Worked until they drop: Factory workers in China face brutal conditions

THE DIFFERENCE between labor law and reality in China can be deadly. Chinese newspapers even have a term for it — guolaosi — meaning 'overwork death.' Lawyers are discouraged from taking up cases, and workers — mostly migrants from small, rural, peasant villages — have little recourse.

SONGGANG, China — On the night she died, Li Chunmei must have been exhausted.

Co-workers said she'd been on her feet for nearly 16 hours, running parts from machine to machine inside the Bainan Toy Factory. When the quitting bell finally rang shortly after midnight, her young face was covered with sweat.

This was the busy season, before Christmas, when orders peaked from Japan and the United States for the factory's stuffed animals. Long hours were mandatory, and at least two months had passed since Li and the other workers had enjoyed even a Sunday off.

In bed that night, the slight 19-year-old complained she felt worn out, her roommates recalled. She was massaging her aching legs, and coughing, and she was hungry. The factory food was so bad, she said, she felt as if she hadn't eaten at all.

"I want to quit," one roommate, Huang Jiaqun, remembered her saying. "I want to go home."

Her roommates were already asleep when Li started coughing up blood. They found her on the bathroom floor a few hours later, moaning softly in the dark, bleeding from her nose and mouth. She died before the ambulance arrived.

The exact cause of Li's death remains unknown. But what happened to her last November in this industrial town in southeastern Guangdong province is described by family, friends and co-workers as an example of what China's more daring newspapers call guolaosi. The phrase means "overwork death," and usually applies to young workers who collapse and die after working exceedingly long hours, day after day.

There has been little research on what causes these deaths, or how often they occur. Many are never documented, say local journalists, who estimate that dozens die under such circumstances every year in the Pearl River Delta area alone, the booming manufacturing region north of Hong Kong.

The stories of these deaths highlight labor conditions that are the norm for a new generation of workers in China, tens of millions of migrants who have flocked from the nation's impoverished countryside to its prospering coast.

In a historic shift, these migrant workers now number more than 200 million by some estimates, more than the 80 million employees working in China's shrinking state industries.

They are younger, poorer, and less familiar with the promises of labor rights and job security that once were the ideological bedrock of the ruling Communist Party. They're more likely to work for private companies that are often backed by foreign investment, with no socialist tradition of cradle-to-grave benefits.

They're also second-class citizens, with less access to the weak courts and trade unions that sometimes temper market forces as China's economy changes from socialist to capitalist. Most of all, they are outsiders, struggling to make a living far from home.

Li Chunmei's home was the village of Xiaoeshan, a remote hamlet high in the mountains of western Sichuan province, 700 miles and a world away from the factories of Songgang, where she died.

The area remains among the poorest in China, with no roads, one telephone, and limited electricity and plumbing. There are no tractors — just oxen, a few primitive tools and peasants who till the earth with their hands. Few residents can read; even fewer speak the national language, Mandarin.

Li was the second of five children born to parents who squeeze out a living from small plots on terraces carved into the mountainside.

"This is a poor village, and all the parents here want their children to leave for the cities as soon as possible," said Li's father, Li Zhimin, in the house he built of packed dirt. "The sooner they go, the sooner they can help support the family."

Villagers eat most of what they grow, and by selling the rest they earn an average annual income of about $25 each. But local officials demand about $37 per person in taxes and fees. Several peasants who refused to pay last year were arrested.

Residents say there's only one way to survive: Pull the children out of school, and later send them to find work in faraway cities.

Li took both Li Chunmei and his eldest daughter, Li Mei, out of school in the third grade to farm and feed the livestock. At 15, Li Mei boarded a bus to Shenzhen, the special economic zone adjacent to Hong Kong.

Two years later, Li Mei returned home with more than $100 in savings. Li Chunmei, then 15, announced she was ready to join her sister. At the end of the holiday, Li Zhimin accompanied his daughters on the long walk through the mountains to the nearest bus station. Li Chunmei was crying quietly, he recalled.

The train ride lasted three days and three nights.

When they reached the elevated expressway between Guangzhou and Shenzhen, Li Chunmei caught her first glimpse of the factory complexes of the Pearl River Delta, her sister said. Lining the road were drab, concrete dormitories, decorated only by lines of laundry hanging from window to window. Late at night, passing motorists can see, through factory windows, rows of young women hunched over machines, working under florescent lights.

The sisters disembarked in Dongguan, a fast-growing city of 9 million, of whom more than 7 million are migrant workers. Li Mei had a job waiting there, and arranged one for her little sister, too.

But Li Chunmei's first year in the factories ended abruptly when a motorcycle struck her and broke her leg as she crossed the street. She went home to recuperate and didn't return for more than a year.

