   
``Stop that line!'' yelled Jill Tucker as she strode through the
factory.
The assembly line slowed to a halt. The young women who were busy
gluing parts of Reebok sneakers looked up in surprise, while
flustered male supervisors scurried around.
Tucker pointed. ``They're not wearing gloves. It's the same
problem as before. This is ridiculous,'' she said.
Gloves quickly were found and donned, thus protecting the workers
from the toxic cement, and the gluing resumed.
Behold the best-case scenario for U.S. corporate behavior in
China.
Tucker is Reebok's human rights director for East Asia. Her job
is to make sure that the firm's factories are free of health and
safety hazards and other sweatshop-style labor abuses.
She is part of a new attempt by some leading American firms to
improve working conditions in China's notoriously harsh factories.
The success or failure of their work is central to the debate in
Washington over whether to give permanent trade benefits to China.
Do trade and corporate investment help improve the human rights
situation and pave the way for democracy in China, as the Clinton
administration and the trade bill's backers say? Or, as opponents
contend, are U.S. firms simply profiteering from communist
repression, taking advantage of 20-cents-per-hour wages and the
Chinese government's denial of workers' rights?
During recent travels by two Chronicle journalists throughout the
vast Pearl River delta industrial zone of southern China's Guangdong
province, interviews with dozens of workers, company and government
officials uncovered plenty of evidence to support both conclusions.
It was clear that Reebok and (to a lesser extent) other American
firms are making changes for the better. They provide jobs, improve
working conditions and set a relatively good example for Chinese and
other foreign firms, whose factory conditions are generally
draconian.
But it was equally clear that some of the U.S. firms' own
practices do not meet the corporations' own codes of conduct or
international labor-rights norms. Nor have they prompted the Chinese
government to improve enforcement of its own labor laws or
international workers' rights standards.
In Zhongshan, Tucker's reform plans are complicated by the fact
that she is not really in charge. As in nearly all other plants
producing for U.S. brands in southern China, the factory is owned
and operated by a subcontractor -- in this case, Yue Yuen, a
Taiwanese firm. Yue Yuen, which also makes shoes for New Balance,
Timberland and Dr. Martens at the same factory, produces for nearly
all other American brands at other plants.
Yue Yuen may be unknown to U.S. consumers, but it is a colossus
in the wholesale footwear industry. The firm's factories in China,
Indonesia, Vietnam, Taiwan and Los Angeles produced 14 percent of
all branded athletic footwear sold worldwide in 1999, as well as 14
percent of casual shoes -- adding up to a total of 87 million pairs.
The Zhongshan factory, for example, is as big as a small city,
with 35,000 workers, nearly all of whom live on site in highrise
dormitories.
During Tucker's visit to Zhongshan with a Chronicle reporter, it
was apparent that her frequent outbursts -- pointing out missing
gloves here, missing goggles and the wrong kind of solvent there --
were not just a show for the press.
In December, because of similar problems, Reebok punished Yue
Yuen by transferring about $40 million in annual sneaker contracts
from the Zhongshan plant to one elsewhere in China owned by another
firm.
And because of pressure from Reebok and other American firms, Yue
Yuen has ended several practices that had earned harsh criticism
from human rights groups -- including its system of fining workers
for misbehavior and its practice of paying mainly by piece rate.
``Reebok's concerns have helped us pay more attention to human
rights issues,'' said Edward Ku, executive director of Yue Yuen. He
said that within a year, the company would switch completely to less
toxic, water-based glues on all its factories' production lines --
another longtime demand of activists, who say the chemicals cause
health problems among workers.
Evident throughout the factory is a strange mix of Reebok's
idealism and Yue Yuen's stern paternalism. Slogans everywhere exhort
workers: ``Work diligently because life is hard and short (The
spirit of Yue Yuen).''
But Wang Pingli, one of the 35,000 workers, says she is happy she
made the trip late last year from her village in Shaanxi province,
800 miles to the northwest.
Yue Yuen ``is the best place to work in the area, because the
factory takes care of me,'' she said.
To Wang, what makes Yue Yuen a desirable place to work is its zhi
du -- a system of rules partly derived from Reebok's code of conduct
and partly from Yue Yuen's own Confucian ethos.
Zhi du regulates the conduct of both management and workers. It
means, among other things, that Wang works a maximum of 60 hours per
week, with five days of paid vacation a year, three months of
maternity leave if she gets pregnant, the services of a company
clinic and a pair of Reebok shoes as an annual bonus. Most important
(and most unusual in Guangdong), she is paid on time, once a month.
Wang gets three meals a day and a bunk bed in a 12-woman room in
a high-rise dormitory. Factory regulations stipulate that she place
her toothbrush in just the right angle in her rinse cup, hang her
face towel just so, participate in early-morning drills and obey the
11:30 p.m. curfew.
In return, Wang is paid 650 yuan, or about $80, per month. To
her, it's a good deal, because back in her village she earned
nothing. In a few years' time she will have saved enough for a
dowry, she said. ``Or maybe enough to start a shop of my own,'' she
added brightly.
