Sacked steel workers call for release of 8 protest leaders
The workers, protesting peacefully, are asking for severance wages and they have accused managers of corruption. Police have arrested their leaders and directors have refused to negotiate.
Chongqing (AsiaNews/SCMP) Employees of a steel plant in Chongqing are pressing ahead with their sit-in in front of the municipal government headquarters to protest against the arrest of their leaders and the closure of the factory they worked for. A woman said: "We will not leave until the eight men leading the protest have been released.
"Many workers, including elderly people and women, are now kneeling down in front of the police office asking them to free the leaders. We are protesting peacefully but the authorities have deployed over 1,000 policemen to drive us away and take away our leaders."
The protest broke out in August when the management of the steel plant dismissed workers of the Chongqing Special Steel Plant without compensation. The company, on paper one of the largest steel producers in China, gave work to more than 18,000 people at the peak of its development. In July, more than four billion yuan in the red, it declared bankruptcy.
On 12 August, more than 2,000 laid-off workers barricaded one of the main city streets, bringing traffic to a standstill, to demand severance wages. The company managers said "they did not want to negotiate anything" with the workers who had lost their jobs and who were asking for 2,000 yuan (around 1,000 euros) per head.
A 41-year-old woman alleged corrupt senior managers were to blame for the factory's failure. "These cadres spent 50 per cent of the company's revenue on their salaries and welfare," she said. "My family has worked for the factory for more than 50 years. We all joined the company when we were kids but now we've got nothing at the end."
Communist Party leaders are increasingly worried about persistent protests in the country's factories and mines. Liu Xutao, a political scientist with the State School of Administration, said workers had been sacrificed as Beijing embarked on economic reforms, because they were never really the "masters" of the society. "Workers are the 'masters of our country' is just a political slogan [used] since 1949. It has never been implemented in the political system," Professor Liu said.
The expert said the only way to stop the protests was to allow authentic free unions; at the moment, demonstrations are the only means available to workers to protest against dismissal and injustice.
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