China Labour Bulletin

The Nation: China in the Driver's Seat

clb — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 11:44:51 +0800

China Labour Bulletin is quoted in the following article. Copyright remains with the original publisher.

Robert Dreyfuss 20 September 2010

Sitting at a sidewalk coffee shop a block from the White House, Andy Stern, former president of the Service Employees International Union, is reflecting on a series of visits he's made since 2002 to China, where he has discussed organizing and collective bargaining with leaders of the All-China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU). China's economic transformation is a profound challenge to the United States, and to American workers in particular, Stern says. "We have to recognize that China is the first real economic competitor that has ever threatened America's standing as the global economic superpower."

Few would argue that the rise of China has world-altering significance. But across the American left there are sharp, sometimes acrimonious differences about what constitutes appropriate and principled responses to China's emergence as a great power, and whether the country's ascendance is promising or ominous. Even Stern's visits to China over the past decade have drawn withering fire from other labor leaders, along with human rights and globalization activists, who vilify the ACFTU as an instrument of antiworker repression by China's ruling Communist Party. "Andy Stern seems to think he can find progressive elements within the ACFTU. And the SEIU is OK with that?" asks Sophie Richardson, advocacy director of Human Rights Watch's Asia division. Jeffrey Fiedler, a longtime activist on China, an official at the International Union of Operating Engineers and a member of the Congressionally mandated US-China Economic and Security Review Commission (ESRC), is scathing. "Andy Stern threw away all principle and started dealing with the ACFTU. The head of the ACFTU is on the fucking Politburo!" he exclaims. "He's a thug."

Many in the labor movement, of course, are riled by their belief that export factories in China, often managed by US and other multinational corporations, are stealing American manufacturing jobs. They view China as the biggest player in a worldwide rush by US and other corporations to take advantage of cheap labor and lax regulatory regimes in much of the developing world, whose producers stock the shelves of American shopping malls with imported goods. "The global imbalances generally—with Germany, Japan, China, Korea and others focused on an export model and relentlessly wedded to it without concern for moving to a more balanced marketplace—have a direct destabilizing effect on the global economy, and on this economy in particular, and can't be sustained," says Robert Borosage, co-director of the Campaign for America's Future. "And so the United States has to move into a series of much more fraught confrontations and challenges, not just with the Chinese."

The implications of China's rapid ascent go far beyond those concerns. It is fast becoming an economic giant, moving from low-end assembly lines and garment sweatshops to high-end products and innovative approaches to green technology, including wind turbines, solar panels and electric cars. Despite the uncontrolled, almost Wild West nature of capitalism in China, for many developing countries its muscular combination of top-down political control and state-guided industrial growth represents a palpable challenge to the dominant post–World War II paradigm of American-style development, and it is an attractive one in many quarters. "I am concerned that there are other places in the world where China's form of authoritarian capitalism is taking hold," says Carolyn Bartholomew, vice chair of the ESRC and a former aide to Representative Nancy Pelosi. "Look at how China is engaging in Africa."

"It's almost as if the continental plates of global politics are shifting beneath our feet," says Orville Schell, director of the Asia Society's Center on U.S.-China Relations. "We suddenly have this other model of authoritarian capitalism that is proving to be remarkably successful, and it is even posing a challenge, not just economically but politically, to our belief that our system of democratic governance is the one that's best able to deliver a good life."

Along with China's growing economic power comes an inevitable corollary: China's eventual emergence as a political and military power wielding its influence from East Asia to the Pacific, the Indian Ocean, the Middle East, Africa and beyond.

Among progressives, there's certainly no consensus over how to respond to the rise of China. "This drives a wedge right through the progressive community," says John Feffer, co-director of Foreign Policy in Focus at the left-leaning Institute for Policy Studies (IPS). Well aware that US policy toward China is driven by the multinational corporations and banks that invest there and by the military-industrial complex, which sees China as a rival and potential adversary, progressives know they have only limited power to affect national policy. Still, they debate choices: confront China or accommodate its rise? Slam China with tariffs and sanctions or invite its sprawling, state-owned enterprises to buy up US companies and build factories in the United States? Engage the ACFTU and other Chinese institutions or avoid them? And what about human rights, including worker rights, religious freedom and minority rights for Tibetans and Muslim Uighurs in western China? Will labor shortages, which have helped spark a wave of strikes and protests, lead China to give greater freedom to workers to organize, to secure higher wages and a better standard of living?

To answer at least some of those questions, I interviewed several dozen progressive policy analysts, economists, environmentalists, labor and human rights activists and officials, and academic specialists on China. Nearly all of them agree on one thing—namely, that to compete with China the United States must adopt a clear-cut set of industrial policies, investing in infrastructure, job creation, education and training, high-tech manufacturing, and research and development, especially in green technology.

"The first priority is to get our own house in order, so we're not filled with so much anxiety that is easily transferred onto the rise of another country," says Schell. But even on this point there is disagreement, because many activists on the left argue that it's difficult to promote a US industrial policy—taxing the rich, subsidizing favored industries, spending a lot more on infrastructure and training—without simultaneously taking on the dominant ideology of neoliberal globalization and free trade, and that includes the China problem. "It's almost impossible to have a domestic industrial policy without addressing the trading regime," says Robert Kuttner, co-founder of The American Prospect.

For many in the US labor movement, there's little doubt that China is a grave menace, at the very least, to American jobs and prosperity. At the AFL-CIO, the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) and the Alliance for American Manufacturing (a project supported by the United Steelworkers), the book on China is this: it's a bullying, mercantilist power, competing unfairly with other countries by artificially keeping the value of its currency low and by suppressing labor rights and trampling on environmental standards, cannibalizing a generation or two of poor migrant workers to churn out cheap products for export. In this narrative, China exploits the willingness of multinationals to set up unregulated factories along its industrial southern coast, meanwhile blackmailing those firms to share trade secrets and technology with China as the price of admittance. It's a sweeping indictment, and the remedy they suggest involves some combination of daunting and punitive tariffs—as much as 25 percent across the board on imports from China, some say—along with sanctions and other measures to force China to revalue the renminbi, its currency, by 40 percent or more.

