In a set of unprecedented actions, workers in China went on wildcat
strikes at three Walmart locations in China, one after another, in chain
reaction fashion.
The mobile messaging app “WeChat” helped organize the strikes at locations
over 900 miles apart.
Chinese leaders are already worried about social unrest due to the
commodities crash and overcapacity in steel production that led to layoffs.
These strikes will heighten official fears about more labor unrest.
Walmart staff across China have launched a series of wildcat strikes
against the company’s new working-hours system, in an unprecedented bout of
nationwide co-ordination by workers.
Employees in one store in the southern city of Nanchang went on strike
last Friday. By Monday the action had spread to a second store in Nanchang
and to stores in Chengdu 1,500km away and Harbin in the country’s north-east.
“We will continue the strike until the company gives a satisfactory
reply,” said Duan Yu, who works at the Walmart store in Bayi Square,
Nanchang.
The strike has realised the Communist party’s fear of co-ordinated
cross-country labour unrest just as China prepares to lay off millions of
workers as a result of the industrial slowdown. The number of worker disputes
in the country has soared in recent years, doubling from 2014 to reach 2,774
protests in 2015, according to China Labour Bulletin, a Hong Kong-based
workers’ rights organisation.
“It is unprecedented for workers to organise this way,” said Anita Chan, a
professor of sociology at Australian National University. “Most strikes are
in one workplace. This is different — Walmart has many stores in China and
uses the same management methods in all the stores. So these workers
understand everyone’s situation: they are all the same.”
The rapid organisation of strikes has been helped by the mobile messaging
platform WeChat. Zhang Jun, a former electrician at the Walmart store in
Yantai City, Shandong, was one of several workers who set up the first
Walmart Chinese Workers’ Association WeChat group.
WCWA has since multiplied into more than 40 WeChat groups, with about
20,000 members — a fifth of Walmart’s workforce in China — despite members
suffering threats from Walmart management, according to Mr Zhang.
The wildcat strikes in China will play directly into union drives and
protests against Walmart in the US.
