But Friedman points out that while the widely dispensed image of the Chinese masses toiling away on iPhone assembly lines may depict one aspect of the ruinous effects of global capitalism, this narrative fails to account for the ways in which these same workers are responding to their dismal labor conditions with mass demonstrations and work stoppages at an astounding rate - and all without the assistance of the very unions that theoretically exist to protect their interests. The highly publicized Foxconn suicides of 2010 and the wide-release documentary Last Train Home drew international attention to the plight of China’s increasingly disenfranchised migrant workers, who travel by the millions from their rural homes in China’s interior to industrial factories on the coast for employment, scratching out a living on meager wages and sending the little money that is left over back home to their families. Though police eventually arrived to shepherd the managers out of the building, Shinmei released a statement the very next day apologizing for the new rules and promising to raise workers’ wages.
According to the South China Morning Post, Tamura later reported that the plant’s workers had trapped him and other managers in his office and refused to let them use the bathroom.
After attempting to impose a new set of draconian workplace rules, including fining workers for taking bathroom breaks over two minutes long, management was locked into the factory during a visit from the company’s president, Hideaki Tamura. Predictably, the Chinese cases that attract the attention of the American media tend to involve multinational company owners like Chip Starnes, and, a few months prior to that, ten Japanese bosses who were taken hostage along with some Chinese managers by an estimated 1,000 employees at the Shanghai Shinmei Electric Company. “You do hear stories about boss hostages happening from time to time,” says Eli Friedman, a labor scholar at Cornell who studies worker insurgency in China, “but there are no statistics on this, and reporting is always sensitive and subject to censorship.” Unlike France, where some of the bossnappings are orchestrated and backed by unions, in China they are but one facet of mounting worker unrest that has taken place almost entirely outside the confines of organized labor.
So, too, has the tactic been promising for workers in China, though documentation of such instances there remains scant. Bloomberg Businessweek mused after the Goodyear hostage and subsequent payout, “Bossnapping and similar tactics have turned out to be pretty effective negotiating tools for French labor unions.” Almost all of the hostage situations resulted in favorable settlements for the workers. That year, over ten incidents of bosses taken hostage were reported, and included incidents at major multinational companies like Sony, Caterpillar, and 3M, where - as several media outlets reported - the imprisoned manager was fed mussels and fries while he waited to be released. The Goodyear hostage mirrored a wave of bossnappings that spread throughout France in 2009. Though the police eventually retrieved the trapped executives, Goodyear went on to grant the laid-off kidnappers three times the severance pay that they had initially proposed, up to 130,000 euros per employee. As many as 200 employees occupied the factory and detained their bosses in an office, plugging the door with a massive tractor tire to prevent escape while more stacks of tires burned spectacularly outside, shrouding the whole operation in rubbery black smoke. Workers at a Goodyear factory in France similarly nabbed two executives in 2014 in protest over the company’s plans to shutter the plant and thereby eliminate over 1,000 jobs. Within a week, the workers had forced concessions and the siege was over. The locked-in Starnes, hazily sullen behind a barred window in the photos that emerged, was delivered three meals a day by local police, who otherwise declined to intervene. Several workers were unhappy with their severance packages, while others believed that Starnes was planning to close the company and abscond with their wages entirely.
Starnes had arrived at his plant in order to commence layoffs and subsequently was apprehended and imprisoned by disgruntled employees. In June 2013, the Associated Press released photographs of Chip Starnes, the American co-owner of the company Specialty Medical Supplies, who was being held hostage by a crowd of Chinese workers at a factory just outside of Beijing.
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