Interview with “China Labor Watch” activist

January 26, 2012

Questions for Li Qiang of China Labor Watch

By DAVID BARBOZA, http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/26/q-and-a-with-li-qiang-of-china-labor-watch/?hp

Li Qiang, 39, is the founder of China Labor Watch, a nonprofit group in New York City that seeks to improve labor conditions in China. In the late 1990s, while studying law in southwest China’s Sichuan Province, he began supporting striking workers and taxi drivers. Later, he moved south, to China’s biggest factory zones near Shenzhen. He worked at several electronics, toy and shoe factories, where he investigated labor conditions, and tried to expose what he saw as unjust and inhumane conditions.

Now, Mr. Li works from a small office near the Empire State Building, employing a team in China that sneaks into factories, smuggles out photographs and publishes reports of illegal or abhorrent labor conditions at suppliers to some of the world’s biggest corporations. David Barboza, the Shanghai bureau chief of The New York Times, interviewed Mr. Li after doing the reporting reflected in his article, “In China, Human Costs Are Built Into an iPad,” written with Charles Duhigg.

Q. For years, labor rights groups like yours have described sweatshops and how factories serving global companies have abused and mistreated workers. What is the situation today?

A. They’ve improved a lot, but labor conditions are still poor. One reason is the local economy is directly related to the well-being of the factories. So the local government regulators don’t want to enforce a high labor standard and force the factories away.

Q. But many big factories are audited by independent firms, hired by multinational corporations. Hasn’t that improved working conditions in China?

A. Every year, 30,000 factories in China are audited. But there’s corruption in the auditing process. The factories need to pass an audit, but fixed factory costs are high, so the factory bosses bribe auditors, that is less costly. If a factory has 500 workers, to improve standards you might need to pay each worker another $20 a month. But 500 workers times $20 times 12 months is $120,000 a year. It’s much cheaper to bribe auditors.

For the international companies that had an audit done, they get what they consider to be an advertisement, or certification that they comply with all the standards. But this isn’t a true reflection of what is happening. Last year, we investigated 100 factories in China. And we found that only about 10 percent of the factories can pass the their own the international labor standards of their clients — the multinational corporations.

Q. What are some of the key problems you see when you visit the factories? What are they doing wrong?

A. The pay is the biggest issue. Based on our investigation, most workers have signed a labor contract so there is some improvement. But then the factories conceal their treatment of the workers, like they’ve shortened the lunch break from one hour to 40 minutes, so the workers lose one day a month.

Another trick for factories to lower the payment is a system called “overall working hour system.” As we know, the normal working hours are 8 hours a day, 5 days a week. If workers work overtime on weekdays, the overtime wage should be 1.5 times the original salary. If they work on the weekends, the wage should be 2 times the original salary. What the factories do is to let the workers work 6.7 hours a day, 6 days a week. So when the workers work on Saturday, they only get the original salary rather than the 2 times salary required by law. And often, they don’t only get paid with the original salary when overtime for working on Saturdays or Sundays, when you should pay double salary to them. This is the way the factories reduce the salary and increase productivity.

Q. What is your impression of Foxconn, which has some of the world’s biggest factories and is China’s biggest export machine?

A. Foxconn is not good. But if we compare all industries, electronics, textile, toys, Foxconn is one of the best. The biggest problem for Foxconn is the workers are working under a lot of pressure. They’re standing 10 to 11 hours a day. Foxconn treats the workers like they are machines.

They think about how many products they can produce, not about giving the workers a rest. But in the electronics industry all the companies are the same.

They say they’ve increased salaries, but Foxconn doesn’t say the workers have to produce more products per hour. So they have to work even harder. And the worst thing is that Foxconn is the biggest company in the industry. So they set the standard in the industry. And the working intensity has already been audited by the multinational companies, thus meeting the standards set by Foxconn’s clients.