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日期：2008-8-9　23:09:49

　　Capitalist style downsizing by China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC)
　　Tue, 5 Aug 2008.
　　The largest crude oil company in China judging by its capital size – China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC) issued a statement on Friday the 25th of July 2008, in which it was revealed that the company plans to downsize its workforce by 5 percent within the next three years in order to cut down on the total cost of running the corporation.

　　By Cheng Feng
　　(This article was first published in Chinese on 30 July 2008. English translation by Li Wenli.)
　　Earlier CNPC stated that due to the continued increase in the fixed costs of crude oil, fuels, labour power and tax expenditures the company’s pre-tax profits during the first half of this year has decreased by 39percent compared with the same period of last year, and has dropped to a value of 56.4 billion RMB.

　　Although the CEO of CNPC, Jiang Jiemin, has not revealed the exact number of employees that are going to be fired as a result of this downsizing, according to estimates from external sources the number of people involved will exceed 10,000. However, this is no more than an approximate estimate because the annual reports and websites of the corporation never stated the total number of employees in the company. Jiang Jiemin also stated that the company plans to introduce a reward-based salary system, in which the exact amount of salary will be calculated according to the work performance of the employees. This is an example of the most common way by which capitalists try to extract as much surplus value from the workers as possible - continuously trying to use various devious means to suppress the pressure for wages to increase, and to decrease the amount of expenditure that result from paying wages to workers. Jiang Jiemin at the same time also mentioned that the company plans to reduce leisure and travel expenses in 2008 by 10 percent compared with 2007, but he never revealed the exact amount of expenditure in these fields for the year 2007. For a supposedly state-owned enterprise, the workers should be the biggest shareholders in the corporation, as specified by the Chinese Constitution itself. We should have the right to know all the figures and statistics relating to the company’s production, finances and management, let alone the figures for leisure costs which shouldn’t be considered as business secrets by any means. The real reason for all this secrecy is evident without further elaboration: it’s a collection of “black money” that dare not see the light – someone is using the blood and sweat money of the people to indulge in their corruptions!

　　What is even more inexplicable is that has the corporation really lost so much profit, to the extent that it really requires downsizing due to objective economic reasons? Because according to Article 27 of the Labour Contract Law of China: “If the employer work-unit is really on the verge of bankruptcy and is undergoing a legalised procedure of reformation, or if there is an extremely severe difficulty in the conditions of management and production, and therefore there exists a genuine necessity to down-size, ..., then it is permissible to fire employees.” And according to Article 41 of the newly revised Labour Contract Law: “Under one of the following circumstances, if there is the need to reduce the number of employees by more than 20 or less than 20 but more than 10 percent of the total proportion of workers in the enterprise, the employer work-unit must notify the union or the workforce as a whole 30 days in advance, and after receiving advice from the union or the workforce, the plan to fire employees must be reported to the labour administrative department, and only after that can employees be fired. This only apply when after the switching of production mode in the enterprise, a significant technological innovation or an adjustment in the style of management, and after changing the labour contracts, there is still the need to reduce employee numbers.”

　　“Reward-based salaries”
　　These two legal articles explicitly and clearly specify that only when “there is an extremely severe difficulty in the conditions of production and management” can the China National Petroleum Corporation engage in such large-scale downsizing of their workforce. But viewing what is currently known regarding the various economic figures of the corporation as well as the general tendencies of the government’s policies, at the moment the corporation cannot at all be described as in a state of “extremely severe difficulties in the conditions of production and management”. Nor can one say that the said company is in the process of “adjusting the management style” at all, it has clearly admitted itself that the central aim is to “save” the fixed cost. In plain words, this kind of action is a typical form of downsizing in the capitalist mode, and just like when the same company started to use its new system of reward-based salary scheme, the objective is nothing other than to extract as much as possible the surplus value from workers! This way the maximum amount of profits can be acquired by the crude oil capitalists and their bureaucratic collaborators so that they can enjoy their arrogant and corrupt lives!

　　Yet we working class people will never dare to imagine having that kind of life, we spend all of our days diligently working for the most basic necessities of everyday life, worrying over the highly expensive education costs for our children, and feeling painful over a balance sheet of several hundred yuan after a trip to the hospital ... and now these capitalists still want 5 percent of the workforce in their corporation to have so much more sufferings on top of these ones, how unfair and unjust is this!

　　This is indeed the great injuries that the capitalist system has imposed upon the working class, and in order to remove this pain, we workers must courageously fight against every capitalist, until we completely overthrow the sinful capitalist system, and thereby establish a just, democratic genuine socialist society that is free from exploitation and really does engage in rational planning!

　　Workers should state their own demands against the China National Petroleum Corporation:
　　We oppose profit-driven capitalist-style downsizing!