The Washington Post summons up the appropriate level of irony and skepticism, I think, at the news that Yao Ming will be named a "vanguard worker" in China's May Day celebration this year.
As a national controversy swelled over what it means to be a worker in the China of 2005, the Communist government announced Thursday that Yao Ming, the 7-foot-6-inch center for the Houston Rockets from Shanghai, has been honored with the title of "vanguard worker" -- even though he is a millionaire living in Texas who makes his living playing basketball.
The tribute was part of a May Day exercise in which the party labor union and government bestow medals every five years on a number of people they consider to be selfless, exemplary Chinese workers. Since the revolutionary days of Mao Zedong, the title has been given to the likes of blue-collar laborers on high-output production lines or country schoolteachers bringing literacy and correct socialist ideology to remote villages.
The move has been taken as a sign of the changes in China's economy, such that the glory Yao has attained for his homeland can somehow substitute for the honor due someone laboring away at cleaning toilets or driving buses. Some of the workers intereviewed by the WaPo, however, were rather skeptical:
"Model workers should be good examples within reach of common people by the sweat of their brow," said a contributor to Sohu.com.cn, one of the country's three most popular Internet sites. "But now the evaluation for model worker is becoming strange. It is meaningless. It should not be a star show."
What the WaPo doesn't emphasize as much--but which the print version of China Daily did last week--was that Yao's award came admidst a more general redefinition of who was eligible for the award this year. In addition to Yao, a number of prominent businessmen were nominated for the award (the final recipients will be announced tomorrow). The logic being that in China's current economy, those businessmen contribute as much as those toilet cleaners. (The print China Daily article rationalized the inclusion of a Guangzhou businessman in terms of the millions of jobs he had created by building his multiple factories; it did not mention, however, whether those jobs offered living wages or just pure sweat shop labor.)
It will not be all cynicism and money at this year's May Day celebration, though. When they expanded the categories of workers included for consideration for the award, the Chinese government also expanded in the other direction--to include the millions of migrant workers who are building China's roads and buildings and mining China's coal. (I think the distinction relates to the way the nominations are generated; the provinces submit the nominations for their own residents, and since migrants are specifically excluded as residents in the places they live and work, I suspect they needed to deliberately allow for their inclusion.) And as the WaPo article noted, Yao will receive the vanguard worker award, while the migrants will be eligible for the more traditional model worker recognition.
The article announcing inclusion of migrant workers (and Yao) closely preceded another announcement, that migrant workers would now be eligible for worker's comp.
Migrant labourers are going to get work-related injury insurance.
The Ministry of Labour and Social Security said priority will be given this year to millions of migrant workers in construction, mining and other sectors where employees are more likely to sustain industrial injuries or vocational damages.
The practice, to protect migrant workers' legitimate rights, will be expanded to all sectors in the future.
The system currently covers 45 million workers (out of 130 million migrant workers overall). And it seems to be tied to the signing of new contracts--which means workers who are illegally in their city of employ (a common problem) and workers in existing contracts will not be immediately eligible. But it does seem to be an attempt to protect the millions of workers who work, for example, in China's dangerous coal mills. It has yet to be proven that the measure will work (the print version of this story claims that all migrant workers have now received their back pay, which is blatanly untrue). But viewed from the perspective a country where another million or two people lose insurance every year, it seems like a step in the right direction.
I raise these issues because it shows how consciously--if ham-handedly--China is trying to redefine and understand what laboring means as all its prior categories have become obsolete. The model worker awards have become less frequent (every five years rather than annually), and the move to recognize Yao and some sweatshop owners doesn't convince me they're making the right decisions. But they're thinking about it.
Our government, on the other hand, seems unconcerned that a growing number of our workers are losing their health care. And in the face of the rising prevalence of McJobs, they tried to redefine service work as manufacturing, probably to bury the dramatic changes in demographics.
Don't get me wrong. We're still way better off than the people working in China's death trap coal mines. And there's a reason Yao chose to come to the US to play hoops rather than play for glory and meager pay in his home country. But watching China's propagandistic attempts to redefine labor made me see more clearly our own government's inaction. it's high time our government reassessed what it means to labor in this country. Our categories are changing in inverse relationship to China, as many of our manufacturing jobs move overseas. And it'd be nice if our service workers, in particular, received some of the attention that Yao Ming is getting from his own country.
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