Search

The article focuses on historical materials on a model capitalist industry in Shanghai, China. On the establishment of the Shanghai Tobacco Workers' Union, the workers seized the opportunity to make various demands for an improvement in their livelihood. The capitalists at first tried to suppress the workers, but after realizing that the workers were united as one, all members of the administrative staff were in fact admitted to the Association, in which senior members of the staff were in complete control of its most powerful organ. The workers launched a full-scale attack and the entire committee was forced to resign. Most of the new committee members elected were workers and it was only then that the Association became exclusively a trade union of the workers. The total number of male and female workers on the day and night shifts of the South Seas Brothers Tobacco Company is over six thousand, and they feel that maintaining their livelihood has been difficult over the past year. The workers have made a total of seventeen demands, but there are no details on all of them.