Today while at a Bund-side five-star hotel's cafe where I was conducting an interview for the Enterprise section we'll launch in March's edition of Newsweek Select, a troop of 30-plus mud-covered construction workers tromped in with their rubber boots and construction hats and plopped down next to white collar workers disinterestedly sipping 55RMB ($7) lattes -- an amount of money one of said workers would love to earn in a 14-hour day. These construction workers are "waidiren" or people from outside of Shanghai. They were clearly agitated. Some joked, some laughed, some called for "foreign coffee."
Every year, millions of migrant workers come to Shanghai from the surrounding countryside in search of work. They live in subpar conditions -- often unheated trailers or plastic tarp tents -- and work backbreaking hours. From dark morning to dark night, they toil in mud and rain without relief from the cold and without even the simple comforts of a hot shower or a hearty meal. Generally, they eat rice and cucumber with a small slab of tofu at lunchtime, washing it and some of the misery down with cheap beer. Year-round they bathe with buckets of boiled water if they are fortunate, cold water if they aren't.
They carry heavy burdens -- not just the backbreaking loads of earth they shovel nor the buildings they bring down with their pick axes nor the cement slabs and bricks they toss into waiting trucks that belch hot black smoke in their seething lungs as they heave and ho these sharp wedges of things undone, but the knowledge too that their families, in faraway Hefei, Zhejiang, Jiangsu, Sichuan, are counting on them to be strong and to make life right for the family. China's cities would not stand without these men, yet they are given inferior status here. They remind the city residents that life used to be much harder -- that bigger discomforts beyond faulty service at a restaurant or bad mobile phone reception continue to exist and indeed will for a long time. City people generally avert their eyes when they see "mingong" or migrant workers on the street. They complain that waidiren bring lawlessness and unrest.
This morning, the unrest proved palpable. To see these two colliding worlds this morning once again struck me to the core. Women in smart suits quickly picked up briefcases and fled. Groups of men in Western jackets snapped pictures of the workers with their iPhones and joked amongst themselves about what a spectacle it made. Because I was with a PR official from the hotel, I knew I couldn't escape for long, so I rushed over to speak with one of the construction workers, turning on my recorder. He told me they were from Jiangsu province, and so in my dealings with him, I tried to speak with my best Jiangsu accent, which is hardly standard Mandarin, but I wanted him to feel comfortable around me or at least to see I was trying, however poorly I fared.
He told me that the men, who mostly tacitly sat with unreadable expressions on their faces, had been working on the hotel for six months and had not been paid because their boss had not yet been paid. This is an entirely common situation in China. Either the developers or the contractor weasel the workers out of their money. With only a few days before Chinese New Year (aka Spring Festival), China's biggest holiday, the man said, they needed their wages to get home.
However, even money, I thought, might not be enough to ensure their safe return for this year's Spring Festival. Unprecedented heavy snow and ice have entangled Chinese transportation, stranding more than half a million passengers at the Guangzhou Railway Station. Likewise, 40,000 people, or 10,000 cars, have reached an impasse at the Hunan stretch of the Beijing-Zhuhai highway. Twenty-four airports have been affected by the weather. Many have even closed. In Guangzhou, the government, trying to persuade thousands waiting at the train station to clear out, has offered to show migrant workers who cannot return home free movies. Free kung fu flicks, however, are a rather paltry substitute for the only time in the year a worker can feel the warm embrace of family on flesh and taste home-cooked meals that sustain him through the rest of the year's lonely, empty days and nights.
I asked the man how much money he was owed, and he said he wasn't certain. He and the others had toiled on this hotel for six months without much pay, he said. They had come here to get what was rightfully owed them. I asked him if he thought it was dangerous for him to come here like this. He said he wasn't clear about that. I asked him if he was afraid the police might come. He said he didn't care. "We came here to demand our wages," he said. "We work. We depend on the money from this work for our livelihood. It's what rightfully owed us. If we aren't paid, we have no options. We are just common people," he said.
By this time, the PR official had been at my side tugging on my sleeve for about 30 seconds. It was time to go. I said thank you and good-bye to the men first and then to the PR official and made my way out into the cold Shanghai afternoon where dark clouds of snow circled in a gray sky. On the commute to my next interview of the day, the PR representative called my mobile to assure me that the men had been wrong and that it hadn't been the hotel's fault. "They were working on a building connected to ours but owned by an entirely different company," she said. "Shortly after you left, they realized their mistake and left."
If her story is true, it is even more troubling that the contractor had so easily led his workers to demonstrate their grievances to the wrong party, and it raises several questions. Was the contractor leading on the workers in an effort to showboat his concern for them, thus putting himself in a more advantageous position to cheat them? Did the contractor truly misunderstand whom he and his men were working for and thus have no leverage in truly pursuing the debtors? What documents did he have at his disposal to track down the true debtors? Why had he not consulted such documents before storming the hotel? Additionally, this scenario evidences the lack of knowledge and power these workers have in their lives -- they have no way of redressing harms done unto them, no real viable recourse to even claim what is rightfully theirs. In fact, they are not even entirely sure what is owed them. Pimped and played, scorned and suffocated, they live. They live. But to look at their hands, so cracked and leathered, to witness their sinewy bodies in quiet motion, to glimpse the wrinkles where smiles traced happier times, to see them toss cards on hot pavement during a rare summer moment of leisure and to hear them sing their hometown's songs is to understand these men as China's finest and most brave.
When I arrived back at the office, an e-mail from the PR official awaited me: "It was nice talking with you this morning, even with that tedious interruption. What can one say -- this is the 'sin' of being a luxurious hotel. We are easily targeted, even though it has nothing to do with us."
Is that true? Do corporations that flaunt their money in impoverished countries have no responsibility to the communities of which they are a part besides hiring some of its more privileged locals? Or can such corporations, which make phenomenal profits, somehow give back to the neighborhoods where they are located? Maybe a rain tarp for the men who toil on the next-door building, or a hot meal for them on a cold day or information or training for their children still living in the countryside about working in a hotel -- how that could be a possibility someday for them. Another option could be paying for these men's representation in a court of law when next-door neighbors turn out to be bullies.
I'm not entirely clear what a corporation could do for disadvantaged groups like the migrant workers, but I know there's a limit to this idea of a world in which we are able to somehow excuse ourselves from being connected or responsible to one another. It is wrongheaded and perverse to human nature.