Editor’s note: Before going abroad, I often saw endless debates within the country about the living conditions in other countries. The liberals promote going abroad to work for “human rights” and higher wages, while the pinks (pink-haired youth) shout daily that working abroad will lead to discrimination, high prices, and so on. The Zhongxiu government is actively preventing the domestic working masses from understanding foreign situations, fostering many literary vagabonds and hooligans to stir up trouble, and strongly portraying foreign countries as hell. Some relatively backward thinkers also hold illusions about foreign labor conditions, believing that foreign countries are labor paradises, with unions helping workers fight against capitalists, high wages ensuring living standards, and so forth.
In fact, before going abroad for work, I basically shared these thoughts. Due to long-term living as a student in exile, rarely participating in social struggles, I was often afraid of struggle and feared confrontation. Moreover, in the parasitic and opportunistic academic life, I developed a very reactionary “intellectual dignity” view, believing that fighting and making a fuss was undignified, and that losing a struggle would cause one to lose face. Therefore, I held unrealistic fantasies about foreign labor conditions, labor bureaus, unions, etc., once thinking that erupting conflicts could be exploited to take over everything. But later, the class struggle on construction sites also profoundly educated me: “There has never been a savior, nor rely on fairy emperors.” In this reactionary era of capitalist restoration, dreaming of relying on yellow unions and bourgeois state machinery to fight, and fantasizing that the labor conditions achieved by the older generation of workers through spontaneous struggle could help me avoid struggle, is completely impossible. The only way out is to learn Marxism, consciously fight against the bourgeoisie and its running dogs—that principle applies both domestically and internationally.
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I previously encountered a coworker in the factory who wanted to go abroad to work and repeatedly persuaded me to go as well. I argued that going abroad is nothing more than enjoying the成果 of the international working class’s struggle. China’s working conditions are extremely harsh, but ultimately, it depends on us to fight and liberate ourselves. However, I have indeed lacked understanding of the situation of foreign workers, making it difficult to persuade him with reason and evidence. Looking forward to updates
First time getting illegally fired. Can foreign labor laws, labor departments, and yellow unions keep you safe?
(Occurred last August)
I had never worked in construction before. At most, I had spent a few months working in Chinese restaurants and warehouses, and basically those places all had air conditioning or at least weren’t too hot, so when I first started working on a construction site in the summer, I was really not used to it. Since I was doing rebar work, I had to work up on the roof all the time, with no shade anywhere, so it was extremely hot. After lunch breaks, the rebar would often get so hot in the sun that it burned to the touch, and you could feel the heat even through your gloves. On top of that, rebar work was incredibly exhausting: not only did you have to carry steel bars several meters long, you also had to step on them, and if your foot didn’t land on one of the tied intersections, it could get stuck. Since I hadn’t really done this kind of work before, I had to walk around very carefully.
In the construction industry, the organic composition of capital is relatively low, and manual labor is often required. Rebar has to be tied with hooks, and tools for cutting and bending rebar often require human effort as well. This is mainly because the reactionary bourgeois government does everything it can to suppress construction workers’ wages, especially the wages of foreign laborers. Every time I worked under the sun, I would think about how the surplus value stolen from construction workers has to support foremen, construction company capitalists, general contractors, real estate agents, and a whole swarm of social parasites! What’s left of the wages is pitifully small, nowhere near enough to match the profits made by those real estate agents who buy and resell properties and live off the spread in rent and housing prices. I worked my ass off, sweating for a month, and my paycheck was only half of that of the real estate agent who showed me the apartment and signed the contract!
What arises on the economic base of low organic composition and lots of manual labor is a harsh labor hierarchy. On the construction site, it was always the lower ranks obeying the higher ranks, the newcomers obeying the veterans, to the point that people would be crudely insulted as “idiots,” “morons,” or barked at like dogs. I hated this unequal relationship very much, but because I had long lived in school and been indoctrinated by bourgeois education into servility, I was very weak-minded. I may have felt dissatisfied in my heart, but in action I often didn’t dare oppose them directly, and often just took a petty-bourgeois attitude and tried to avoid labor.
Among the coworkers I was working with, there were a few older brothers who could speak both a foreign language and Spanish. Because they were paid the least but did the most work and suffered the deepest oppression, they were relatively kind to others. Every day at noon they could only sit in a dusty pickup truck, gnawing on discounted bread or sandwiches, at most with one or two frozen chicken nuggets. Their lives were very hard. But I didn’t build a deep connection with them. On one hand, I didn’t understand their lives; but more importantly, at that time I was treating wage labor with a petty-bourgeois mindset of escaping labor and oppression, always wanting to make life easier for myself. This was extremely fatal, because in the end, in order to avoid labor I slacked off, which meant my coworkers had to do more work while I took the same wages as them, turning me into someone who exploited them by doing less work and taking more money. In this way, the workers all understood that I was not in the same class as them, and it was also very hard for me to get along with them. On top of that, I had not studied Marxism well and couldn’t do class analysis, so I couldn’t tell which workers were proletarians with mistaken ideas and which were morally corrupt skilled labor aristocrats, and I failed to unite those foreign laborers. This laid the groundwork for the isolation and helplessness I would later face when the capitalists fired me.
Some of those labor aristocrats looked down on me for having poor skills (as if anyone is born with skills), and would often tell me in a harsh tone to go pick up trash. I was very dissatisfied with this, but couldn’t think of any countermeasure, so I just worked slowly. Sometimes I also didn’t respond to them properly, wanting to resist their oppression that way. But this kind of thinking was just an individualistic form of resistance; in reality, it did nothing to strike at the bourgeoisie, and before long the contradiction between me and the capitalist exploded.
Finally, one day, the capitalist and another Chinese sellout came to find me. As soon as I saw that lineup, I felt they were definitely going to fire me.
But what I didn’t expect was that the traitorous sellout was actually far more eager than her master. She came right out and said seriously that the boss was completely disappointed in me and was now going to fire me! Damn it, the traitor really is the most arrogant beast. That capitalist still had to pretend to be the good cop, coming over to settle accounts with me, saying that my wages were way higher than those of the Spanish-speaking brothers, but I carried rebar less and tied rebar more slowly, and that xx who started at the same time as me was already far above me, while xx who came later than me was also catching up to my level… In the end, it all came down to skill, skill, skill: my skills were too poor, so they fired me.
In reality, if we’re talking about skill, they never really taught me much in the first place. And if you analyze it using Marxism, even though I worked a little slowly every day, I was still creating surplus value for the capitalist no matter what. His excuse of poor skills really meant that I couldn’t create more surplus value for him. The foreign laborers he used to compare me with were people who were getting the minimum wage while doing the same work as skilled workers. The capitalist used those foreigners who suffered the deepest exploitation to compare with me; what he was really saying was that I wasn’t letting him exploit me as much as they did. What did that have to do with skill?
After being unfairly fired, I couldn’t swallow this insult. I thought to myself: no matter what, this is still a “democratic country,” so compared with China, “labor law” should still count for something, right? With that in mind, I pushed open the door of the labor office…