Advocates in this camp discount fears of a confrontation or a trade war with China, and in fact they insist that the longer the United States waits before taking on China, the harder it will be. "I would say to the Chinese, 'We are not going to allow the free access of Chinese goods, as long as you are pirating technology, requiring American companies to produce in China only for export and not for the Chinese market, extracting technology transfer agreements that are plainly coercive, and manipulating your currency.' Then the fat would be in the fire, and the Chinese would have to decide what they're going to do about it," says Kuttner. "It might lead to some conflict," he says. "If we took a harder line on Chinese mercantilism, it might get kind of ugly in the short term."

Robert Scott, an economist at EPI, published a study in March claiming that between 2001 and 2008 nearly 2.5 million American jobs skedaddled to China, including more than 600,000 in computer and electronics manufacturing alone. Like many in the AFL-CIO's orbit, Scott takes a frankly nationalist stance in defense of measures to rebalance the US-China trade deficit. "The US government has an obligation to US workers to develop policies that are in our national interests," he says during an interview in his office. When I point out that over the past three decades China has lifted hundreds of millions of people out of desperate poverty, and that his attitude might sound chauvinistic to some, he nods. "It does. I view my job as being concerned with the living standards of American workers." And he insists that only a threat to close the US market to Chinese imports will be enough to get Beijing's attention.

It's possible to make the case that China's success in bringing masses of peasants out of poverty—as many as 400 million and counting—is the single most important event in the world in the past quarter-century. To be sure, much of China's growth since the late '70s has come at the expense of the environment and of workers laboring under atrocious conditions. But many advocates of getting tough with China dismiss the vast improvement in living standards there or question whether it has happened at all. They argue that China has achieved its stunning record of growth, averaging close to 10 percent annually since 1979, by cannibalizing its workforce, with little or no material benefit for the average Chinese. "I don't view it as a success story," says Scott Paul, founding executive director of the Alliance for American Manufacturing (AAM), a longtime labor lobbyist and former aide to David Bonior, a former Congressman from Michigan. Paul argues that Chinese workers are often not paid proper wages and that they labor under weak or nonexistent environmental and workplace safety rules. By compelling China to revalue the renminbi, Paul and others argue, the United States can force China to absorb more of what it produces, which will raise Chinese wages, consumption and living standards. "This will allow China to enjoy the fruits of its growth," says EPI's Scott.

Over at the AFL-CIO, Thea Lee also isn't ready to acknowledge that China's growth has been a boon to its population. Lee, the federation's assistant director for public policy, is part Chinese herself, and she's intimately familiar with US policy toward China, which she faults as too accommodating and too driven by the interests of American corporations that operate there. "I don't call it a success for working people," she says. "It's a disgrace. The regulatory system is like the Wild West, and nobody cares. You have long-term environmental damage, you have child labor, you have forced labor, the destruction of workers' health." Like Fiedler, Lee rolls her eyes when she talks about the ACFTU, which has nearly 200 million members. "We don't recognize the ACFTU as a real union," she says. "I consider them to be the government. They're management."

Even as officials and activists within the labor movement and among its allies call for a confrontational stance against what they regard as predatory trade practices by China, at times they fall into what can only be called cold war–style rhetoric. AAM's Paul expressed grave concern about China's efforts to enhance its military power. "The trade surplus is being used by China to build up a military. They want to build a blue-water navy in the Pacific, to develop sophisticated nuclear weapons, satellite-killing weapons. What does that say about peace?" he asks. "Their stated goal is, they want to have a presence in the Pacific Rim and challenge US supremacy in the Pacific. That has enormous implications." And on Fiedler's list of steps to be taken to show China that the United States means business is a slowdown or suspension in US-China military ties and sharp limits on Chinese students studying in America. Fiedler tosses out words like "fascist" in regard to China, adding, "I would continue to sell arms to Taiwan."

Of course, there is another view. Some argue that it's impractical to try to bring jobs back from China, and that in any case the United States must make room for Beijing's rise as a great power. For these analysts, any talk of boosting America's military response to China is alarming.

The liberal bête noire of the labor movement and its allies is James Galbraith, the heterodox economist and professor at the University of Texas, who is sharply critical of those who think that jobs can be coaxed back home via any combination of pressure tactics against China. People like Galbraith are rudely dismissed as "panda huggers" by some, and even their motives are called into question. ("He's an apologist. His wife is Chinese. He's done some consulting for the regime. For God's sake, don't quote me on that," says one left-leaning critic.) Galbraith represents a diametrically opposite point of view from the AFL-CIO/EPI/AAM nexus, and his views are echoed by people like Columbia University's Joseph Stiglitz, MIT's Alice Amsden and others.

Galbraith dismisses the claim that China's economic growth has not brought massive material benefits to hundreds of millions over a short time. "It's clear that you have vast populations that are a generation removed from grinding poverty—and with an existence that they understand very well is vastly better." He argues that a great deal of what China manufactures is produced for its domestic market, that wages and working conditions are improving (especially for those in the export sector) and that forcing China to upvalue its currency would have no effect whatsoever on US job creation.

A central argument among US labor officials and their allies is that by suppressing the value of its currency, China is also suppressing domestic consumption far too severely. And, they argue, China's sky-high savings rate—more than 40 percent annually, one of the highest in the world, compared with US levels, which have mostly fluctuated in the zero to 5 percent range—is accomplished only by squeezing the living standards of its 1.3 billion people. So, they say, by compelling China to revalue the renminbi and direct its wealth inward, they're only doing what's best for China—and meanwhile helping to create Chinese demand for US goods.

Galbraith ridicules the idea that Americans know better than the Chinese what's good for them. "The notion that China could somehow increase its consumption in ways that would materially benefit American workers is not plausible," he says. "First, consumption in China has been rising rapidly for decades. Second, raising it more rapidly means what? Having more cars and fewer roads to drive on? It doesn't make any sense from a development standpoint. Why should they want to slow the pace at which they build infrastructure relative to the purchase of consumer goods? Why would they build fewer power plants and have more appliances in order to have brownouts?"

Some, like Galbraith, who question labor's unblinking anti-China stance don't shy away from accusing many of China's most vehement critics of xenophobia, racism and Yellow Peril–style alarmism, which echoes the fearmongering about Japan's supposed threat to US prosperity and jobs two decades ago. Progressive critics of the AFL-CIO's China policy often make two intertwined points: that China ought to get more credit for its accomplishment in bringing so many people to the threshold of a prosperous urban life, and that it's wrong for the United States to inflict pain on China in order to compensate for its own decades-long history of economic mismanagement. "We're talking about a country that has the continuing potential to pull a huge number of people out of poverty," says IPS's Feffer. "I don't think it can do that by competing 'fairly' according to the rules of international policy." Compared with workers in China, never mind steelworkers in Nigeria or textile workers in Brazil, American workers are vastly better off, he says. "If you look at American workers, they're doing pretty well."

