where it poses a threat to social stability.
“Rural migrant workers are the mainstay of China’s industrial work force,” Premier Wen Jiabao said in comments that were interpreted as a sign of the government’s desire to see wages rise. “Our society’s wealth and the skyscrapers are all distillations of your hard work and sweat. Your labour is glorious and should be respected by society at large.”
