Four months' salary was not paid: hundreds of workers in Shanghai went on strike, moving from the factory door to the Labour Court

On 18 August, the Watt Group sub-facilized factory in the Kating region of Shanghai did not sound the same machine as usual. Hundreds of workers in the three factories, Hua Valley, Son Won and Walter, stopped working and began to recover wages that had been outstanding for months. In the days that followed, they did not wait for the problem to be resolved quickly, and the operation continued from the factory to the outside. The Chinese collective protest website “Faceday” recorded that the strike continued until August 21.

The workers then went to the Labour Personnel Disputes Court of the Carten District. (a) For a functioning labour security system, the minimum legal relationship in which workers are paid after being offered a contract; However, the reality of these workers is that the work done becomes a debt to the enterprise and that the payment of wages requires a halt to work, a meeting and a call to the government.

The on-site claims are not complex: they are paid.

“Faceday” records that the workers concerned were held in arrears for up to four months. The Walt Group, based in Shanghai, is a car spare parts business, which deals with automobile interiors, noise-proofing components and high-molecular materials, and supplies products to the upper-air public, the upper-air general, the first-square public, Ford and others.

This background makes the strike particularly interesting. China’s new energy-based automobile and automobile exports have been officially shaped in recent years to make important industrial advances, but real operating pressures at the end of the chain are often not reflected in production and export figures. When the cash flow of the spare parts enterprise deteriorates, it is often the macro-statistical tables that are the first to bear the costs, but rather the wages of the workers.

From 18 to 21 days, workers ' actions were directed to factories, labour arbitration bodies and group headquarters. This movement has itself shown the problem: workers first ask for their own wages from the company, when the enterprise is unable to solve it, and then look for the government labour security system; If the formal system is still unable to pay wages quickly, the only tools they can use in the end are collective stoppages and public expression.

The Communist Party has long claimed to represent the working class, but in reality Chinese workers do not have the right to organize independently. The All-China Trade Union is under the leadership of the Communist Party of China, and unions that are truly established by workers themselves and that are able to organize strikes and collective bargaining independently are not permitted by the system. This has led to a sharp paradox in labour disputes: the official ideology places workers in a very high position, while the real system does not allow them to have a truly independent organizational power.

What is meant by four months' wages, and no ambitious economic theory is required. For those who depend on monthly salaries to pay rent, mortgages, food, children ' s education and household expenses, it means that family cash flows have been forcibly cut off by the enterprise. Business difficulties can be brought into bankruptcy, restructuring or debt proceedings, but workers ' labour cannot automatically become interest-free loans.

The Shanghai incident ultimately required more than just an answer to the question of when the company would pay its wages. The questions of when the labour inspectorate knew about the lack of pay, whether there were sufficient assets in the enterprise, why payment of wages could be delayed by four months, and whether labour arbitration and administrative enforcement were timely involved should be made public.

Machines in factories can stop because of the reduction in orders, but a worker ' s family life is not suspended because the employer owes salary. Hundreds of people finally walked out of the workshop, which is exactly what Xi called the “China-made” narrative of Xi’s administration, and another more real industrial voice: they first demanded the return of their already-work-related money.