"There is this longstanding Yellow Peril discourse in the United States, and a lot of this stuff fits into it comfortably," says Doug Henwood, editor and publisher of the Left Business Observer. "Yeah, they're competitive, but...that history of Yellow Peril–ism makes it seem sinister and virulent. It's a lot easier to blame China than it is to look at what's wrong with the United States. There's a kind of nationalism that is a little too close to xenophobia that fuels this sort of thing, and populists on the left and right can agree on not liking China."

Such a tendency is all the more regrettable in that it fuels saber-rattling arguments from the right. For years the Pentagon has been issuing increasingly dire warnings about China's emergence as a strategic challenge to the United States, and since the end of the cold war neoconservatives and the promilitary right have raised the specter of a Chinese boogeyman to compensate for what Charles Freeman, a Mandarin-speaking former senior US diplomat, likes to call "enemy deprivation syndrome."

Selig Harrison, a former journalist and director of the Asia Program at the Center for International Policy, suggests instead that progressives ought to support an accommodation with China's legitimate national interest in its region. "The idea that we should accept China's interests in East Asia, I would think, should be readily understood by liberals," he says. "The fact that China is going to have a navy with a long reach, that it's going to be a superpower, just as India is, well, America has to adjust."

But America doesn't adjust well. It's hard to imagine a US politician making the case that Washington should pull back from its overextended posture in Asia and the Pacific or cede an expanded presence to China. Only this summer, the Obama administration started laying bricks in a Great Wall of Containment around China by mending ties with a brutal Indonesian special forces unit and taking sides against China in a potentially dangerous dispute over Beijing's claim to a string of islands in the South China Sea. "It would be disastrous for progressives to provide fodder for the military-industrial complex by demonizing China," says Michael Klare, author of Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet. "There are very powerful interests in Washington who want to set us on a path of confrontation."

In particular, the issue of Taiwan is a flash point, and if relations between Beijing and Washington spiral downward, a conflagration between the two nuclear powers could erupt over the Chinese island. According to Harrison, an end to US military support to Taiwan ought to be the starting point for improved US-China ties, including on economic issues. "We'll never get China to behave economically on key issues like the currency peg and their position in the future on holding our securities if we continue to fuck them on Taiwan," he says.

Where one stands on China depends, in part, on whether one thinks China can evolve from its authoritarian system to a freer, more democratic one—and if so, how quickly.

The bible for many of those who believe that China isn't about to change is James Mann's 2007 book The China Fantasy. Mann, a former Los Angeles Times reporter now at the Johns Hopkins School for Advanced International Studies, argues that China is unlikely to disintegrate or democratize. Instead, he says, it's most likely that decades from now China will be both superrich and undemocratic, and he says those who believe in the possibility of democratization are "hopelessly gullible." China, he says, "is still a Leninist regime, run by a Communist Party governed, in hierarchical ascending circles, by a Central Committee, a Politburo, and a Standing Committee of the Politburo."

It's beyond the scope of this article to examine the various paths that China's political system might follow in the coming decades. But if change does come about, the working class will be a driving force, and lately there are signs that Chinese workers are starting to flex their muscle. Over the past several years, they have staged an escalating series of job actions, strikes and protests, culminating in headline-grabbing shutdowns at Honda assembly plants in May. And despite those who see China in black-and-white terms—an oppressed working class beaten down by a monolithic regime and its captive ACFTU union—recent labor actions present a far more nuanced picture. At the very least, the recent wave of strikes is a sign that all the players—workers, provincial and local governments, the ACFTU, the regime in Beijing—are engaged in a complex dance. Perhaps most surprising, in many parts of China, workers, the central government and enlightened provincial authorities are united in an effort to raise wages and improve working conditions.

"More than twenty provinces have introduced increases in the minimum wage of around 20 percent," says Geoffrey Crothall, the spokesman for China Labour Bulletin (CLB), a prolabor activist group based in Hong Kong. "When strikes have broken out, many local governments have interceded and tried to get management and workers to negotiate." Crothall says there is no doubt the central government wants wages to rise, to contribute to social stability. And there are other factors that are pushing wages upward: among them, China's need for a higher-quality workforce as it moves into high-end manufacturing, along with early signs of a labor shortage resulting from slow population growth, the one-child policy and the fact that so many millions have already left the countryside for factory jobs. The ACFTU, which has long seen itself as a defender of the party and as a "trade union with Chinese characteristics," is now being pressured to change from below by striking workers and from above by the government in Beijing.

Crothall, whose organization was founded by Han Dongfang, who set up China's first independent union during the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989, points to the ferment in Guangdong province, site of many of China's most important manufacturing facilities. "The ACFTU is evolving. It's not a monolith," says Crothall. "It is a government institution. But in Guangdong, the federation is quite progressive and pragmatic-sounding." And in Guangdong, according to CLB, the provincial government is experimenting with new regulations that would allow Chinese workers to engage in collective bargaining.

That's why Andy Stern's efforts in China, despite the criticism, seem so valuable. "I get in trouble on Glenn Beck saying, 'Workers of the world unite!' It's not just a slogan," Stern says. It's critical, he adds, for US and Chinese workers to see each other as allies, and he argues that efforts such as his can help shift the ACFTU in a direction that will make it much more representative of its hundreds of millions of members. "There's a big evolution going on," says Stern. "And to me, the question is, Where does the union end up, not where it started." Like Crothall, Stern emphasizes that it isn't just workers who want the ACFTU to change the way it operates. "The government is pushing them to transform, too."

Katie Quan, a former union leader and associate chair of the Labor Center at the University of California, Berkeley, backs Stern's effort to engage the ACFTU. "The policy of the AFL-CIO to boycott China, to have nothing to do with China, has only kept the working class behind," she says. She proposes a three-pronged approach to China and the ACFTU, involving union-to-union dialogue, worker-to-worker exchanges and talks among scholars. In recent years, she says, China has made enormous changes in labor policy, starting with a law governing contract labor that took effect in January 2008. These changes have made workers more aware of their rights and, in fact, helped spark the recent upsurge in strikes. And there are future reforms in the works, including a collective-bargaining law.

