Building Trust for Small Change

Product rationale

Whenever I hear big words such as leadership, trust, responsibility, drive, promise, compassion, I try to generate pictures that would help me grasp the truth meaning of them, and oftentimes, fail. Understanding such big words sometimes demands a life marked by vicissitudes and rich experiences which I do not have. Looking back, I think the past 11 weeks successfully altered my views on some of the most important concepts in character building and self-development. Put it in a simpler way, to a certain extent, hope has been planted back in my mind.

As I explained in my last research proposal, the focus of research project and final product has been adjusted to trust, for a number of reasons. The most important of them is that trust is one of the most important factors, if not THE most important one, in building and maintaining a lasting and successful relationship, marked by amicability, equality, reciprocity, and understanding, with a community or any social group. However, trust-building is no easy task. In my past research experiences, it has always been the first and probably the final obstacle encountered, and the last to resolve, if solvable at all.

My time working with Da Ai Qing Chen, and its partners Laowei Law Firm and China Labour Bulletin, in Beijing and Shenzhen, has shown me not only how workers fight for their rights, but also how NGOs work with socially vulnerable, culturally dissimilar, politically disenfranchised, or economically underprivileged groups. Unfortunately, the community I have been working with, Chinese workers in Guangdong, falls in almost all the above mentioned categories. Therefore the relationship is unsurprisingly delicate, intricate, sometimes confounding, and oftentimes tender and emotional. One of the project I participated only briefly failed, because one NGO staffer failed to acquire the workers’ trust in their first meeting, and in two hours’ time, we saw 180 people withdraw from a messenger chat group, never to return. In another case, over 700 workers successfully negotiated their wages up by 30% because the vice president of workers union is a charismatic man widely loved by the workers, who enjoys his colleagues’ confidence earned in over 12 years’ time.

Product summary

I devised a project to building a sustainable relationship with a group of workers who came to DAQC and Laowei in late May for help. My final product for DAQC is my work to build trust among the workers of Qilitian, initiate a trustful relationship with them for DAQC and Laowei, and design plans for the workers to gain trust from the local authorities, as well as a written report for this work. Their employer is ostensibly renaming their factory, but the ulterior motive is to close it and get rid of the workers with having to pay a penny of recompense. After the ownership storage has been transferred to another person, and several machines sold, workers started asking after the future plans of their company. No responses were given. An unorganized strike mysteriously started, and workers are barred from entering the factory buildings. A significant number of the workers are subsequently dismissed: some find their employment terminated without explanation, some are fired on the ground that they are “unruly and undisciplined.” The unwanted strike becomes a real one, and a workers’ committee is soon formed. Six representatives are elected. When the six men came to Laowei, full of rage, they presented us a list of demands of the company.

“Do you have a plan?” asked Duan, a Laowei lawyer.

“You bet! We have put together an army. We have a communication team; we have a discipline team; oh, and a team that is tenting outside of the factory, they are responsible for making sure that no more machines are relocated.”

“But how can you be sure that your people follow you?”

Silence.