But there are sticky details, which seem to show the limits of
Tucker's good intentions.
For one, the 60-hour week violates Chinese federal labor law,
which sets a maximum of 49 hours. Though the law is ignored
throughout Guangdong and other export- production zones in China,
Reebok's corporate code of conduct, as well as those of other U.S.
companies, pledges compliance with national labor laws in all
countries they operate in.
More important, from the point of view of the AFL-CIO and human
rights activists who oppose U.S. trade concessions to China, is the
violation of internationally recognized labor organizing rights.
At the Zhongshan factory and everywhere else in China, labor
peace is guaranteed by the only union allowed, the All-China
Federation of Trade Unions, controlled by the Communist Party and
factory management. Strikes are banned and union functions are
mostly limited to organizing after-hours recreation programs.
The union president is invariably a management executive. The
union boss at the Reebok section of the plant, Xu Lan Ying, is also
the section's personnel director. She said her main purpose as union
chief is ``to help the factory run smoother and more productively.''
Although Xu said she had been chosen in a democratic union
election, she could produce no documentation to prove it. When asked
about the union outside the factory gates, Wang and her co-workers
said no such election ever occurred. Several were even unaware of
the union's existence.
When first asked about the union, Tucker also was unaware that it
existed. Later, she said it was ``not really a union,'' and Reebok
had never communicated with it.
Human rights groups say that elsewhere in China, workers who
disobey their union chiefs or try to organize independent unions are
automatically fired or worse. Dozens of labor activists are
languishing in prison on charges of ``disrupting public order'' or
``counterrevolutionary crimes.''
``If you try to compare Yue Yuen with many small companies, it's
paradise,'' said Chan Kawai, executive director of Hong Kong
Christian Industrial Committee, a labor-rights group that has
carried out extensive studies in Zhongshan and at other south China
factories.
``But the fundamental rights of workers -- the right to freedom
of organization and the right to collective bargaining -- are still
repressed. Because they are so big, Reebok and Yue Yuen should do
more to give a voice to workers.''
Whatever the limits of its efforts in Zhongshan, Reebok is
undeniably a leader of the corporate reform movement. Along with
other European and American firms such as Adidas, Levi Strauss, Nike
and Mattel, it has hired dozens of inspectors to check factories for
substandard conditions.
Tucker is an example. Formerly the director of International
Development Exchange, a liberal San Francisco group that carries out
small-scale aid projects in poor nations, she also worked at the
Asia Society in Indonesia before being hired by Reebok.
Tucker seems torn by the criticism, defending her record while
agreeing with much of what her detractors say. ``Shoes are going to
be made in China no matter what,'' she said. ``It's the reality of
the industry. I think we just have to do whatever we can to improve
things.''
But where there are no Jill Tuckers or zhi du, working conditions
are grim indeed.
Workers at other factories in Guangdong say rampant exploitation
and poor conditions are routine. Workers are forced to toil 70, 80
and even 90 hours per week, protective equipment is rare, physical
abuse common, dorms filthy and unexplained ``penalties'' often
reduce paychecks to near zero.
U.S. human rights groups have harshly criticized Disney,
Wal-Mart, K-Mart and the Gap for conditions in their Chinese
factories. They say these companies, and others like them, will be
big beneficiaries of China's expected entry this year into the World
Trade Organization, which will phase out U.S. apparel and textile
import quotas and stimulate yet more foreign investment in
Guangdong.
Zhongshan's deputy mayor, Wu Rui Cheng, said he wants to attract
more companies like Reebok -- or DuPont and Union Carbide, and many
others that have local factories. But when asked about Reebok's
human rights pressure, he wrinkled his nose. ``We have our own laws
about how to treat workers,'' he said.
In fact, many U.S. firms seem to give the Chinese government
contradictory messages about reform. The American Chamber of
Commerce in China recently distributed to all top government
officials in Beijing a 97-page ``white paper'' proposing extensive
changes to Chinese laws and regulations that affect foreign
investors. The government has already made some of the requested
changes.
But the report fails to mention any of the U.S. critics' concerns
-- enforcement of workplace health, safety, environmental and labor
laws, and union rights. And the report goes so far as to ask the
government to cut labor costs -- especially in coastal areas such as
Guangdong -- because it says wages there are ``among the highest for
developing countries in Asia. . . . These high labor costs have
already discouraged some potential investors.''
That raises the hackles of Medea Benjamin, director of Global
Exchange, a San Francisco group cooperating with Reebok, Mattel,
Levi Strauss and other organizations to create a common set of rules
for U.S. firms' factories in China.
``Unlike the rhetoric that companies have a democratizing effect,
most U.S. companies are not only taking advantage of China's low
wages and repression, but they're actually pressing the government
to lower standards,'' Benjamin said.
Chamber Chairman Timothy Stratford defended his group's stand.
``I don't see any contradiction with our members' codes of
conduct,'' he said. ``We're upholding the highest standards, and
we're living by them.'' |
