money home. After three weeks, Peng was forced to move on. His co-workers stayed. Work isn’t easy to find, and they didn’t feel confident enough to leave.
‘Did I do the right thing, sister?’ he later asked me, obviously looking for reassurance. I told him he had, and he returned to the Daxing labour market next day to try his luck again.
Peng resented the idea of security work, but it was the only work he had substantial experience in and a likely chance of getting. He continued his search. He had only 200 yuan left and couldn’t remain unemployed for long. When I saw that he’d cut down to one tiny meal a day to save living costs, I offered to help. But he refused – he was far too proud.
‘I’m OK. I just need to take up the next job available and make no fuss,’ he said.
As I left Peng at Yinghai township, I wondered how I could possibly help him. The fact is that there is no national minimum wage in China. The minimum wage law that came into effect in January 2004 makes local authorities responsible for setting their own minimum wage standard. The law stipulates that this should be 40 to 60 percent of the average wage in the particular area, making the so-called minimum wage very difficult to live on. In Beijing, the monthly minimum wage of 640 yuan (£58, $101) can provide little more than a substandard living, but what other options do workers like Peng have?
I could have helped Peng only if I’d had connections. Guanxi! A word heard so often in China. You need connections to open doors for you in every aspect of your life. This is particularly true in post-Mao China, ruled by monetary values and the social relations they establish. Sadly, I had no guanxi good enough to help Peng. I was a foreigner.
Fortunately, times, like tides, do change. A week later, Peng called with good news. ‘I’ve got a new job!’ he said excitedly.
‘What is it? And where?’ I asked.
It was another security job, he explained, but this time in the biggest hotel in Yinghai township, Daxing district, the Golden Sail Holiday Hotel. ‘And this time, I am here to stay!’ he said.
I had never heard Peng sounding so positive. I was thrilled for him. He invited me to visit his new workplace for a hot pot (huoguo) dinner when he would be off duty in the evening. We would celebrate his new job and a new beginning.
Peng had just finished his shift when I arrived. He greeted me with a warm hug, wearing a dark blue uniform, and introduced me to his colleagues – Qiang, the thirtysomething team leader from Jiangxi province, and Mr Li, a security guard in his fifties from Henan province.
‘We have ten security guards here, all from rural areas in other provinces,’ Peng explained. It wasn’t a marvellous job, but it paid more than his last, 1,100 yuan (£100–110, $174) per month. ‘I don’t mind working ten hours a day for the whole week,’ he said. ‘I’m gonna work hard.’
I knew that Peng was determined to send money home to his father. He felt that he must do that, no matter what.
Qiang joined us inside the hotel café. ‘Please sit,’ he said. He poured baijiu, or sorghum wine, into our cups, sat himself down and raised his cup: ‘Let’s toast to Peng’s new life here! Success! Let’s toast to sister Hung’s health and safe journey!’
I had to drink up. It’s easy to get drunk on baijiu – its alcohol content is 40 percent – so I followed with a gulp of hot pot soup to dilute the effect. It was delicious, a mixture of all types of mushrooms, spinach, bean curd, and beef slices.
Qiang had another cup of baijiu, and conversation turned to the security industry in Beijing and how it is one of the shadiest industries here, with only 25 law-abiding security firms, compared with over 500 unregistered ones. (Other migrant workers also quote a similar figure.) The companies work with recruiters to pull in migrants from the countryside who are desperate enough to take anything, Qiang explained, and the recruiters also charge the workers a ‘tax per head’, on top of the money they’re taking from the security companies. Both recruiters and companies are crooked.
No wonder then, Peng said, that around 7,000 labour disputes have been reported in Beijing each month. His figure is not far from the statistics given by the Beijing trade union’s law department, which said the number of workers filing grievances with the Beijing municipal authorities reached 80,000 for the year 2009.16 According to the trade union, Beijing’s Labour Dispute Arbitration Committees (LDACs) were understaffed and had a backlog of cases. Each dispute now took around ten months to resolve, very often in favour of the employers. The Beijing courts have also reported seeing an increase in labour disputes for the same year – a total of 4,506 labour cases were heard. Nationwide, courts heard a growing number of labour cases from 2008 to 2010. Resolving them became one of the most difficult tasks for the Chinese courts during the peak of the economic crisis. Wang Shengjun, head of the Supreme People’s Court, said that courts across the nation handled 295,500 labour dispute cases in 2008, 317,000 in 2009, and then 207,400 in 2010.17 He noted that a large proportion of these disputes involved back wages, nonpayment of overtime and insurance contributions.18
And lawsuits do not always end justly. A high level of incompetence in the courts has been reported in Shenyang. In July 2007, Wu Guangjun, a worker at Liaoning Cotton and Hemp Company, filed a lawsuit against the company seeking reinstatement of his employment contract. After a ‘talk’ with the company, the Huanggu district court in Shenyang told Wu that the court could not accept his case. Wu revisited the court and was told the same thing by the judge himself, and offered no justification. Wu couldn’t get a written copy of the rejection ruling, and was unable to appeal to a higher court. By April 2008, Wu had sold his house to meet the costs of his numerous petitions, which had received no response. Eventually, he became homeless and was seen camping out on the streets of Shenyang. This was a direct result of the failure of institutions and legislation to protect the basic rights of workers.
‘With so many labour disputes, it’s obvious what is happening,’ said Peng. ‘Why doesn’t the government do something to stop the unregulated security middlemen?’
‘These underground security firms are run by criminals,’ Qiang replied. ‘Criminals are the reason the police receive their pay and keep their jobs. Without criminals, the police can’t justify their good salary. They work with each other – they need each other to survive. I am sure you know that these underground firms feed the police with never-ending bribes.’ Tianhe Antai, Peng’s first employer in Beijing, was notorious for that, in fact.
‘As if they gave a damn!’ said Qiang, downing another cup of baijiu. ‘Without migrant workers, Beijingers would starve.’
Eventually, their colleague Mr Li joined in as well. ‘We definitely need to be given more respect and more rights,’ he said quietly.
As we drank more and more baijiu, Peng began asking me about London and whether security guards have a good life over there, in a ‘world-class city’, as he called it. I told him about a place in east London I knew quite well called Canary Wharf, guarded by hundreds of non-British security guards employed by dodgy agencies, to which he listened with wide-open eyes. ‘Really, sister? Are most of them also migrants? From where? Surely they’re not earning peanuts like us…’
Peng toasted me near the end of the evening. ‘Sister, I hope that when you return to Beijing one day, you will see that I’ve got myself a more senior position at work and have done something better with my life,’ he said. ‘I truly hope that conditions will improve for us all.’
2
Earthquakes in Bohemia:
Life
