Zhou Hujun, one of thousands of shoe factory workers on strike in southern China, drove his motorbike to the local government’s Social Security department seeking answers. After a few minutes, he left clutching spreadsheets that just raised more questions.
Zhou and other striking workers believe Yue Yuen Industrial (Holdings) Ltd (裕元工業), which owns the factory making footwear for Nike, Adidas and others, has for years underpaid into workers’ social insurance accounts — government-mandated nest eggs for disability, unemployment and retirement.
The issue goes far beyond the shoe plant and highlights a looming problem for China: The workforce that has transformed the country into a global manufacturing powerhouse over the past 35 years is coming up to retirement age, and, as these millions of blue-collar workers begin claiming retirement benefits from local social security funds, they may find there is less in the pot than they thought.
Photo: Reuters
The underpayment of social insurance contributions is common practice by factory owners across China, labor lawyers say.
The strike at Yue Yuen — which says it is the world’s largest manufacturer of branded footwear, making over 300 million pairs of shoes last year — is not just one of China’s biggest in recent years, it is also more clearly driven by workers’ fears that they have been scammed by an opaque and convoluted welfare payment system.
Today’s workers in China — a total workforce of some 920 million — know more about their rights and are more active in using both collective action and the law to protect their interests.
The Yue Yuen strike comes amid a wave of industrial activism, with the number of work protests in China so far this year up by close to a third, according to China Labor Bulletin, a Hong Kong-based labor rights group — as firms cut costs and retrench in response to slowing growth in the world’s second-largest economy.
At the social security office in Gaobu, a Pearl River Delta factory town that is home to a Yue Yuen industrial complex, workers like Zhou flocked to collect detailed printouts of the history of payments made into their accounts.
Workers told reporters that they felt Yue Yuen has short-changed them by under-contributing company payments into their social insurance accounts. Each month, both the company and the employee pay into these accounts — often 10 to 20 percent of the total paycheck.
Zhang Zhiru (張治儒), a prominent labor activist who was shown copies of Yue Yuen pay slips, said the company had paid a lower social insurance contribution based on workers’ base salary, rather than a substantially higher full wage including overtime.
“China’s social insurance law stipulates that social insurance payments should be based on the actual salary,” he said.
While China’s National Council for Social Security Funds requires local authorities overseeing social insurance funds to put the money into low-risk vehicles such as bank deposits or Treasury bonds, corruption has blighted the system for years. Former Shanghai Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Secretary Chen Liangyu (陳良宇) was arrested in 2006 after siphoning off millions from the city’s pension fund.
Another point of contention at Yue Yuen is that most, if not all, workers are listed as “temporary,” even though they say they signed contracts years ago. Some also said the figures on their spreadsheets did not add up, while the savings were difficult to cash in or transfer when they left the company.
“We feel like we were tricked,” said Liu Shuixiang, who works on a production line for Nike at Yue Yuen, and who visited the social security office a day earlier.
“I’ve been at the factory for more than 10 years and my account only has about 11,800 yuan [US$1,900] in it. They’ve taken out more than 150 yuan from my salary [each month] and should have been paying more than 300 yuan a month,” she said.
In a filing with the Hong Kong stock exchange, where its shares are listed, Yue Yuen said on Thursday that it would improve benefits beginning May 1.
Workers said they were unimpressed, and want Yue Yuen to back-pay the social insurance shortfall.
“They say they’re only going to start to pay from May 1, but what about the past?” Liu said. “What we’re doing isn’t stirring up trouble. We’re just protecting our rights.”
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day
Thousands of parents in Singapore are furious after a Cordlife Group Ltd (康盛人生集團), a major operator of cord blood banks in Asia, irreparably damaged their children’s samples through improper handling, with some now pursuing legal action. The ongoing case, one of the worst to hit the largely untested industry, has renewed concerns over companies marketing themselves to anxious parents with mostly unproven assurances. This has implications across the region, given Cordlife’s operations in Hong Kong, Macau, Indonesia, the Philippines and India. The parents paid for years to have their infants’ cord blood stored, with the understanding that the stem cells they contained