A US Factory Being Held Hostage By Workers In China

[shuntmaster]

A US Factory Boss Says He’s Being Held Hostage By Workers In China Demanding Severance

APBEIJING (AP) — An American executive said Monday he has been held hostage for four days at his medical supply plant in Beijing by scores of workers demanding severance packages like those given to 30 co-workers in a phased-out department.
Chip Starnes, 42, a co-owner of Coral Springs, Florida-based Specialty Medical Supplies, said local officials had visited the 10-year-old plant on the capital’s outskirts and coerced him into signing agreements Saturday to meet the workers’ demands even though he sought to make clear that the remaining 100 workers weren’t being laid off.
The workers were expecting wire transfers by Tuesday, he said, adding that about 80 of them had been blocking every exit around the clock and depriving him of sleep by shining bright lights and banging on windows of his office. He declined to clarify the amount, saying he wanted to keep it confidential.
“I feel like a trapped animal,” Starnes told The Associated Press on Monday from his first-floor office window, while holding onto the window’s bars. “I think it’s inhumane what is going on right now. I have been in this area for 10 years and created a lot of jobs and I would never have thought in my wildest imagination something like this would happen.”
Workers inside the compound, a pair of two-story buildings behind gates and hedges in the Huairou district of the northeastern Beijing suburbs, repeatedly declined requests for comment, saying they did not want to talk to foreign media.
It is not rare in China for managers to be held by workers demanding back pay or other benefits, often from their Chinese owners, though occasionally also involving foreign bosses.
The labour action reflects growing uneasiness among workers about their jobs amid China’s slowing economic growth and the sense that growing labour costs make the country less attractive for some foreign-owned factories. The account about local officials coercing Starnes to meet workers’ demands — if true — reflects how officials typically consider stifling unrest to be a priority.
Huairou district and Qiaozi township governments declined to comment.
A local police spokesman said police were at the scene to maintain order. Four uniformed police and about a dozen other men who declined to identify themselves were standing across the road from the plant.
“As far as I know, there was a labour dispute between the workers and the company management and the dispute is being solved,” said spokesman Zhao Lu of the Huairou Public Security Bureau. ” I am not sure about the details of the solution, but I can guarantee the personal safety of the manager.”
Representatives from the U.S. Embassy stood outside the gate much of the day, and eventually were let in. U.S. Embassy spokesman Nolan Barkhouse said the two sides were on the verge of an agreement and that Starnes would have access to his attorneys. It was unclear what agreement might be reached, and subsequent attempts to contact Starnes were not immediately successful.
Starnes said the company had gradually been winding down its plastics division, planning to move it to Mumbai, India. He arrived in Beijing last Tuesday to lay off the last 30 people. Some had been working there for up to nine years, so their compensation packages were “pretty nice,” he said.
Some of the workers in the other divisions got wind of this, and, coupled with rumours that the whole plant was moving to India, started demanding similar severance packages on Friday.
Christian Murck, president of the American Chamber of Commerce in China, said he wasn’t familiar with Starnes’ case, but that such hostage-taking was “not a major problem” for the foreign business community.
“It happened more often say 15 years ago than today, but it still happens from time to time,” he said. “It rarely leads to personal harm to the managers involved, but there are cases when it has in years past.”

 

[shuntmaster]

If such events are happening in suburbs of Beijing in front of global media glare, I wonder what must be happening in the remote regions of China...

 

[third eye]

Would they not given into similar demands of the workers in the US ?



A lot of CEOs get taken hostage in China

It’s a story to give an American manufacturing executive nightmares: He arrives at his Beijing factory to lay off 30 people, and instead is taken prisoner by his employees while they demand compensation.

That’s what happened to Charles Starnes, a co-owner of Coral Gables, Fla.-based Specialty Medical Supplies, who visited the factory last week to wind down the company’s plastics division and move it to Mumbai. What exactly the workers wanted is a matter of some dispute.

Starnes told the Associated Press that they expected higher wages and severance packages, and brought local government officials to back them up. A union representative said they were just asking for unpaid wages before the factory shut down. Either way, it made for striking imagery, with photos of Starnes trapped behind bars.

“I feel like a trapped animal,” Starnes told the AP on Monday. “I think it’s inhumane what is going on right now. I have been in this area for 10 years and created a lot of jobs and I would never have thought in my wildest imagination something like this would happen.”

The situation remains unresolved, according to the U.S. Embassy in Beijing, which has been monitoring events and declined to give more information out of privacy concerns. Specialty Medical Supplies did not return calls for comment. [UPDATE, 6:12 p.m. - A company representative released this statement: "We are actively working with Beijing authorities to get him out to safe ground and, although making progress and keeping communication going, he remains held against his will."]

But this isn’t an unusual occurrence in China. Lacking any other recourse for abuses, workers will sometimes act against managers when they’re on site. In January, for example, the staff of an electronics manufacturer in Shanghai went on strike and locked 18 managers inside a room to protest harsh rules imposed by new management, according to the Epoch Times. Usually, it doesn’t make for international headlines.

“This has been occurring for a long time,” said Li Quiang, with the advocacy group China Labor Watch, through a translator. “Workers do this because bosses have a history of just running off, and workers know this, so they trap them in, and say we’re not going to let you run, you’re going to pay us.”

They also do it because it works, he says, when official legal procedures are unreliable. Think of it like the Chinese equivalent of lodging a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board.

“The reasons it’s effective is because workers are really threatening the one thing the government cares most about, other than economic benefit, and that’s stability,” Quiang says. “The government will become concerned, and when workers are demanding compensation the government might force the company to give economic reparations. By using this method, the workers are bringing in the strongest agent of change.”

Worries about factories abruptly closing have been magnified in recent years, as rising wages have pushed manufacturing to different places within China — from the higher-cost cities to the country’s vast interior — as well as to countries like Cambodia and Vietnam. Foreign investment in China actually fell by 3.7 percent from 2011 to 2012, the first and only time since the global recession-induced dip in 2009.

Specialty Medical Supplies’ sector, the medical device industry, has been something of a bright spot. With strong domestic demand driven by an aging population, it’s expected to grow by more than 10 percent per year through 2017, according to the research firm IbisWorld. It’s also the kind of manufacturing that development experts advise maturing economies to foster, as low-skilled work migrates to less advanced countries.

But companies still shift jobs around for their own reasons, whether it be to get closer to a client or take advantage of a business partnership. And despite the government’s attempts to educate workers on their rights, the specifics of how much severance they’re entitled to is often unclear. That leads workers to take action even when they’re not sure what’s going on, in what University of Michigan Prof. Linda Lim calls the “grapevine effect.”

“Very often, things get misrepresented,” Lim says. “It’s possible they were taking a preemptive strike, because so many other owners have left and left people int he lurch … the company needn’t have done anything wrong.”