Scattered Sand. Hsiao-Hung Pai

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      By the third week, Peng felt like a prisoner. He wanted to get out – there was no way he could go on like this without pay. One day, he noticed that his team leader, a simple-minded man, was easily placated by the offer of a bottle of spirits. Peng came up with an escape plan. He shared it with only two coworkers, because the others seemed too frightened to do anything.

      The next week, as their shift ended for the day, Peng invited the team leader for a drink in their dining area. The man had no suspicion about Peng’s motives, as so many workers had offered him alcohol to sweeten him up in the past. As cup after cup of liquor was poured, the leader became less and less aware of what was happening. ‘Have more, my elder brother! It is my fortune to have met you!’ Peng cheered and toasted him.

      Finally the team leader downed the last drop in his cup and, voice slurred, said he had to go to bed. Less than a minute later, he was asleep. Then Peng and his two companions snuck out of the building, into the dark night of Yellow village, in central Daxing. They ran as far as they could, although no one was chasing them, slowing down only to catch a bus headed away from Daxing. They had nothing to show for their three weeks’ work, but they knew they had done the right thing.

      The bus took them to the east side of Beijing, where they stayed with another job seeker from Liaoning, who let them sleep on his floor and fed them for two days. Peng and his two coworkers then tried to recover their IDs, calling the recruiter and threatening to call the police. Of course, this was an empty threat, since reprisals from the security company for carrying it out might be anything from an ordinary beating to a disabling one by company thugs – but it worked: the recruiter sent the IDs via another migrant from the northeast. The company still refused to pay them; Peng had to give that up. He didn’t know what became of the workers who had remained on the job.

      Eventually, he and his two friends learned the security company’s real reputation – much too late. Tianhe Antai is well known for its criminality. Their labour recruitment is used to make illegal profits. Many of the rural job seekers they hire are underage and made to work for nothing. The migrants even have a saying: ‘You can get work from Tianhe Antai, but you can’t get money!’

      It is as if the Labour Contract Law never existed. The law was passed on 1 January 2008, thanks to momentum generated by a child labour scandal in May 2007 that caused a great deal of public anger: Thousands of children, some as young as eight years old, had been kidnapped and sold for 500 yuan a head to 7,500 illegal brick kilns in Shanxi and Henan. Of these, 576 children were rescued. The kidnapped children were found to have been beaten, burnt, and disabled, and some were killed. Those who survived were forced to work in the kilns under the most subhuman conditions. It was found that these illegal brick kilns employed 53,036 migrant workers.14 At the time, many feared that this scandal was only the tip of the iceberg. Its aftermath was also shocking: A few foremen and middlemen (one of them a Labour Bureau official) were prosecuted, and one of the kiln owners, the son of a Party official, was sentenced to nine years in prison for what amounted to a crime against humanity. Other than that, little was done. But the public outcry had worried the government. It was in this context that a call for the enactment of new labour legislation was heard. A law to protect workers’ basic rights was recognized as necessary. Eventually, the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress, that is, China’s top legislature, decided to adopt the Labour Contract Law, which had been under consideration since 2005 but never became reality until after the brick kiln scandal.

      The law contained ninety-eight articles setting out rules requiring employers to provide workers with signed contracts of employment, which must be based on ‘equality and free will’ and designed according to the principle of ‘negotiated consensus and good faith’. The government claimed that the Labour Contract Law aimed at providing greater job security than the old contract law enacted in 1994, for example stipulating that employees of more than ten years’ standing are entitled to non-fixed-term contracts, requiring employers to contribute to workers’ social security, and setting wage standards for workers on probation and those working overtime.15 At the time, Wu Bangguo, chairman of the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress, promised that the new law would ‘regulate employers’ use of labour and protect workers’ rights’.

      In practice, however, the law has made no difference for workers like Peng and his colleagues. ‘Even when you are given a contract by these companies, you’ll find that the contracts are always written in the interest of the company!’ Peng told me. ‘[The law] doesn’t take into account the workers’ position at all. Some of us simply don’t dare to sign the contracts because they are written in such ambiguous ways. We are afraid of being cheated.’

      Utterly demoralized by their experience in Beijing, Peng and the other two workers returned to their villages. This was the second time in a month that Peng had returned home to Liaoning without any pay.

      And the relentless cycle continued. Two months later, I received another call from Peng. Back at home, his father wouldn’t stop hassling him, and he’d returned to Shenyang and the Lu Garden labour market. ‘But I’ve been unlucky,’ he said. He’d found absolutely nothing. Now, his plan was to head back to Beijing. Word was that Daxing’s labour market was flush with jobs. ‘I am determined to find something.’

      I was in Beijing at the time and met Peng at the Gongzhufen bus station when he arrived. Dozens of villagers, mostly young men and women in their twenties and thirties, some with children back home, all from Liaoning, filed off the bus. They’d come to Beijing looking for work, some in the building industry, others in domestic service and cleaning. They were all carrying bags of belongings, looking as if they intended on settling for a while.

      Then we all boarded another bus, as Peng and his fellows had done just a few months back, and proceeded on to Daxing district. ‘I’m gonna make it this time, sister,’ Peng said to me. ‘I’ve got to find a job that lasts.’ We got off at Yinghai township on the east side of Daxing, where Peng said he knew of cheap lodgings for new arrivals, where you could sleep five to a room. He led me up the stairs of this place and we had some green tea. There was obviously no room for me to stay, and so I wished him good luck and left.

      The next day, Peng went to the Daxing labour market at around 9 a.m., a mistake, because most jobs are taken early in the morning. He told me the Daxing market is smaller than Shenyang’s and full of people from everywhere – from the northeast, Shandong, Henan, Zhejiang, Jiangsu. Competition seemed even harsher than Lu Garden. He met four other migrants from Liaoning, and they told him that there were many jobs advertised around Beijing’s train stations, so together they took a bus into the city centre, some fifteen kilometres away, to have a look. At West Station, they found plenty of ads on shop windows, all for low-paid, temporary manual work. Peng spotted one that read: ‘Grand four-star hotel near Beijing West Station. Looking for fit, young men to do security work. Call to discuss pay.’

      The five of them, including Peng, felt encouraged and called the hotel recruiter immediately. The ad was clearly aimed at migrants from rural areas, and so Peng and his group did not expect an offer of a reasonable wage. However, they did not expect to be offered only 35 yuan (£3.1–£3.5, $5.5) per day. Beijing’s legal daily minimum wage, meagre enough, is 54.40 yuan (£4.9, $8.5). On top of that, they were asked to pay for their own uniforms, and to do three days’ work, called training, without wages, and they would have to work without a contract.

      ‘You take it or leave it,’ said Peng. ‘Stay like a slave, or go back to the countryside – who gives a damn about you?’ Without other options, they took the jobs and were housed in a garage by the hotel, where they were given hard bunk beds, no sheets or pillows provided. Peng slept on top of his jacket and jeans. The floor was concrete, and filthy, as if it were never cleaned. The work was straightforward enough, though – guarding the hotel entrance. The men worked eight-hour shifts and were sometimes asked to do overtime. They felt lucky that they all got paid.

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