A recent report by CLB, "Going It Alone: The Workers Movement in China, 2007–2008," concludes by saying that despite the ACFTU's history, there's no alternative to trying to reshape the federation. "It is essential that the formal organizing power of the ACFTU somehow be integrated with the strength and support of the workers," says the report. "The two sides will have to find a way of coming together."

Of course, it's fair to ask whether change will come fast enough. Ralph Nader, who's inspired a generation of global-justice activists and who has long campaigned against a trade regime dominated by rules written by and for big banks and corporations, strongly advocates confronting China and other low-wage exporting countries, such as India, with a social tariff designed to compensate for the lack of collective bargaining, a decent minimum wage and poor or nonexistent regulations. He acknowledges that in the end China might change, especially if modernization causes workers to demand more rights and the growing middle class exerts pressure for more democracy. But Nader is not prepared to be patient. "If we wait long enough, in thirty-five years wages and working conditions and all that may equal out," he says. "But look at the hollowed-out communities in the United States in the meantime."

In the end, however, there is probably very little that the United States can do to change China's trajectory. Few, if any, of the economic measures suggested to force China to make changes are likely to work, at least not without backfiring and causing massive dislocation in the United States as well. "Any attempt to get tough with the Chinese would also bite us in the ass," says Left Business Observer's Henwood. If a trade war begins to develop, China can, among other things, wield its vast holdings of dollars and US Treasury bills as a weapon and can look elsewhere for imports that it now buys from the United States. Sophie Richardson of Human Rights Watch says the United States ought to place democratization and human rights far higher on its agenda, even in meetings on other topics, without fear that China will be insulted: "There are all sorts of ways of saying it in meetings between the two countries without it being a giant Fuck you! in the middle of the meeting." So far, President Obama seems to have sidetracked human rights.

The United States may have little choice but to get used to the fact that China is coming into its own. If that's the case, though, we may be able to use the Chinese challenge to make sweeping changes in the way America does business at home. "It isn't just China's rise, which is tectonic, but it's our own financial, political and cultural collapse that is cause for even more consternation," says Orville Schell. "We need to find ways to accommodate China, and to influence it. And it's not a foregone conclusion that it will be easy, or even peaceable."

Migrant workers in Hainan paid far less than the minimum wage

clb — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 16:17:40 +0800

One sixth of migrant workers in Hainan earn less than 500 yuan a month, far below the legal minimum wage in the province, according to a survey by the province’s trade union federation.

The majority (55 percent) of the 350 workers surveyed by the union earned between 500 yuan and 1,000 yuan a month. Only five percent could earn more than 2,000 yuan a month. Not surprisingly, 90 percent of the respondents said they were not satisfied with their current level of income.

The minimum wage in Hainan was raised by 200 yuan per month on 1 July, an average increase of 37 percent, and the highest increase of any province in China this year. Yet, the survey clearly showed, this adjustment has had little impact on the poorest paid migrant workers in the province. The minimum wage in Hainan now ranges from 680 yuan a month to 830 yuan in the main cities such as Haikou and Sanya, but this is still only about the average wage for those migrant workers surveyed.

Many workers had not signed contracts with their employer, and most complained of low wages, wage arrears or only partial payment of wages. Most respondents said laws and regulations related working hours and conditions and holidays were routinely ignored by the employer, who unilaterally determined pay and working conditions.

In addition, the gap between the wages of migrant workers and workers with an urban residency is alarming. The average monthly wage in Sanya is now 2,455 yuan. Most migrant workers can only earn a third of that.

And when compared to the cost of a room at one of the luxury hotels that line Sanya’s beach front, the low wages of migrant workers fall into even sharper relief. Many five star hotels were reportedly charging more than 10,000 yuan per night during this year’s Spring Festival holiday, the equivalent of an entire year’s pay for many migrants in the city.

The humanity of Chilean mine saga: a poignant contrast with China

william — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 15:35:57 +0800

On 5 August 2010, more than 33 miners were trapped deep inside a mine, causing many to fear for the worst. However, remarkably, 17 days later, the miners were found to be still alive, to the relief and joy of their families and countrymen.

After reading news stories of the events and watching video, one couldn’t help but be struck by the stark contrasts with Chinese post-incident report coverage:

First, in Chile, most of the media attention has been on the actual miners – on their health and safety, their psychological well being, and their stories as individuals. International mine safety experts have been consulted. The Chilean government has tried to care for the emotional health of the miners, by consulting NASA about how people deal with extreme isolation. Professional psychologists are also helping the miners and their family members. In China, on the other hand, media focus is almost always directed at the heroic efforts of the government to save trapped miners. Family members and miners are rarely the main profile of stories, and families only serve as objects of paternalistic relief efforts. The CLB research report Bone and Blood: The Price of Coal in China points out that after mining incidents, the government strictly controls the media, by controlling the content and tone of the stories, and limiting access to the mines and bereaved family members. While in Chile, the foreign and domestic media has free access to report the truth. Also, we learn that not only have food, water and anti-depressants been sent down a small tube to the miners, but also individualized gifts, such as a national football jersey signed by the entire Chilean national team, as well as a photo of Elvis for an adoring fan. The extent to which the media has focused on individuals in Chile would be unthinkable in China.

Second, upon hearing that the miners were still alive, dozens of spontaneous celebrations broke out in Santiago and elsewhere, with people joyfully honking horns and waving the Chilean flag. Having lived in Chile for a year, when I saw these scenes on TV, I couldn’t help but feel extremely happy for Chile and the inspirational and determined spirit of the trapped miners. In China, in contrast, one rarely sees spontaneous national celebrations when miners are found alive. To some extent, that’s understandable, since China is an enormous country with many big and important media stories happening simultaneously. And yet, sometimes it’s possible to detect a certain numbness and complacency on the part of the public towards mining incidents. In some ways, again, this is understandable. Mining disasters occur all the time, and the disaster reports are usually reported in a stale, cookie-cutter approach. Besides, even a jubilant and spontaneous celebration involving thousands of people might be seen as a “mass incident” in China, and the government would then take appropriate “measures” to ensure “stability”.

Finally, in Chile, the workers have had strong institutional support on their side. Since the company who owns the mine has gone broke, union leaders are fighting on behalf of the workers to make sure their wages are paid. Also, family members have already filed lawsuits against the mining company San Esteban Mining. In China, immediately after mining disasters, groups of government officials – usually in work teams of three− go to each affected family to comfort them – and to get them to sign a compensation settlement as quickly as possible. By targeting each family individually, officials can decrease the risk that the bereaved family members will unite as a collective force or seek legal advice. Also, once the family has signed a compensation agreement, the employment relationship between the dead worker and the mine operator is ended, and workers’ families are no longer able to sue the mine bosses.

