Workers in the fabled efficient and regimented factories in China, where all of the electronic toys that the western world uses every minute of every day, are becoming restless in the slave-like condition in which they toil.

They are sick and tired of the long days, the long weeks, the often-dangerous conditions, the barbed-wire dormitories, and the low pay of their jobs.  They came from around their country to work, but they did not think that they would be kept like so much livestock.

What is the solution to their complaints?  They have, together, demonstrated to the companies that make some of the most popular electronic devices used by millions of Americans, that they are sick and tired of the exploitation and they want changes and they want them now.

The way they’re talking, you’d think that there were union organizers scattered broadly throughout their midst.  But, you’d be wrong.  In China, it doesn’t work that way.  Rather, the tens of thousands of “job actions” and strikes that are occurring each year in China are merely the response of human beings that want to be treated as human beings.  Without actually being on the shop floors, it appears that these actions are spontaneous and are just human reactions to unbearable stresses and strains of their living and working conditions.

Chinese workers do, indeed, need unions.  They need to be able to work in conditions that are humane and bearable, because they have had a direct hand in creating them.  This is the ideal of a broadly supported union movement within a democratic society:  people take charge of their lives and, in the process, they make it better for their families, their own communities, and, eventually, for the nation.  That was the idea, even in the U.S.

Somewhere along the way in the U.S., however, the use of the First Amendment by very powerful elements in society in the U.S. resulted in a propaganda barrage that has turned the very workers who would benefit from a union against the very idea of a union.  This assault has resulted in the Citizens United U.S. Supreme Court decision, wherein five justices of the court decreed that money is speech and corporations are human beings.  As such, Corporate America could spend as much money as it wants to further its own agenda and there shall be no curb on their acting as though they were people.

As a result, there is no stopping them in the political arena.  And, there is no convincing a sizable percentage of American workers that there are profound benefits in joining a union, which would provide higher wages, good benefits (including health care), and a secure retirement.  The corporate propaganda has worked…for nearly a century.  It has had four or five generations to fully implant itself in the body politic.

Chinese workers are at a similar place in their progress as American workers were early in the 20^th Century, in that there is little in the way of a formal or legal way to defend themselves and to improve their lives.  Under those conditions, workers spontaneously react to abuse and exploitation.  That’s what American workers did and that’s what Chinese workers have been, and are, doing.

Each year there are scores of thousands of job actions and strikes in China, some have involved burning cars and destruction of other property.  Most of the actions, however, have been non-violent and there have been some concessions by authorities, some higher pay and improved working conditions.  To accomplish small progress, it has taken unrest that would be unheard of in the U.S., at least in 2012.  China has about one billion more in population than the U.S., so it takes much tighter control measures to handle the millions of workers in their cities and factories.

One of the ways that they have attempted to make a distinction between urban and rural workers is a system of identification papers, started in Mao’s time, which determines where one can seek services, and there is no way without great difficulty that they can change rural papers to urban ones.  Rural workers who work in urban factories are called migrant workers in China and those workers can be forced to send their children back to their rural villages for schooling, housing, welfare, or other services.  A December 2011 BBC report noted that officials have admitted that granting equal rights to migrant workers is a “major challenge.”

And, the rural workers are not going to return to their villages, even though conditions are not good in the urban factories, like those in Guangzhou, described by BBC as “China's manufacturing megacity.”  There are 14 million workers in that city alone and seven million of them are migrants.  Workers in other areas of life in the hub city, such as bus drivers and laborers, have taken job actions or strikes and the inclination to do so is growing.

Workers may not know what it is that they are manufacturing, but they know they want to live more like the people who buy those products at the retail end.  They want the same things.  They want to be consumers, for better or worse, not just cogs in a manufacturing machine.  A growing number of North Americans, Europeans, and Japanese are beginning to realize the limits to a consumer society and the potential harm to the ever more fragile environment that is so negatively affected by such a system.  They are trying to change that system to a more sustainable one, but it’s a tough sell. 

The average Chinese worker, farmer, or laborer doesn’t want to hear about the necessary austerity of a more sustainable society.  People earning a few dollars a day for a 16-hour day and a six-day week want higher pay, benefits, security in old age, good food and education for their children.  They want what other people in other countries want. 

This presents a problem for workers and consumers in other countries, who want cheap electronics and computers, yet they probably (most of them, anyway, in the abstract) would say that all workers should be treated fairly and compensated properly.  But, are they willing to pay twice as much for their cell phones, computers, and other devices, so that Chinese workers can be paid a decent wage and live at a decent standard of living?  It’s not likely.  They might be willing to pay a little more, but not so much as to achieve what we might call a living wage.

In a country where legal remedies time-consuming and rare, the people, whether they are professors, laborers, doctors, farmers, or factory workers, are finding that direct action is the quickest to gain the attention of the government.  A riot may even be better.  The government and the richest entrepreneurs in China just want the problem to go away and are becoming more willing to negotiate an end to the strife, so that they can get back to making money. 

It appears that Chinese workers, unlike most U.S. workers today, are beginning to understand that concerted action is vital to advancement of the working class.  This is something that most U.S. workers once understood.  Out of that understanding came the union movement, which improved working class life and set the standard for all workers in the nation.  Somewhere along the way, they fell prey to a philosophy that eventually led them to believe the propaganda that “hard work would be rewarded and the boss’ door is always open…just as long as you do not have anything to do with a union.”  What they were not noticing was that, as long as there was a strong union movement, the living standard of all workers was improved and enhanced, and they had some democracy in the workplace.  Along the way, that knowledge was lost, the union movement was diminished, and the living standard of U.S. workers has dropped like a stone.

Workers in this country have to summon the grit that it will take to equal the Chinese workers’ courage, even in the face of a repressive regime.  In solidarity, U.S. workers need to say that they will be willing to pay more for products that come out of wage slavery, or worse.  Unless and until workers in other countries have a decent standard of living, few manufacturing jobs will return and there will be a wrenching period of adjustment for the U.S. working class, until there is a different way of providing energy and a different way of producing the things that we need.

In the meantime, workers in China will have to fight the same fights that were fought in 1930s America, leading to that short period of our history when workers joined together, in unions, and showed what can be accomplished when democratic principles are put into effect.  Chinese workers don’t have the same amount of time to accomplish their goals, but then, considering the state of working America, neither do we.

BlackCommentator.com Columnist, John Funiciello, is a labor organizer and former union organizer. His union work started when he became a local president of The Newspaper Guild in the early 1970s. He was a reporter for 14 years for newspapers in New York State. In addition to labor work, he is organizing family farmers as they struggle to stay on the land under enormous pressure from factory food producers and land developers. Click here to contact Mr. Funiciello.