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China's Legal Changes Create Army of Self-Taught Lawyers

from The Wall Street Journal, July 21
by Peter Wonacott

After Exposure to Poison at Work, Mr. Wu Became a Labor Crusader

SHENZHEN, China -- China's labor laws were once kept secret so workers wouldn't know when their slim rights were being violated. Now, as the nation's leaders open the door a crack to labor reform, an unexpected group is pushing to throw it wide open: aggrieved workers who have become the workplace equivalent of jailhouse lawyers.

Wu Lei is one of them. In an apartment crowded with rice cookers and wash buckets one recent evening, he held a pay stub under a flickering fluorescent light while its owner looked on expectantly.

"The company is cheating you," Mr. Wu told the man, a printing-plant apprentice who shares the apartment with seven roommates. For one thing, the pay rate on the stub was far less than the official minimum wage of 465 yuan, or about $56, a month. The apprentice's name also was missing from the stub. Mr. Wu suspected the company left it off so the apprentice can't prove it's his and thus complain to the local labor office about his wages. "You can sue them for this," said Mr. Wu.

Dressed in gray sweatpants and a green plaid shirt, the 34-year-old Mr. Wu is a pugnacious high-school dropout and unemployed factory worker. He hasn't passed a bar exam or taken a single law course. But after being exposed to toxic fumes at work, he taught himself labor law and launched a legal crusade against his employer, seeking back pay for the 11 months he spent recuperating in the hospital. Now, still in the midst of his own fight, he's joined the offices of a local legal-aid organization and become a counselor for other workers who have disputes over pay or working conditions.

"We want to show we are not weak-minded children," Mr. Wu says. "We won't be pushed around."

Thanks to a series of laws that offer workers greater protections and greater access to the legal system, Mr. Wu and others like him constitute a new class of de facto attorneys. They're former factory laborers who learned the law by devouring whatever textbooks they could find and picking up advice at one of the government's 2,400 legal-aid offices. Many of them know more about the ins and outs of China's emerging labor laws than licensed attorneys. They typically work free of charge, offering advice and sometimes actual representation to fellow workers.

Deep Change

The rise of these crusaders reflects a deep change in how China treats its workers. For most of the country's recent history, workers were locked out of the courts: The government kept many labor regulations out of the view of the public as internal orders, and low-skilled laborers who faced poor working conditions tended to switch jobs rather than confront their bosses. Licensed lawyers, usually costing several months' wages, were out of reach.

But in the 1990s, as China became the factory floor to the world, growing competition put businesses under intense pressure to reduce prices and operating costs. Many managers extended work hours and cut corners on worker training and factory maintenance. And they commonly held back wages to prevent workers from leaving for another job once they'd been trained.

Conditions became so bad that the government feared worker unrest. At the end of last year and the start of 2003, for example, there were eight protests in Shenzhen and neighboring Guangzhou where workers threatened to jump from buildings to protest unpaid wages, according to the Institute for Contemporary Observation, a think tank in Shenzhen that follows migrant-worker issues. One worker did jump, killing himself.

The government also faced external pressure. As China lobbied to join the World Trade Organization, it became eager to show it could meet global expectations for how workers should be treated.

So, starting in the mid-1990s, China began to reform its labor rules. In 1994, the government passed a labor law that, among other things, gave workers a system to challenge their employers. More followed throughout the 1990s, including a law that established the legal-aid offices to give workers free advice and another that allowed workers to represent themselves in legal proceedings. One of the most recent laws, passed as China joined the WTO in November 2001, mandated safe working conditions in factories.

Moreover, the government has loosened its grip on the media to allow TV shows to report employer abuses and encourage workers to go to court to resolve problems.

The number of labor-related arbitration claims and lawsuits is rising sharply, with 184,000 cases filed last year, according to the Ministry of Labor, up 19% from 2001 -- and almost twice the number filed in 1998. Steeper increases are reported in coastal cities such as Shenzhen, one of China's oldest and most important export bases. Workers won 47% of their cases last year, compared with 15% for companies; the rest were settled.

While Chinese courts are tolerating more worker-employer disputes, they remain powerful instruments in crushing organized dissent and other threats to Communist Party control. One court in Northeastern China recently handed down long jail sentences to two men who had led large-scale protests of laid-off workers.

Mr. Wu's own battle began on a winter day in 2001. He remembers gasping for breath as he walked around the block to his employer, Qianli Printing Co. It took him 45 minutes to make the short trip. At work, his legs trembled and arms tingled. Mr. Wu stayed awake at night wondering what was wrong with him.

In January 2002, he checked into a hospital in Guangzhou. Seven other workers from the plant soon followed. They all were told they had been over-exposed to N-Hexane -- a hazardous chemical found in the solvent white petroleum, which is used to scrub colored ink off printing machines.

High concentrations of N-Hexane cause dizziness, respiratory difficulty and potentially fatal problems in the central nervous system. Mr. Wu got so many injections of vitamins B1, B2 and B12 to help repair damaged nerves that veins on the back of both hands collapsed.

