“The global economic crisis is picking up speed and spreading from developed to developing countries and the effects are becoming more and more pronounced here. Our economy is facing a serious challenge,” Mr Yin, the minister of Human Resources and Social Security said.
Mr Yin’s comments came after the ministry conducted a survey of the employment situation in Guangdong, Shanghai, Chongqing, Sichuan, Hunan and Zhejiang, assessing in particular the flow of migrant workers. On 17 November, the ministry issued a notice urging local governments to postpone raising the minimum wage, allow some service orientated companies to adopt flexible working hours and pay, and consider lowering social security premiums. Local governments should also ensure that at least 50 percent of those unemployed migrants who had been employed locally for more than six months are registered as unemployed. Previously, only workers with urban residency could register as unemployed. However, social security and subsistence payments in many regions are already much lower than the minimum wage and can not sustain unemployed workers, particularly those with families, for very long.
The ministry also urged local governments to introduce measures to reduce wage arrears and regulate staff layoffs. The labour department in Guangdong has already strengthened its supervision of enterprises with economic difficulties, those initiating closure, and those with wage arrears of over one month. Particular emphasis has been placed on foreign owned processing industries and labour intensive factories. Moreover, the province will set aside 540 million yuan to subsidize small and medium-sized enterprises, and grant another 200 million yuan in tax rebates for labour-intensive, export-oriented enterprises. Shanxi and Chongqing have also introduced measures to control layoffs.
The response of China’s official trade union , the All-China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU), to the economic crisis and rising unemployment has been to make stable economic development its priority and ensure that employers and employees work together to achieve that goal. On 28 October, the Shenzhen Municipal Federation of Trade Unions issued a Notice on Mobilizing Employees and Enterprises to Pull Together to Overcome Difficulties《关于动员广大职工与企业同舟共济共渡难关的通知》. This was followed on 14 November by the Shanghai federation’s Notice on Maximizing the Vital Role of the Union in Organizing and Mobilizing Workers to Push Forward Economic Stability and Healthy Development《关于充分发挥工会在组织动员职工推进经济平稳健康发展中重要作用的通知. Both notices stress that the stable development of enterprises is the key to strengthening workers’ rights and interests, and that supporting and promoting enterprise development is a precondition for the union’s protection of workers’ fundamental rights. Both federations require local unions to work together with enterprises to find positive solutions to the current difficulties, while using existing labour rights protection and dialogue mechanisms to stabilize labour relations, and resolve disputes before they escalate into protest and work stoppages.
The two notices do, however, betray different approaches to the resolution of labour disputes. Shanghai stresses that the union must understand and grasp the mood of the workforce so as to identify any problems or burgeoning disputes and intervene as quickly as possible to resolve them through persuasion and education. The tone of the Shanghai notice is more in keeping with the union’s traditional role as a Party and government organization acting as a facilitator between labour and management. In Shenzhen, the more progressive federation stresses that the role of enterprise level unions is to protect workers’ rights and interests rationally and according to law. The union should, it says, represent workers interests and put forward workers’ appropriate demands and suggestions regarding wages and benefits and working conditions through collective negotiations with management.
The Shanghai approach, however, has thus far failed to resolve the complaints of the city’s transport workers, despite even the high-profile intervention of Mayor Han Zheng. Taxi driver, bus driver and conductors’ representatives met with the mayor on 19 November to complain about low wages, long working hours and competition from unlicensed operators. Taxi drivers in Shanghai say they have to pay their companies around 600 yuan each working day and work 18 hour days just to earn around 2,500 yuan a month, about half of the city’s average wage. These complaints have been long-standing but are only being addressed now because the municipal government wants to forestall further strikes and protests in the transport sector in the wake of the Chengdu bus strike, the Chongqing cab strike and several other cab strikes this month. Transport strikes are now almost a daily occurrence in China, with the latest in Shantou on 20 November when, according to Xinhua, more than a thousand taxi drivers staged a protest against unlicensed cabs in the southern coastal city.
Local governments across China have generally responded positively to the upsurge in labour disputes this month by pledging to pay wages in arrears (even though they are not legally obliged to do so) and seeking to resolve workers grievances. However, local governments have also been willing to use the police to maintain social order when they deem it necessary. In Shenzhen on 18 November, for example, Radio Free Asia reported that 400 workers demanding the payment of wage arrears clashed with local police and a detachment of the People’s Armed Police.
As CLB points out in its research report Speaking Out: The Workers’ Movement in China, 2005-2006 (see chapter 4), since 2004, the Chinese government has increasingly seen worker protests less as a political threat, and more as a response to economic and labour rights violations. The authorities have sought to intervene as quickly as possible to resolve disputes, but if protests get out of hand and become a “threat to public order,” they will not hesitate to send in security forces to restore order.