Mobilizing Without the Masses: Control and Contention in China (Cambridge Studies in Contentious Politics) by Diana Fu

Author:Diana Fu
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2017-11-08T16:00:00+00:00

From Frames to Action

While activists deliberately constructed diagnostic and prognostic frames to influence workers’ interpretation of labor exploitation, they did not provide a blueprint of action because the organization’s primary mission was to raise workers’ awareness of labor rights and to inspire them to work together to devise specific forms of collective action. The construction of these frames inspired some of the participants to experiment with micro-collective action. Thus, when Solidarity in Action’s workers ultimately decided to stage a flash demonstration in front of the court-house to protest the blacklisting of worker-activists by the manufacturers’ association, they did so because they had been inspired by the organization’s pedagogy.

The lead activist of the flash demonstrations was Jay,8 a skilled worker in his mid-twenties who had been working in the industry for over a decade. As a committed participant of Solidarity in Action, Jay emerged as a leader in the micro-collective action taken against the manufacturers’ association. He had been employed as a department leader with a team of twenty workers under him. While employed, he noticed that the factory management was pressuring workers to quit before the end of their contract terms by reducing their hours and falsely accusing them of violating factory codes. The management would hire cheap replacements in the form of temporary interns who were paid less. In addition, the factory failed to pay overtime wages and did not purchase social insurance for its workers even though this was stipulated in the labor contracts workers had signed.

After Jay and three other department leaders reported these violations to the local Labor Bureau, they were fired without compensation. When they attempted to find employment in other factories, potential employers told them that they had been put on the association’s blacklist. Jay and his colleagues set out to collect evidence in preparation for civil lawsuits. They obtained a copy of the blacklist and covertly recorded a hiring manager who told Jay that he had been blacklisted and that no enterprise belonging to the association would hire him. With this evidence in hand, Jay and two other worker-participants of Solidarity in Action filed a civil lawsuit with the district court against their employers for putting their names on the blacklist of “trouble-making” employees. They also filed a separate lawsuit against the association, which eventually made its way to the Municipal Intermediate People’s Court.

On the day of the district court’s hearing, nearly two dozen workers from across the industry crowded into the courtroom to show support. It was hoped that such a demonstration of solidarity would pressure the judge to hold a fair trial for Jay and his fellow plaintiffs. Initially, court officials attempted to prevent workers from entering the courtroom as observers. The workers subsequently entered into a verbal dispute with court authorities, insisting that they had the right as stipulated by Chinese law to observe a public hearing. In the end, court officials permitted a limited number of workers to audit the case and ordered the rest to wait outside (Participant observation, 2010).

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