悉尼先驱晨报 中国工人开始翻身

当大多数中国工人接受十年来第一次真正的工资增长，数以百计智障和其他方面无能力的男孩和男人被困于黑砖窑。尽管一些与世事隔绝的城市居民仍然否认，但这场惨剧引起社会和政府多个层次的深刻反思。

　　一些知识分子关注法律和问责结构的缺失，注意到共产主义时代与封建时代之间深刻的连贯性。

　　中国大量受剥削的工人往往是“移民”劳动者（农民工），他们的官方联系在乡下，但在遥远的城镇和城市赚取收入。他们很少获得城市居民的权利、保护和特权。他们面临的歧视是历史性的、文化的、深深制度化的。

　　这些工人可以用作谈判筹码的就是他们的劳动。当有百万农民在等着取代他们，他们坐在生产线上或下矿井的时候筹码不会增加很多。

　　中国“低人权”模式和它不断增长的全球经济影响力相结合，意味着它的劳动力市场状况具有全球重要性。非技术工人在数千年来首次获得谈判的力量。

　　来自中国社科院的蔡昉（Cai Fang）表示工资突然上涨，老板不按时支付薪水的事件减少。在他看来，原因是富余劳动力的池子在枯竭。他估计中国农村可能仅有2500万剩余劳动力——占劳动力的5%。

　　有证据表明，在某些地区和行业，曾经以为劳动力是消耗品的雇主如今思考如何吸引员工留下来。新加坡国立大学东亚研究所的澳大利亚研究员凯利（David Kelly）表示，“你越来越断绝那种认为中国的相对优势永远是低工资的想法。如果广东（领先的制造省份）想要维持它的优势，它必须更像新加坡——而且不要做一个永久基于杀价竞争的加工中心。”

　　一个行业接一个行业，一个省接一个省，中国雇主门慢慢学会要用奖赏让工人高兴。广东并非工人的天堂，但“企业社会责任”早已不是一个完全陌生的词组了。

　　狭义来讲，中国紧缩的劳动力市场已经影响商品的价格和全球劳动密集型产业的分布。

　　工人日益增长的谈判力量应该会鼓励官员放宽农民工面临的某些制度化的歧视。对自己工作所在的经济和法律体系的架构，普通人第一次开始拥有发言权。如果他们不喜欢它，他们可以和不同的工作场所或不同的省谈，或者他们可以直接回家。凯利表示，“劳动力短缺”是争取公民权利的一种表达，在战术层面来讲，斗争的方法是“退出”或者“用脚投票（即如果不赞成就走开）”。

　　这开始影响中国的社会契约。它还可能迫使地方官员回答上下的提问，阻止黑砖窑那样的悲剧。（作者 John Garnaut）

China's workers start to shift the balance

SCANDAL does not begin to describe the black brick kiln tragedy uncovered in China's coal-smeared midwest this year. While most Chinese workers were receiving their first real wage increases in a decade, hundreds of mentally disabled or otherwise powerless boys and men were trapped and sometimes worked or beaten to death by officially connected brick barons.

While some insulated city-dwellers remained in denial, the tragedy sparked a deep introspection at most tiers of society and government.

Some intellectuals focused on the lack of legal and accountability structures, noting deep continuities between feudal and communist times.

This is Wu Si, a historian, author and vice-president of the intellectual magazine Yanhuang Chunqiu, or Chinese Chronicles, speaking about the brick kilns to Southern Metropolis Weekend in June: "If China did not have this sort of thing, then I'd find it strange. Because the core power structure has not changed: it is still an upwardly responsible pyramid."

To Wu Si, pockets of forced labour are the predictable result of a "local tyrant system" that has thrived in China under feudalism and communism. The system is institutionalised partly because even the labourers come to believe they have no entitlement to anything better. Other Chinese thinkers see an even broader problem, where the black brick kilns are but one severe point on a spectrum of abusive labour practices.

These critics look at the millions working in unsafe coalmines, on construction sites and in factories who receive their wages in arrears, or not at all. They tend to work 94-hour weeks, receive little or no compensation when injured or maimed and earn wages below those in comparable developing countries. One thinker who, like Wu Si, has been named one of China's top 50 public intellectuals by the magazine Southern Weekend, believes China has a "low human rights advantage" over its competitors.

How else, he asks, can you explain the movement of manufacturers from low-income countries such as India to a middle-income country such as China? The following passage is from his paper which, with any luck, will be openly published soon: "This global transformation is not only - not even mainly - a shift of industries from high-wage to low-wage regions. It is instead a shift of industries from regions of 'high' to 'low' human rights."

China's teeming mass of exploited workers tends to be "migrant" labourers, who officially live in the countryside but earn their incomes in far-away towns or cities. They have few of the rights, protections and privileges afforded to urban residents. The discrimination they face is historical, cultural and deeply institutionalised.

All these workers have to bargain with is their labour. That does not add up to much when they are sitting on a production line or down a mine shaft when there a million other peasants waiting to take their places.

The combination of China's "low human rights" model and its growing global economic dominance means the state of its labour market is of global importance. Unskilled workers are gaining bargaining power for the first time in thousands of years.

Cai Fang, from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, has shown that wages are suddenly rising and the incidence of bosses failing to pay workers is declining. The reason, in his view, is that the vast wells of surplus labour are drying up. He estimates there may be as few as 25 million surplus labourers left in rural China - 5 per cent of the labour force.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that, in some regions and industries, employers who once thought of labour as expendable are now thinking about how they can entice workers to stay. Dr David Kelly, an Australian researcher at the National University of Singapore's East Asian Institute, says: "You're getting weaned off the idea that China's comparative advantage is forever a matter of low wages. If Guangdong [the leading manufacturing province] wants to preserve its advantage, it needs to be more like Singapore - and not forever a processing centre based on the race to the bottom."

Industry by industry, province by province, Chinese employers are slowly learning to place a premium on keeping workers happy. Guangdong is not exactly a worker's paradise but phrases like "corporate social responsibility" are no longer completely unknown.

In narrow terms, China's tightening labour market is already affecting the cost of goods and the global distribution of labour-intensive industry.

Workers' growing bargaining power should encourage officials to loosen some of the institutionalised discrimination that migrant workers have faced.

For the first time, ordinary people are beginning to have a say in the structure of the economic and legal system in which they work. If they do not like it they can walk to a different workplace or a different province, or they can just go back home.

"The 'dearth of labour' is thus an expression of the struggle for citizen rights," Kelly says. "In tactical terms, the method of struggle is 'exit' or 'voting with their feet'."

This is starting to affect China's social compact. It may yet force local officials to answer to those they govern as well as those they report to further up the tree - which would prevent tragedies like the black brick kilns.

For the world, the question is whether workers' bargaining power is growing fast enough to break China's "low human rights" workplace model before it exports that model to the world.