Nine Dragons Paper - Sweatshop Paper
Nine Dragons Papers (Holdings) Limited was listed in Hong Kong in 2006, with a peak market value of nearly 100 billion HK dollars. The company is engaged in the manufacturing of packing paper. Its products include cardboards, high-strength corrugated core paper and white coated paperboards. It also produces natural colour wood pulp. Nine Dragons Paper has two production facilities in mainland China, one in Dongguan City, Guangdong Province and the other in Taicang City, Jiangsu Province, employing 9,000 and 6,000 workers respectively. The company is building its third and fourth production bases in Chongqing and Tianjin. Nine Dragons Paper is so far the biggest papermaker in China, the second in Asia and the eighth in the world in paper manufacturing. In 2006, the corporate chair Ms Zhang Yin was ranked as the ‘first richest woman of China’ in the Huran Top 100 Rich List. She is also a member of National Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC).
PHOTO: SACOM members and students are protesting in Nine Dragons Paper Hong Kong office.
In the past few months, Zhang has been very high sounding in attacking the national policy for labour protection. She explicitly stated that “from the perspective of development, a country will not become strong and affluent if the disparity between the rich and the poor does not exist,” “if the law over protects the labour, an enterprise can hardly operate” . Recently, she made strong critique at the legislation of the Labour Contract Law, saying that “signing labour contracts without a fixed term proposed in the new Labour Contract Law is equal to the iron rice-bowl policy during the age of planned economy. It brings pressure on both the capitalist and the unskilled labourers. ” At the earlier National People’s Congress and the CPC National Congress, Zhang, as a member of the National People’s Consultative Conference, made a motion to remove the core provisions of the Labour Contract Law – labour contract without a fixed term.
According to the interviewed workers at the Dongguan factory, on 13 December 2007, about 2,000 workers of the stockyard department went on strike for three days because the factory management deducted their wages in September, October and November, forced them to sign a labour contract with a labour dispatching company at a low wage level and wrote off their years of employment (the wage offered by the new contract signed with the labour dispatching firm is only 960 yuan per month , much lower than 1,500-1,700 yuan per month in the past). The workers caused a traffic stoppage by blocking the highway in front of the factory. Besides, the workers of the Taicang factory told that, at the end of 2007, about 500 workers from the raw materials department organised a strike for four days against the company’s arrangements of labour contracts. The two strikes were not triggered by the new Labour Contract Law but instead caused by the factory management’s illegal move of clearing out the workers’ employment year record and withholding or deducing their wages unreasonably.