Anhui court accepts HIV discrimination lawsuit

clb — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 15:44:05 +0800

A college graduate from the central province of Anhui has successfully filed what is believed to be China’s first HIV employment discrimination lawsuit.

The plaintiff, known by his pseudonym Xiao Wu, filed an anti-discrimination lawsuit in the Yingjiang District Court in Anqing on 26 August after the Anqing education department denied him a teaching position because he was HIV positive. The court formally accepted the case on Monday August 30.

In his lawsuit, Xiao Wu claims that the education department’s actions “infringed legal regulations prohibiting discrimination against people with HIV/AIDS, and violated the plaintiff’s right to equal access to employment.”

Apart from legal expenses, Xiao Wu is not seeking any monetary compensation, merely a confirmation from the court that the education department’s refusal to employ him on the grounds of his medical condition was an “illegal act” (行为违法), and that the department take “concrete action” (具体行政行为) to correct its mistake.

Xiao Wu, a young graduate from a poor rural village in Anhui, had passed both the education department’s written test and face to face interviews in June. But in July he was told to take a medical examination. When the results came back the following month, the education department informed him that he had failed to meet the requirements (不合格) of the test and was thus barred from employment.

The education department does not deny the charges, and defended its actions on the grounds of public safety. “We believe that teachers should be responsible for students’ sound development. Our decision not to hire him is to protect the students. We definitely won’t change our minds,” a department official named Fang told the China Daily.

The education department’s justification of its discriminatory action clearly shows that prejudice against, and misunderstanding of, people with HIV is widespread and deeply ingrained in Chinese society. There are at least 740,000 people living with HIV in China today but because of the stigma attached to the condition, until now, none have been prepared to take legal action against discrimination in the workplace.

Xiao Wu’s lawyer said he hoped the case would help raise public awareness of the discrimination suffered by people with HIV, and protect the rights of job seekers in the future.

SCMP: Reforms planned to cut firms' influence over local unions

clb — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 13:05:49 +0800

China Labour Bulletin is quoted in the following article. Copyright remains with the original publisher.

Daisy Zhong
23 August 2010

The mainland's sole official trade union will pay staff in its branches from next year and will gradually allow more leaders of the grass-roots unions under its umbrella to be elected by workers' representatives.

Such reforms, aimed at making local unions more independent of their members' employers, are being drafted in the third amendment of the Trade Union Law, said Liu Jichen , head of the legal work department at the All-China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU).

But Liu stressed that no matter how independent the unions were, they should not deviate from the leadership of the Communist Party. "Even with the direct elections [of union chairmen], no mode is allowed other than the current unified trade union system, where grass-roots unions are led by their higher authorities," he said.

The latest reforms are a response to the wave of strikes that rippled through foreign-owned factories in the manufacturing heartland in the south this year, casting doubt on the ability of the mainland's flawed trade unions to represent workers.

"Very few workers trust the union, and they don't think it represents their interests," said Geoffrey Crothall, a spokesman for China Labour Bulletin, a Hong Kong-based workers' rights group.

He said the ACFTU was making a concession to the workforce because of fears that social conflicts might escalate.

Apo Leong, a consultant to the Asia Monitor Resource Centre, another labour rights group, said election reform was being brought in "to accommodate outside and inside pressure - the harsh criticism against the ACFTU".

The trade unions are all part of the ACFTU and are seen as branches of the government. Most of their leaders are Communist Party appointees or managers from the companies to which they are linked.

The Labour Law says a union's funding must come from the company, putting unionists fighting for workers' rights in an embarrassing position, because their own salaries are paid by the firm's management.

Leong said a strike at a Honda components factory in Foshan was a test case that proved the country's trade union system was malfunctioning.

The chairman of the trade union at the factory, where workers went on strike in May, was also the plant's deputy manager, and other union representatives were also senior managers.

So it did not come as a surprise when some workers said trade union staff had beaten them, while others said they had no idea who their representatives were or what they did at the factory.

Academics say that because trade unions are accountable to the government and the company instead of to workers, their main role has been to maintain social stability and encourage workers to produce more - and they have become ineffective in defending workers' rights.

As the authorities have no intention of easing their own control over trade unions, their only option to accommodate workers' concerns is to reduce the influence of the companies' managements on the unions.

One way is to have all local union staff paid by the ACFTU instead of the companies. Other reforms could include extending the collective bargaining system, which provides a platform for workers to negotiate salaries with management, from the enterprise level to the industry level.

The ACFTU also plans to enhance the "democratic management" of local trade unions. The amended law will allow workers' representatives to choose their union leaders from among candidates endorsed by the union, instead of official appointees or company managers.

The method has been tried in some well-off areas in southeastern China since as early as 2003, although some academics have expressed doubts about just how democratic the elections there are.

Leong said such elections were far from fully democratic.

"Good governance needs openness and transparency, as well as awareness from workers," he said, but many elections were "just an act".

He also said that those elections would only be promoted at the local level, not at the city and provincial levels, where tight government control still prevailed.

In another reform, trade unions higher in the hierarchy will be able to send leaders to grass-roots unions and pay their salaries, rather than have leaders appointed from within the local union.

Leong said the reforms were steps towards more grass-roots democracy that would free unions from the influence of management and go some way towards resolving the conflict of interest. However, the government-sanctioned unions would remain a far cry from the independent unions seen in many other countries.

He said that when Communist Party policy conflicted with workers' interests, it was always the workers' rights that were sacrificed. One example was keeping wages low to attract foreign businesses, which was counter to workers' interests.

This meant that even if a trade union was independent from management, "it still won't be able to function properly, because it is still not independent from the party".

Crothall said that in the current political environment, a truly self-governing trade union, free from both management and government control, was unlikely to emerge.

"It's too politically dangerous," he said.

So the best that workers could hope for would be "a democratically run trade union within the ACFTU", he said.

Are "hometown unions" the best defenders of migrant workers' rights?

william — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 16:23:55 +0800

Recently in Shaanxi province, 118 migrant workers – who were mainly from Hubei province – were beaten by 300 thugs while staging a protest to get back their back pay at a railway bridge construction project near the historic city of Xi’an. In total, thirty workers were injured, nine severely. But strangely, what has attracted attention to their case is not the horrific scale of violence used by the employer, but the way the dispute was eventually settled.

