A Worker’s Revolt That Would Make Karl Marx Proud

China has ten million slaves. The definition of a slave is someone who is given work and food but no wages. That’s what these people are.

—Professor Zhou Xiaozheng, People’s University of China

China’s factory workers are not only some of the hardest working and most disciplined in the world. They also are forced to toil in dangerous and oppressive working conditions not seen since the Dickensian nineteenth century.

The worst of the worst are China’s coal mines, where thousands of miners die annually and tens of thousands more are severely injured. In these mines, peasants are routinely forced to sign what are derisively referred to as “life-and-death contracts” that revoke all legal claims and grant them a small lump-sum payment in the event of death or injury.

Meanwhile, in China’s factories, large and small, thousands of workers are dismembered or killed on a monthly basis—literally ground up by machinery. Thousands more are exposed to lethal doses of chemicals or dust that, years later, will take their lives.

It is not just that working conditions can be horrific. In many cases, the wages that workers do earn are not even paid. This most typically happens to migrant laborers in China’s cities who are ruthlessly exploited because of their second-class status. The amount of monies withheld by unscrupulous employers is staggering, running into the billions of dollars each year.

The problem is most acute in China’s frenetic construction industry, where it is common practice to feed and house the migrant workers but withhold their wages. The tragedy here is that the construction industry is second only to mining in terms of health and safety risks. As in the coal mines, most construction workers are poor migrants, and their injuries and casualties typically go unreported.

This is hardly the only slave labor in China. In an economic arrangement that harks back to the days of the Maoist communes, many enterprises house their workers in dormitories, which effectively turn China’s workers into either slaves or indentured servants. In some cases, bars on the windows prevent their escape. In other cases, the “bars” are purely economic because many workers are forced to sign labor contracts that effectively indenture their services to a company for a long period. If a worker breaks this contract, the worker will owe the company such a large sum of money that it would be impossible to pay it.

Of course, all the problems are compounded by the lack of any meaningful worker-protection laws, the outlawing of labor unions by the government, and the lack of enforcement of the few labor laws on the books. Is it any wonder that a seething rage in the Chinese workplace is spilling over into increasingly violent worker protests?