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The compliance inspector tries to ensure that the factory is not going to embarrass the brand by ensuring that the factory is sticking to an agreement that would typically cover the length of the working day, the amount of compulsory overtime, wage rates, safety and health requirements, and fire regulations. But compliance inspection is a cat and mouse game. In China, as everyone in the business told me, ‘counter compliance’ has become a sophisticated art. Companies keep two sets of payrolls—one for inspection, another that records the real hours the workers put in and the real wages they are paid. Inspectors like Jane Trevor spend their days in the factory, photocopying documents to cross-check with production volumes, then hang around outside after dark to see if the workshop lights stay on beyond the admitted hours.
Trevor said that there was ‘massive falsification’ of factory documents and that people like her had to cope with too many factories, each with a high turnover of workers. ‘Everything was so bad in the beginning. There was no minimum wage, the conditions were unsafe. At that time we all felt a huge satisfaction. But making the next step is really hard. Everything is so much more cut-throat and carnivorous now. The brands are squeezing the last bit out of the factories. Consumers are paying no more for sports shirts than they were ten years ago. You can make a change in your tiny world but you are surrounded by appalling factories and unless you can change on a macro level, it’s no good. In Pinggu, outside Shanghai, factories regularly keep half the workers’ wages back until the end of the year. In Xinjiang we have a Korean factory that’s paying less than the minimum wage but he won’t change because it will upset the others.’
Wal-Mart employs one hundred auditors and inspects at least some of its suppliers. We know this because of a document known as a ‘cheat-sheet’ which in 2004 found its way to an NGO from a worker at a Wal-Mart supplier, the Heyi factory in Dongguan, in Guangdong Province. The factory had prepared the document in advance of an inspection that was scheduled to take place in February 2004. It showed that workers would be paid fifty yuan each if they memorized the answers to questions that the inspectors were likely to ask them. The correct answer, for instance, to the question ‘How long is the working week?’ was ‘Five days’. The correct number of days worked in a month was twenty-two; overtime was not forced and was paid at the correct rate; they were not obliged to give the factory a deposit when they started work there; wages were paid on time; there were enough toilet facilities in the dormitory and the dormitories themselves were spacious and clean. There were fire drills, and they were not made to pay for their own ID cards or uniforms. If all of this were true, what need would there have been for the workers to memorize the answers?
That is one reason that Jane, an employee of a large American multinational, has reached an unexpected conclusion. ‘It’s ridiculous for us to be trying to do this private investigation work. The only people who can really monitor compliance are the workers. They are there all the time. They know what’s going on.’
I asked if she was proposing to reinvent the trade union.
She laughed. ‘Well, I wouldn’t say it on the record, but yes.’
‘The most prominent feature of the trial has been the court’s complete lack of interest either in the facts or in issues of law’, he said in his speech to the Dongguan court. The defendants, he admitted, had taken part in ‘inappropriate action’ but they had already paid dearly for it with the loss of their jobs and the stigma of having been arrested. The cause of the riot was ‘the fact that our society today permits and encourages the most naked forms of social injustice, together with an unrestrained level of gross and inhuman exploitation of the workers that has reached truly reactionary proportions.’ The factory workers worked a six-day week, four of those days eleven hours long, for a wage that, he said, ‘cannot even support normal life.’
Gao continued, ‘The inequity of workers within our current system of labour relations is absolute. The channels for resolution of labour conflicts of all kinds in our society are either totally blocked or non-existent; and judicial protections for the rights and interests of the labourer are functionally absent… This is just like the [pre-1949] situation of cold-blooded and ruthless exploitation of the workers by the capitalists…the very same situation that caused the workers then to rise up in revolutionary rebellion! What distinguishes the present situation, however, is that in those days the Communist Party stood alongside the workers in their fight against capitalist exploitation, whereas today the Communist Party is fighting shoulder-to-shoulder with the cold-blooded capitalists in their struggle against the workers!’
the workers' defense attorney for workers at the Stella factory [shoes]
[...] Three hundred million migrant workers have passed through the Pearl River Delta in the past twenty years and 30 million currently work there. For most of them, their factory lives are brief: after five years, factory owners are reluctant to employ someone who is judged, by then, to be worn out. Their remittances have helped to raise their distant villages out of poverty, but many have paid a terrible price for their willingness to labour. There are some sights in China I shall always remember: the young women from a battery factory, poisoned by cadmium, who pushed forward their thin haired, yellow faced little children for me to look at (they had passed on the contamination, unwittingly, to the next generation); the men who gasped for breath as they contemplated an early death from silicosis; the workers hideously mutilated by a factory fire for which they received no compensation. For the last two decades men and women like them have provided the labour that has given us cheap goods (on the shelves of Wal-Mart and elsewhere) and put fortunes into the pockets of local officials and factory owners.