After the incident, the Hubei Federation of Trade Unions, the Hubei Nanzhang government, and the Xi’an City Linzhang District government had a series of consultation meetings. They came to the following points of consensus: 1) the public security bureau would conduct an investigation according to the law; 2) the relevant departments would bear responsibility for the medical costs of treating the migrant workers; and 3) the Linzhang government would dispatch an auditing team to carry out a thorough audit on the project’s finances, and according to the audit’s findings, the accounts would be settled with the migrant workers. If an agreement cannot be reached, the case will go through arbitration and then the courts.

According to media reports, after some of the beaten migrant workers told the Xiangfan City Trade Union in Hubei about what had happened, the Hubei Federation of Trade Unions got involved in this case, and a “migrant worker in non-native place rights defense joint mechanism” (农民工异地维权联动机制) was launched. The fact that the two unions, under the guidance of the governments and Party institutions, have largely settled this problem has brought national attention to the concept of yidi wequan (异地维权). Yidi weiquan essentially refers to the concept of having unions from the migrant workers place of origin help in the rights defense process by coordinating and consulting with the local government and union in the place in which the incident occurred. Some people point out that this sort of rights defense may be a way to solve the problem of “local protectionism” – in which enterprise and local-level unions in the place where an incident occurred are basically indifferent to the plight of migrant workers, perhaps because they’re blindly subservient to the local government’s priorities in boosting business and GDP, or perhaps they might be outright corrupt, or just plain lazy. But to what extent can this serve as a viable solution in solving workers’ grievances?

On the one hand, the most prominent institutional example of yidi weiquan is what Sichuan province has done since instituting yidi weiquan mechanisms in various provinces, cities, and counties since 2005. From 2005 to 2009, Sichuan’s yidi weiquan organizations got involved in 1,211 cases by helping local trade union to take on rights defense cases. In total, by getting involved in these cases, they helped migrant workers win back over 36 million yuan in wages in arrears, and over 6 million in occupational injury cases.
When looking at these numbers, combined with the fact that the Xi’an case seems to have been resolved relatively smoothly, one can certainly see the positive aspects of this model. By enlisting the help of their tongxiang (fellow hometown folk) migrant workers might get extra help in situations in which they might otherwise be given the cold shoulder.

However, the model also has several limitations, some of which the Chinese press has pointed out. First, as an editorial in the Yangtze Daily (长江日报) points out, a union’s relationship with workers should be based on labour relations, not on geographic origin of the workers. But, the editorial notes that the fact that the Hubei union initiated an investigation, rather than the Xi’an union initiating it, demonstrates that local unions’ power to protect the rights of migrant workers is fairly weak. Second, the practical limitations to this model are also quite apparent. As the editorial notes, migrant workers are the main workforce these days – with an estimated number of 210 million. With this many people working far away from their hometowns, and with labour rights violations so rampant, is a system that might necessitate officials flying back and forth to distant cities and staying in hotels really feasible financially? Clearly the costs are very high, and it clearly wouldn’t make much economic sense for officials in far away areas to get involved in routine cases involving relatively small amounts of back wages. Also, it’s notable in the Xi’an incident mentioned above that not only the unions of both places became involved, but the negotiations also involved Party and government officials. Obviously, the case had already taken on a political dimension, which paradoxically helped facilitate a settlement. However, the vast majority of labour rights violations occur in private sector industries, and most have no direct political implications. These are the types of cases the yidi weiquan model is ill-suited to solving. It should also go without saying that while the yidi weiquan model might have a role to play in rights defense distant unions are incapable of playing a more pro-active role pre-incident role: by monitoring workplace safety conditions, engaging in collective bargaining…etc.

Although the model can play a certain limited role, its main rationale – that hometown solidarity can help migrant workers overcome local protectionism – is outdated. First, as many people in China now recognize, “migrant workers”, who are often referred to as nongmingong (农民工) or “the floating population” (流动人口) , now need to be seen as simply “workers” or “new urban citizens” (新市民). Undoubtedly, this shift in mentality will require a new sense of dignity and respect for these workers. Second, the ACFTU needs thorough reform so that it can be run by workers, in order to serve workers − no matter where they are from.

Foxconn and Elec-Tech – a tale of two factories

Geoff — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 13:43:56 +0800

As Foxconn was staging its elaborate song and dance show yesterday to convince the world that, after a string of suicides earlier this year, everything was now fine and the workers in its Chinese factories were happy, a Hong Kong activist group released a report on a lesser known factory where appalling work conditions have clearly not improved.

In the last year alone, more than 60 workers at Elec-Tech International, a manufacturer of small home appliances, have been injured, many losing fingers and hands while operating antiquated and dangerous machinery at the company’s plant in Zhuhai, according to the report by Students and Scholars Against Corporate Misbehavior (SACOM).

Even more troubling is that Elec-Tech has made no effort to repair or replace the faulty machinery; “Our torment does not bother Elec-Tech at all! They don’t care about the ongoing danger in the factory,” SACOM quoted one employee as saying. He was in hospital receiving treatment while the machine that injured him was still in operation.

No training is given to machine operators at Elec-Tech, employees are forced to work excessively long hours, and, most outrageously of all, the company even imposes fines on accident victims for their “mistakes” in the operation of the machinery.

Moreover, in the wake of the report, the company is now putting pressure on injured workers not to talk about their case to anyone outside the company.

Despite the fact that Elec-Tech supplies products to American retail giant Walmart, SACOM’s report has thus far received little attention from the international media, which has instead given considerable coverage to Foxconn’s publicity stunt.

One journalist who did follow up the story, Beijing-based Kathleen McLaughlin, was told by Elec-Tech “Why don't you call Foxconn?”

Hopefully now that the Foxconn circus is over, more attention will be paid to the plight of the Elec-Tech workers, many of whom are struggling to get proper compensation for their career-ending injuries.

For more information on the case, please contact SACOM’s Debby Chan on 852 2392 5464. Email debby@sacom.hk

Canadian Press: iPhone-maker Foxconn holds rallies in attempt to boost morale after worker suicides in China

clb — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 16:12:01 +0800

China Labour Bulletin is quoted in the following article. Copyright remains with the original publisher.

iPhone-maker Foxconn holds rallies in attempt to boost morale after worker suicides in China
By Gillian Wong (CP)
18 August 2010

HONG KONG — Following a string of suicides at its Chinese factories, Foxconn Technology Group raised workers' wages and installed safety nets on buildings to catch would-be jumpers. Now the often secretive manufacturer of the iPhone and other electronics is holding rallies for its workers to raise morale at the heavily regimented factories.

