Shenzhen, China's Dream, Choking On Growth Amid Brutal Work & Foul Environment - NYT

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Shenzhen owed its success to a simple formula of cheap land, eager, compliant labor and lax environmental rules that attracted legions of foreign investors who built export-based manufacturing industries. With 7 million migrant workers in an overall population of about 12 million — compared with Shanghai’s 2 to 3 million migrants out of a population of 18 million — Shenzhen became the literal and symbolic heart of the Chinese economic miracle. Now, to other cities in China, Shenzhen has begun to look less like a model than an ominous warning of the limitations of a growth-above-all approach.

While grueling labor conditions exist in many parts of China, Shenzhen’s gigantic plants, employing as many as 200,000 workers each, have established a particular reputation for harshness among workers and labor advocates. Monthly turnover rates of 10 percent or more are not uncommon, labor groups say.

The tough working conditions, in turn, have helped spawn one of the most important labor developments in China in recent years: large-scale wildcat strikes and smaller job actions for better hours and wages. The Guangdong Union Association, a government-affiliated group, said there were more than 10,000 strikes in the province last year. Among Chinese economic planners, Shenzhen’s recipe is increasingly seen as all but irrelevant: too harsh, too wasteful, too polluted, too dependent on the churning, ceaseless turnover of migrant labor.

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Near the gates of Foxconn, a huge electronics assembly plant that is one of the city of Shenzhen’s largest employers, a half-dozen former factory workers lounged in the shade on a recent afternoon. Asked if it was their day off, one of them, a 20-year-old, explained that he had been fired when he developed lesions on his arms from exposure to paints and asked to switch jobs. Now, he said, he and his friends survived by “beating people up for a living.”

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http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/19/world/asia/19shenzhen.html?_r=1&oref=slogin