This time Li, now 17, settled in Songgang, northwest of Shenzhen, and joined her sister at work at a Korean toy manufacturer, Kaiming Industrial.

In the next two years, friends and relatives said, Li worked in three different plants that produced stuffed animals, one run by Kaiming and two others that regularly received orders from the company.

Songgang is dominated by fenced-in industrial complexes that produce all manner of clothes, toys and electronic goods for world markets. In the evenings, after quitting time, young men and women stroll through town, factory ID tags pinned to their uniforms.

Inside the factory, life followed a rigid routine, co-workers said. Li was out of bed by 7:30 a.m. and at her post by 8. At noon, she had 90 minutes for lunch and a quick nap. At 5:30 she had 30 minutes for dinner. Overtime began at 6, and the quitting bell usually didn't ring until after midnight.

Workers said most employees were assigned to assembly lines that stitched together stuffed animals. Li was a runner, co-workers said, always on her feet. When one worker finished a task, a runner would pick up the toy and race it to the next worker on the line. An average line had 25 workers and just two or three runners, and produced up to 1,000 toys a day.

"There were no breaks, and there was no air conditioning," said one worker on Li's assembly line who asked to be identified by his surname, Liu. The air was full of fibers, Liu added, and with the heat from the machines, the temperature sometimes climbed above 90 degrees.

Runners were paid the least, about 12 cents per hour, workers said. During the busy season, including extra pay for overtime, Li could earn about $65 a month.

But workers said the company withheld about $12 a month for room and board and charged them for benefits they never received, such as the temporary residence permits they needed to live and work in Songgang legally. Managers could also impose arbitrary fines for such penalties as spending more than five minutes in the bathroom or failing to meet production quotas, workers said.

Two months before she died, Li Chunmei was transferred from the main Kaiming factory to a new plant down the street, the Bainan Toy Factory, where she and about 60 other Kaiming employees began making toys under the supervision of her manager at Kaiming, Wu Duoqin, co-workers said.

There, conditions worsened. It was peak season, and Wu pressed her employees to work longer hours, sometimes past 2 a.m. or 3 a.m., workers said. They worked every day for more than 60 days.

"Everyone has to work overtime. You have no choice. Even if you're sick, you have to work," said one of Li's co-workers who asked to be identified only by her surname, Zhao. "But we don't even get paid for all of the overtime. ... For example, we might work six or seven hours extra, but then they just put down three or four hours on the timecards."

Less than a week before she died, Li begged her line manager for a day off, pleading exhaustion. He refused. Li skipped a night shift to catch up on sleep and was docked three days' pay, co-workers recalled. Friends said Li often spoke of quitting, but the factory hadn't paid her for two months and she feared she might not get the money if she quit. Several workers were in similar situations.

Many conditions described by Li's co-workers violate Chinese law. The minimum wage in Songgang is about 30 cents per hour. China limits overtime to 36 hours per month and prohibits arbitrary fines and pay deductions. But enforcement is weak.

One Chinese journalist who has investigated working conditions in the Pearl River Delta said the problem is a "merger of interests" between local government officials and factory managers. The officials, eager to stimulate investment and generate taxes and bribes, often are willing to overlook labor rights and safety violations, he said.

Under a government system intended to restrict population movement, migrants enjoy fewer rights and welfare benefits than workers in the old state factories, and police can arbitrarily arrest and repatriate them to their home towns.

Foreign outcry over sweatshop labor has led some multinational firms to monitor conditions in their factories — measures undermined by a system of subcontracting.

For example, Kaiming Industrial receives orders to produce toys for a variety of brand-name companies, but their inspectors rarely visit the company, according to a senior manager who spoke on condition of anonymity.

He said the factory maintains good labor standards because it farms out the least profitable and most difficult orders to factories with lower standards, including Bainan, and then just takes a commission. The Bainan factory, in turn, distributes some of its workload to subcontractors such as Wu Duoqin, who employed Li, he said.

"So you see, she wasn't working for us," he said. "It's not our problem."

After his daughter's death, Li Zhimin traveled to Songgang. For 28 days, he said, he tried to get someone to take responsibility for what happened.

The police sent him to the local labor bureau, which sent him to the Bainan factory, where managers refused to see him. He tried the district-level labor bureau, which sent him to the local commerce department and the Shenzhen city labor bureau.

The local labor bureau declared his daughter's death "non-work-related."

Eventually, he said, Kaiming Industrial pressured Wu Duoqin to pay for Li Chunmei's funeral, his expenses in Songgang and his bus ticket home. His daughter Li Mei returned with him.

Now, the family is again struggling to make ends meet. Li Mei plans to return to the factories next year.