The outreach to workers shows how Foxconn has been shaken by the suicides and the bad press they have attracted to the normally publicity shy company. The latest suicide — the 12th this year — occurred August 4 when a 22-year-old woman jumped from her factory dormitory in eastern Jiangsu province.

The motivational rallies are titled "Treasure Your Life, Love Your Family, Care for Each Other to Build a Wonderful Future" and will be held at all facilities in China, according to Burson Marsteller, a public relations firm representing Foxconn.

"Foxconn feels it's perhaps time to look back and to learn from the tragedies and to send an important message to their employees that they are not alone, and that the Foxconn family is there to support them and to help them through their challenges," Burson Marsteller said in an email. The email invited reporters to attend a rally later Wednesday at its mammoth industrial park in Shenzhen, which employs 300,000 and where most of the suicides took place.

Foxconn, part of Taiwan's Hon Hai Precision Industry Co., has built itself into the world's largest contract maker of electronics, by delivering quality products on thin profit margins for its customers which include Apple Inc., Sony Corp., Dell Inc., Nokia Corp. and Hewlett-Packard Co.

Labor activists, however, say that success has come in part from driving workers hard by enforcing a rigid management style, operating a too-fast assembly line and requiring excessive overtime. The company denies that it treats employees inhumanely and has pledged to prevent more suicides and improve worker well-being.

The troubles at Foxconn came to light amid high-profile labour unrest in China and highlighted Chinese workers growing dissatisfaction with the low wages and pressure cooker working conditions that helped turn the country into an international manufacturing powerhouse.

One activist said Foxconn's Wednesday rally was unlikely to boost morale and does not replace the need for more thoroughgoing reforms.

"I don't think today's event is going to achieve anything except provide a bit of theatre," said Geoffrey Crothall, spokesman of the China Labour Bulletin, a labour rights group based in Hong Kong. "Basically what Foxconn needs to do is treat its workers like decent human beings and pay them a decent wage. It's not rocket science."

"They're still tackling this from a top-down approach, they are organizing the workers. They're not allowing the workers to organize themselves," Crothall said.

A similar gathering was held Monday at Foxconn's campus in the northern city of Taiyuan, which employs about 60,000 workers. A Foxconn official in Taipei said the company decided that day to remove safety nets from the Taiyuan plant, although there are no plans to do the same at its other factories.

In May, Hon Hai's founder Terry Gou promised to work harder to prevent more deaths. More counsellors were being hired and employees also were being assigned to 50-person groups to watch one another for signs of emotional trouble.

Foxconn also announced two raises, more than doubling the basic worker pay to 2,000 yuan ($293) a month at the Shenzhen compound. But workers have to pass a three-month review period before they qualify for the second raise.

___

Associated Press writer Debby Wu contributed to this report from Taipei.

At least 19 killed in massive explosion at fireworks factory

clb — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 16:05:40 +0800

The death toll in yesterday’s explosion at a fireworks factory in northeastern China has risen to 19, with more than 150 injured or missing. It is still not known for sure how many workers were in the factory at the time.

The massive explosion leveled the entire factory building in Yichun, Heilongjiang, and shattered windows more than a kilometer way. The official Xinhua news agency reported that more than 1,700 firefighters had been dispatched to the scene to prevent the blaze from spreading to nearby firework warehouses.

Location of factory in Wumahe district, Yichun, Heilongjiang

View Factory explosion in Wumahe, Yichun, Heilongjiang in a larger map

Monday’s explosion is the latest in a string of major work-related accidents across China, most noticeably in coal mines, but also on construction sites and in factories processing hazardous materials. At least 13 people died and 120 were injured in an explosion three weeks ago when excavation work at an abandoned plastics factory in Nanjing damaged an underground propylene pipeline.

China’s state council announced on 26 July that the standard compensation award for work-related injuries and death will be substantially increased next year. The one off compensation payment for work-related death will be increased from 200,000 yuan to 343,500 yuan. Additional payments will also be made for funeral expenses and monthly pension payments to the relatives of the deceased bringing the total compensation to 618,000 yuan on average.

CLB executive director Han Dongfang, in a recent press release, welcomed the increased compensation levels as being more in line with the long-term needs of workers and their families, but pointed out that the most important issue for the government was how to prevent industrial accidents in the first place.

Han proposed that the government should make enterprise owners criminally liable for accidents that could have been prevented. “The employer should be held criminally liable unless he can prove that the accident was a result of force majeure,” Han said.

Currently, it is left to the local government, police and procuratorate to decide whether or not press criminal charges. Very often the local authorities will only prosecute employers when pressured to do so by higher levels of government. By placing the burden of proof on the employer, Han argued, the local authorities would have no room left to maneuver and would have to take action.

CLB's analysis of Guangdong's Regulations on the Democratic Management of Enterprises

william — Mon, 09 Aug 2010 16:45:45 +0800

In the first half of 2010, industrial conflict in China became increasingly intense, with protests spilling out of the factory into the public domain. A wave of protests spread nationwide following the suicide leaps of a dozen workers of Foxconn in Shenzhen, and strikes at Honda Auto Parts Manufacturing Co. Ltd (Nanhai, Guangdong). Against this backdrop, the Standing Committee of Guangdong Province People’s Congress on 21st July convened to discuss the revised draft of its Regulations on the Democratic Management of Enterprises. According to media reports, the original draft was submitted to the Province’s standing committee in 2008, but deliberations were put on hold to enable measures to be thrashed out for dealing with global financial crisis, which broke in that year. In June 2010, the Guangdong Provincial Party Committee demanded faster progress in the preparation of the draft Regulations, as the rising tide of labour conflicts made it more urgent to construct harmonious labour relations. Therefore, the Provincial People’s Congress duly put the draft into this year’s legislative program. Two new chapters were added to the draft Regulations: the fifth chapter − “collective wage consultations” and the sixth chapter − “dispute coordination and management”. In July, after sending the draft to the Provincial People’s Congress for deliberation, currently the drafters are seeking opinions from four sources: the government, workers, state-owned enterprises and non-state-owned enterprises. It is planned that the draft will be revised again this August, and in September it will go back to the People’s Congress Standing Committee for revision, and should be passed in late September.

