The issue of inequality is arguably the central
issue of our time. On this last day of February, I can’t let January (MLK’s
birthday) and February (Black History Month in the U.S.) go by without making a
connection between Martin Luther King and China's labor activists. The two seem
like strange bedfellows but both have fought long and hard for the one percent
to share more of its wealth with the 99 percent.
Many Americans know that King was
assassinated in 1968 on April 4, but few know that he was assassinated in
Memphis where he had gone to support a strike by sanitation workers. Many know
King as a civil rights leader, but few know him as a democratic socialist who
was broadening his activism beyond racial and religious lines to take on the
issue of economic justice. In 1968, he
and the Southern Leadership Religious Conference (SLRC) began the organizing a
Poor People’s Campaign to call attention to the problem of poverty in the U.S.
and worldwide. That campaign took him to Memphis in that fateful month of April
where he was shot in the neck on the balcony of his motel at the tender age of
39.
Few people also know that one of the signal
events in modern Chinese labor history was a strike by more than 200 sanitation
workers in the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou in August of 2014. The
workers went on strike because the management company that employed them
decided not to renew their street cleaning contract with the district
government. When the management company refused to talk to the workers about
severance pay and their future employment prospects, the workers went on
strike.
With the help of a local labor NGO, the
Panyu Workers Center, the workers organized, elected representatives and
approached the management company with their demands. When the company again
refused to talk, the workers went on strike. Soon after, with the encouragement
of local government and union officials, the workers representatives and
management company sat down and came to a collective bargaining agreement in
which the management company agreed to a severance package that totaled nearly
three million yuan (about U.S.$476,000).
Several things made this case unusual and
important in the annals of Chinese labor history. One was that workers
succeeded in getting a collective bargaining agreement in an authoritarian
country where the official union stands on the side of the government and
management and does not engage in collective bargaining on behalf of workers.
Second, the local authorities and unions encouraged the workers and management
to negotiate, instead of arresting or firing the workers for striking as is the norm in China. Third,
the workers received support from other sectors of society - local students, journalists and other members
of the public.
In his speech to the striking Memphis
sanitation workers on February 12, 1968, King sought to lift the spirits of an overflow crowd with
words that would have sounded familiar to the Chinese sanitation workers in
Guangzhou[1].
“You are doing
many things here in this struggle. You are demanding that this city will
respect the dignity of labor….One day our society must come to see this. One
day our society will come to respect the sanitation worker if it is to survive…
All labor has dignity.
But you are
doing another thing. You are reminding, not only Memphis, but you are reminding
the nation that it is a crime for people to live in this rich nation and
receive starvation wages. And I need not remind you that this is our plight as
a people all over America.
Now you are
doing something else here. You are highlighting the economic issue. You are
going beyond purely civil rights to questions of human rights. That is a
distinction.
Now let me say a
word to those of you who are on strike. You have been out now for a number of
days but don’t despair. Nothing worthwhile is gained without sacrifice…. Let it
be known everywhere that along with wages and all of the other securities that
you are struggling for, you are also struggling for the right to organize and
be recognized.
We can all get
more together than we can apart; we can get more organized together than we can
apart. And this is the way we gain power.
Power is the ability to achieve purpose, power is the ability to affect
change, and we need power.”
The story of U.S.-China relations over the
last 30 years can be read as the story of how inequality was accelerated within
and across borders. The tremendous growth in trade and investment between the
U.S. and China led to the hollowing out of industrial urban centers in the
U.S., and the lifting of hundreds of millions of Chinese out of poverty. In the
process, wealth became increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few in both
countries. China, in particular, went from a relatively egalitarian country to
one of the most unequal countries in the world.
The Guangzhou sanitation strike is, in a
sense, a natural product of this decidedly unnatural inequality in a communist country. It is also a product of a growing
consciousness among Chinese workers of their rights and their collective
strength, or as King noted, their power to induce change. In King’s words, “never forget that freedom
is not something that is voluntarily given by the oppressor. It is something
that must be demanded by the oppressed.”
King’s universal language would have
resonated deeply with the Guangzhou sanitation workers. It’s unfortunate that
he did not live to see their achievement, one victory on the battlefield in the
long war on inequality. He would have been only 86.
