Amid China’s fast-growing economy, workers’ rights have become a flashpoint of activism and protest over the past several years. Disputes over late or unpaid wages and frustration with employers and government inaction, among other issues, have led to unprecedented worker strikes, resistance and violence throughout China.

Hao Ren developed an interest in Chinese labor rights while attending university, and after graduation she worked for a labor nongovernmental organization in the Pearl River Delta, the country’s urbanized industrial heartland. After leaving the NGO in 2010, she supported herself by taking jobs in factories throughout coastal China – and in her free time, interviewed the workers about the struggles they faced. Their firsthand accounts and uncensored views are the basis of “China on Strike: Narratives of Workers’ Resistance” (Haymarket Books).

Hao, who wrote the Chinese edition, and co-editor of the new English edition Eli Friedman, Cornell assistant professor of international and comparative labor in the ILR School, will discuss the workers’ stories April 7 at 4:30 p.m. in the ILR Catherwood Library’s Kheel Center, 227 Ives Hall. The Chats in the Stacks book talk is free and open to the public.

At the center of the Chinese labor resistance is a fight for worker’s rights, including fair treatment and pay and receiving legally mandated benefits. The workers face arrest and imprisonment as they protest local governments’ failure to enforce labor laws. The central communist government in Beijing is now reportedly planning mass layoffs (including more than 1.8 million steel and coal workers) in order to downsize China’s state-owned industries. Many of these supply foreign companies and have been increasingly targeted by strikes and walkouts by thousands of workers at once.

About 1,200 strikes and protests occurred across China from 2011 to 2013, and more than 1,300 in 2014 alone. That figure has more than doubled, with 2,700 incidents in 2015 – more than one a day in some provinces – and the trend has continued into this year, according to China Labor Bulletin, a workers’ rights watchdog organization based in Hong Kong.

Friedman

The book depicts the labor movement through the eyes of those engaged in the struggle – including workers in some of the country’s most profitable industries, at factories supplying Nike, Apple, Hewlett-Packard and other multinational corporations. Their stories also document work culture in China, as well as processes of migration and social resistance.

Buffalo Street Books of Ithaca will offer advance copies for purchase and signing at the Kheel Center event. The talk by Hao and Friedman is co-sponsored by Cornell University Library, the ILR School, the East Asia Program and the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies.

Friedman is the author of “Insurgency Trap: Labor Politics in Postsocialist China” (Cornell University Press, 2014), about state responses to worker unrest in China and the development of labor relations institutions. His primary research interests include China, development, urbanization, social movements and work and labor. He teaches the courses Work and Labor in China and Work, Labor and Capital in the Global Economy, and a sophomore writing seminar, Globalization and the Sociology of Work.

Zhongjin Li, Friedman’s co-editor on the English edition, is a native of China and a doctoral candidate in economics at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.