Chinese State businesses which are exploiting mining minerals or building roads, football stadiums and other infrastructure projects across the African continent continue to create a labour situation dominated by precariousness for their workers. The footprint of China is increasingly noticeable in Africa, but it does not necessarily bring an improvement in the working conditions which its businesses offer in a continent whose labour legislation is still fragile.

Source: Notimex

Maputo, Mozambique, 17/03/2011. “The working conditions of Chinese businesses in Mozambique are the worst, that much is clear,” points out João Feijó, a sociologist and expert in labour matters in African countries, in an interview with Notimex.

Comparatively, the salaries paid by businesses from Asia are considerably lower than those paid by their foreign competitors. “The European companies pay at least 20 percent above the minimum wage” he added.

At the access point of the new national football stadium which the state construction company Anhui Wai Jing is building in Maputo, the capital of Mozambique, a local worker who wishes to remain anonymous for fear of reprisals warns that “the workers’ situation is very bad and there are many problems.”

He explains that he works nine hours a day all week, without a day off, for no more than four thousand meticals (110 dollars) a month.

“The conditions in non-Chinese businesses are much better. I work here because there is no work in Mozambique. It’s this or nothing,” he ends.

According to calculations made in the former Portuguese colony, the basic survival amount of goods needed by a Mozambican family costs at least five thousand metical a month.

Anhui Wai Jing started construction on the new stadium, which will have a capacity of forty thousand spectators, in November 2008 and hopes to finish it shortly.

To do the work the Chinese state construction company employs 260 Chinese workers and between 150 and 250 Mozambicans, depending on needs.

The monthly salary of an unqualified Chinese worker reaches 850 dollars, sources from the company told Notimex.

The discrimination goes even further to encompass accommodation, medical insurance or food, high levels of which are guaranteed for Chinese workers, but which are completely nonexistent in the case of the Mozambicans.

The situation is not free from conflicts, such as the one which took place on 30 April last year, of the eve of Workers’ Day, when a strike by local workers ended in violence, riots and police intervention, and the injury and disappearance of two protestors. Three months previously another protest had broken out.

Complaints about working conditions are normal on other Chinese sites in Mozambique.

In the 95 kilometres of road which the China Henan International Cooperation Group is building between Xai Xai and Chisbuka, in the south of the country, a handful of workers gathered together on the dirt road of work site join in the criticism.

“Look at what I’m wearing,” begins Benito, one of the sweating workers dressed in a threadbare basic uniform. “They don’t give us safety equipment and they treat workers very badly.”

Others explain that the business doesn’t even pay them for transport and that they are sent home when it rains, without any kind of payment. Their income does not exceed 25 cents (USD) for an hour of work, without a contract of other benefits.

This job insecurity scenario is repeated in practically all of the African countries in which Chinese businesses are undertaking large infrastructure projects, and has sparked continued controversy.

Last spring the local workers of a uranium mine worked by China in Niger made their protests publicly known, comparing their situation in the mine to “a Chinese colony.”

In the Copperbelt region of Zambia, which contains one of the largest copper reserves in the world, there have been violent disturbances as a result of working conditions considered unacceptable by the miners.

Three years earlier an accident in a Chinese explosives company had claimed the lives of 46 workers, one of the most lethal accidents in Zambia’s history.

“The Chinese system bases itself solely on maximising production. The local workers are merely anonymous beings. There is no transfer of knowledge and they are not taught anything. And they work much more than they are paid for,” explains the sociologist João Feijó, referring to the treatment of Mozambican workers by their Chinese employers.

A study done by the NGO Rights and Accountability in Development (RAID) confirmed in 2009 that the abuses by Chinese mining companies in the Democratic Republic of Congo are “widespread.”

The report, the first of its kind to be published, describes in great detail the different bad working practises of Chinese businesses.

Also in 2009, the union organisation African Labour Research Network denounced the bad practices of Chinese employers in a study carried out in 10 African countries.

“There is a common tendency towards tense labour relations, hostility from the Chinese employers against unions, violations of workers’ rights, very unstable labour conditions and unjust labour practices,” reads the report.