Authorities in Shenzhen had considered the hazards of N-Hexane serious enough to issue usage guidelines three years ago. Factories were required to post signs warning that "Excessive Inhaling of White Petroleum Causes Nerve Damage," according to the Baoan district government, which is a suburb of Shenzhen. Anyone working with white petroleum was required to wear a mask.

Mr. Wu says that the company never told workers to wear masks, and signs were put up in the factory only after workers got sick. To keep up with big orders of books and calendars, he says, the print-shop team worked as much as 12 hours a day without breaks, going months at a time without a day off. Windows were sealed to keep out humidity, and the air, recirculated through air conditioners, was thick with the smell of solvent.

Yu Xueyan, a manager at the factory and son of the general manager, says Qianli "has always had a warning sign in the plant telling the workers to be careful in using the cleaning chemicals."

Yu Xueyan's father, Yu Renhao, the printing company's top executive, believes Mr. Wu and his colleagues got sick because they were careless, leaving lids off jars of solvent. He adds that their hospital bills were paid through a social-welfare fund to which the company contributed. "I have no regrets" about the working conditions faced by Mr. Wu and other employees, the elder Mr. Yu says.

The ties between the elder Mr. Yu and Mr. Wu go back to Mr. Wu's childhood. In the mid-1980s, Mr. Yu helped manage a printing plant in the Wu family's neighborhood in central Hubei province. Mr. Wu's father was principal of a school on the grounds of the plant.

The younger Mr. Wu describes himself as a rambunctious kid, getting into fights and stealing freshly printed books while Mr. Yu looked the other way. When he turned 16, Mr. Wu dropped out of school and went to work at the plant, despite protests from his father. Mr. Yu eventually left the plant to run a print shop in Shenzhen, and in 2000 offered Mr. Wu a job at his new company.

Even after getting sick, and spending months in the hospital, Mr. Wu planned to go back to work at the printing plant to show allegiance to Mr. Yu. Then a TV crew visited the hospital to publicize the new law on occupational illnesses. The crew interviewed several people and encouraged Mr. Wu to explore his legal options.

His thinking began to change. He wrote an anonymous letter to his boss saying hospitalized workers were entitled to the same level of wages -- including overtime -- that they had received at the factory. The letter, titled "The Ugly Face of the Qianli Boss," accused the company of flouting labor standards and exploiting workers.

Mr. Yu had no doubt who wrote the letter. He asked Mr. Wu's father to smooth things out with his son. When the son wouldn't back down, the father says he wrote back: "Sorry my son is causing you so much trouble."

Meanwhile, Mr. Wu buried himself in legal research. He and three other hospitalized workers spent their mornings receiving intravenous vitamin drips, then scoured bookshops and libraries in the afternoon to research how to recover their lost wages. Last November, all four went back to the printing plant, but were fired two days later and told that their work contracts had expired.

Mr. Wu decided to sue, and his family lined up behind him. His wife took a bookkeeping job in Hubei, about 620 miles from Shenzhen, to help cover their living expenses, while Mr. Wu's parents moved to Shenzhen and used their savings to rent a one-room apartment and take care of his four-year-old daughter.

Mr. Wu bought a tape recorder, a mobile phone and started carrying a black valise. He and a fellow worker hooked up with a local legal-aid society and studied with one of its lawyers for three months.

With his three colleagues, he decided to sue Qianli for about $18,000. At the local labor-dispute arbitration commission, the workers cited China's labor law and the new occupational-illness law in demanding compensation for their injuries, lost wages and the unfair termination of contracts. In May, the panel ordered Qianli to pay the group about $10,116, including $5,875 to Mr. Wu.

Qianli's lawyer, Ren Jie, says the company accepted the decision. He describes Mr. Wu's courtroom performance, grudgingly, as "acceptable."

Mr. Wu and his colleagues weren't satisfied and appealed to the Shenzhen People's Court. They wanted the full amount they'd asked for, which would cover lost overtime and medical expenses incurred after leaving the hospital. A decision is expected Aug. 5.

But there was more at stake than money. "This is a legal education for me," Mr. Wu says. "I want to see, in the end, how just the Chinese law really is."

Mr. Wu's family returned home last month, and he is barely able to afford living expenses. He has considered dropping the case and finding another job. But for now he vows to appeal. He says he thinks about it each time he picks up his daughter. "I want to hold her without my arms shaking," says Mr. Wu.

In the hospital, Mr. Wu proffered advice to other sick workers, and some began accepting his help. Among others, he advised a group of three women who successfully sued their bosses for N-Hexane exposure. Now, as a counselor in the legal-aid office, he spends eight hours a day advising people.

His methods have been unconventional. For a female patient from rural Guizhou province, also exposed to N-Hexane, he posed as a representative from a legal-aid organization, confronted her boss and demanded compensation for the three years the woman spent in the hospital. When the boss called the local branch of the All China Federation of Trade Unions to check Mr. Wu's identity, a union representative who knew Mr. Wu vouched for him and advised the boss to settle. The boss gave the woman $400, but fearful of a slew of new claims, he insisted she not inform other workers of the settlement, according to Mr. Wu.

Though he declined to share any proceeds from the settlement, Mr. Wu accepted the woman's offer to cook his family dinner and give his daughter a dress.