AIMEE K. WILES BEIJING * At a demolition site in the heart of the booming downtown district, a woman loads hunks of concrete by hand into a donkey cart.

By David Tyler and Ben Rand
Democrat and Chronicle

(June 25, 2000) -- While U.S. corporations see free trade with China as a boundless economic opportunity, many workers, labor leaders and human rights activists believe it comes with a heavy price.

Armed with statistical and anecdotal evidence, they argue that an open China is not a free China. The country, they say, will continue to be a place where U.S. companies will pay pitiful wages to exhausted employees laboring in squalid conditions that test the limits of human endurance.

And, they say, the continued push into the largely untapped Chinese marketplace will ultimately cost American workers their jobs.

Now, with China on the verge of admittance to the World Trade Organization and the annual congressional review of its trade status gone, reform of the country's labor practices may not come at all, said Jim Bertolone, president of the Rochester Labor Council. ''At least we had that annual renewal,'' said Bertolone, whose union represents 65,000 members in the Rochester area. ''And even with those measures, change had not happened.''

Information about conditions in China can be hard to come by. The government has barred many forms of social research and often creates phony impressions for outsiders during factory visits, human rights advocates say. Official estimates of jobless Chinese run as high as 15 million in the cities and 130 million in the countryside.

According to the 1999 report of the human rights group Amnesty International, more than 200,000 people were detained without charges in re-education camps in China in 1998. And at least 2,000 people were jailed as political prisoners.

Horror stories abound. Workers being fired or imprisoned for attempting to organize a union. Jail terms for complaining about working conditions. Migrant workers stuffed 10 deep into small rooms that pass for living quarters. Wages that bottom out at pennies a day.

Those stories worry Denis Hughes, president of the New York State AFL-CIO.

''There are none of the safeguards that would allow working men and women to engage in any kind of self-help,'' Hughes said.

Charles Kernaghan, executive director of the privately-funded, labor-based, National Labor Committee and publisher of the 2000 report Made in China -- which is highly critical of business -- calls the country ''the most repressive place I've been.''

''You give a couple hundred dollars a month to the local security force and you can do anything,'' said Kernaghan.

Activists such as Kernaghan question the veracity of many statements made by American companies about their Chinese operations. With a restrictive government and the vast distance between the United States and China, companies ''can say whatever they want,'' Kernaghan said.

The labor committee's report cites Deep-E, an Oregon shoe company, as asserting that its Chinese workers made up to $4.70 an hour. The committee said after visiting the factory that it found Deep-E workers make $9.73 a week.

Workers at some Wal-Mart plants make less than a penny an hour, Kernaghan said.

As trade with China expands, area labor leaders fear a replay of the North American Free Trade Agreement. NAFTA, they say, eliminated 500,000 jobs nationwide and reduced wages for U.S workers. Similar arguments were made during the China trade debate. Corporations maintained that free trade offers more markets for American goods. Labor argued jobs would be lost.

The U.S. passage of normalized trade with China removes a bargaining chip for organized labor, said Kernaghan.

''It's very easy for a Kodak or a Xerox or whoever to say, 'We'd love to give you that raise or that benefit but, gosh, we just can't because we won't be competitive in the global marketplace,' '' Kernaghan said. ''What they're really saying is, 'We're going to put you against the poorest people in the world in a race to the bottom.' ''

Such a move is not without precedent. In an April letter to workers at its Rochester plant, Valeo S.A. management said that ''it's humbling to visit Valeo sites in Mexico and see them outperforming us on nearly every front.''

''We're not seeing that now on a large scale,'' said Tony Bernardo, an organizer for United Auto Workers Local 1097. ''But wait until there's a profit squeeze.''

Eastman Kodak Co. officials say their Chinese plants operate under the same standards as their American plants.

Kodak tries to stay out of politics and public policy debates in China unless the issues directly affect its business. You won't find the company broadly lobbying Beijing on human or worker rights, said David L. Swift, chairman of Kodak's Greater Asia region.

Instead, Kodak feels it can best influence change by being a role model whose policies are the envy of corporate China. To that end, the company says, it requires that all global operations follow one gold-medal standard on issues such as the environment, human resources and working conditions.

For instance, Kodak installed an oil-fired boiler in its new film-making plant in Xiamen last year, even though it could have gone a cheaper route and burned coal. Most businesses in China burn coal for energy as a result China faces stifling air pollution.

''We constantly tell people: We have one standard. This standard applies to our factories in Rochester and in China,'' said Roger Chen, director of health, safety and environment for Kodak's Greater China region.

That approach has literally eased the load on workers' backs. Chen offers an example of how some workers at the Xiamen site had gotten into the habit of carrying loads in excess of 30 pounds. Kodak made them cut back to a safer 10 pounds apiece, Chen said.

The insistence has paid off: Workers at the Xiamen factory have labored 3.75 million hours without losing work time to an injury.

Kodak says its one-standard approach will lead other companies to change as competition for the best employees in China increases. ''We want our actions to speak for themselves,'' Swift said.

Even with that standard, Kodak's workers in China are paid far less than their counterparts in Rochester on a comparative basis.

The company says its policy is to compensate employees competitively in each country, with salaries set by the market and general business conditions.

Kodak did not provide an average salary for China, but said that its workers generally make more than the going labor-rate for similar businesses in China.

Swift said he knows there are problems with human or worker rights in China, but activists are overstating the problem. He has been in and out of old-line companies in China, he said, ''and you could not distinguish them from (U.S.) companies.''

Gary Bonadonna, director of the Joint Regional Board of UNITE, the union that represents Rochester-area Xerox Corp. workers, doesn't buy that line of reasoning.

Without unions and government protection, corporations are free to impose lower wages and harsh conditions on Chinese employees, Bonadonna said.

Forays into China make good sense for a corporation's bottom line, but they come at the expense of American workers, he said.

''If you had a company, what would you do if you wanted to make money?''