From viewing the draft Regulations that are open for opinion, two areas stand out as being particularly important: the fifth chapter on “collective wage consultations” and the sixth chapter on “dispute coordination and management”. Once this local-level legislation has been passed, we think it could trigger a major overhaul of the collective consultation system that has prevailed in China over the last two decades, with collective bargaining becoming one of the principal adjustment mechanisms in labour relations under the market economy. Based on provisions of the Regulations and chapters five and six, China Labour Bulletin draws the following conclusions:

(1) The Regulations provide a framework for initiating collective wage consultation. Article 40 of the Regulations stipulates that when workers recognize the need for collective wage consultations with the enterprise, a request should be sent to the union. When one-fifth or more of the enterprise workers have asked the union for collective wage consultations, the union should organize the democratic election of worker representatives to engage in such negotiations, and inform the enterprise of the request for collective consultations on wages. Article 41 states that for enterprises that have not yet set up a union, when one-fifth of workers ask for collective consultations on wages, asking the local trade union to supervise and guide the democratic election of worker representatives is allowed. In the articles concerning collective consultation in the Trade Union Law (1992), the Labour Law (1994) and the Labour Contract Law (2007), enterprise unions have been given the role of asking for collective consultation − not the workers. If this framework for initiating collective consultation becomes law, it will be highly significant in two ways. First, it will provide workers with a formalised channel for protecting their interests, enabling them to use collective bargaining to voice their demands, without having to first force management to the table through strikes and other forms of collective protests. Second, it will give collective bargaining – a labour right that has always nominally belonged to workers – back to workers. It will allow workers, under the supervision of the unions, to elect their own representatives in negotiations. The preconditions for workers themselves to take the main role in collective bargaining will have been met.

(2) The Regulations have restored collective bargaining to its rightful place—within the enterprise. In recent years, due to the “hollowing out” or outright absence of unions within the enterprise, the ACFTU has consistently pursued collective consultation at the industry or regional level. However, the draft Regulations have underscored the importance of collective wage consultation in the enterprise, and article 37 of the draft Regulations states that enterprises should set up a collective wage consultation system in accordance with the law, and through collective consultation on wages, set up a rationale wage adjustment mechanism. Also, the draft Regulations have provided some guarantee mechanisms, such as allowing workers to freely engage local union cadres and lawyers from outside the company to serve as advisers in the collective-bargaining process. They also bar employers from all discriminatory behaviour against worker-appointed collective-bargaining representatives and from illegally dismissing or revising the employment contracts of workers who serve as representatives in negotiations. Such provisions really have helped to allay the “sense of impotence” or “fear ” cited by enterprise grassroots union cadres and worker representatives as reasons for shunning negotiation. After establishment of a collective-bargaining framework at the enterprise level, collective agreements can be crafted to satisfy the specific demands of workers in different enterprises and sectors, and with differing job descriptions.

In this regard, Ou Guangyuan, chairman of the standing committee of Guangdong’s People’s Congress, points out that “the main object of this legislation is to resolve the problem of inhumane conditions and excessively low wages at enterprises. The enterprise is a cell in the body of society. For the stable development of that society, it is essential to ensure that enterprises establish democratic management, normal mechanisms for wage increases and harmonious industrial relations.”

(3) Due to the precedent of collective bargaining triggered by strike action at Honda, the draft Regulations in Article 40 now include provisions that bar workers seeking wage rises from resorting to work stoppages, go-slows and other extreme methods before they have lawfully demanded collective consultation or while consultations are on-going. During this time, they must ensure the normal order in production operations while protecting their rights. Since the provisions mandate initiation of collective bargaining if at least 20 per cent of workers demand it, there is clearly no longer any need for the current model in which workers usually initiate collective bargaining by striking first. However, the draft Regulations also recognize the reasonableness of workers using strikes or other forms of collective action. For example, Article 51 indicates that if an enterprise management fails to respond to a workforce demand for collective bargaining, or fails to arrange such negotiations, that employer may not terminate workers’ employment contracts on grounds of stoppages or go-slows. Such provisions, we believe, could be interpreted as meaning that the law has recognised the reasonableness of workers’ resorting to striking and other forms of collective action. One drafter of the Regulations, Guangdong Federation of Trade Unions Member and Inspector Kong Xianghong pointed out, Article 51’s aim isn’t to prevent workers from work-stoppages, but rather workers must have first put forth reasonable and appropriate demands, which will help to put labour conflicts of interest onto a path where they can be solved under the rule of law.

(4) The Regulations clearly state the government’s role as one of “neutral coordinator”. In cases where either the enterprise or the worker representatives cannot continue the consultation process due to internal disagreement, or agreement cannot be reached, the draft Regulations in Article 61 allow either side to apply for intervention and mediation by the human resource and social security authorities of the government. Provisions like this identify the government’s role within labour relations as one of facilitation and arbitration. Therefore, the tools for balancing interests within industrial relations have been put back in the hands of labour and management. Conditions have therefore been satisfied for the formation and development of labour as a collective force. The still greater significance of this clarification of role lies in the recognition by the Guangdong legislature that industrial disputes are “contradictions” inherent in labour relations in the market economy, and as such, they come under “contradictions” of economic interest, capable of resolution by collective bargaining. For the government, this recognition has laid the foundations for a non-politicised model of dispute settlement in worker’s collective rights campaigns.

The launch of deliberations on the draft Regulations at the Standing Committee of Guangdong Province People’s Congress shows how a local legislature is nudging rights protests by workers in China towards resolution through standardised, institutionalised collective bargaining. It also shows that completion of the transition to a market-based model for labour relations in China has created a pressing need for such collective bargaining to serve as a core adjustment mechanism, for alleviation of the increasingly conflictual industrial conflicts. The ACFTU has spent nearly two decades promoting the collective contract system. But it has failed to bridge the enormous gap that persists between the very distinctive collective bargaining system China has evolved and the reality of industrial relations on the shopfloor.

In earlier reports CLB has published, we point out that the biggest problem in the existing system of collective consultation is inadequate worker participation. Here, the draft Regulations constitute a major breakthrough. Through provisions ranging from creation of a framework for initiation of collective consultation to election of worker representatives, they show that Guangdong’s lawmakers are preparing to hand back to the workers one of the core collective labour rights, that of collective bargaining. We believe that once workers themselves are involved in collective bargaining, this mechanism will be able to satisfy their demands, attract their interest, and garner their support. Collective contracts, once signed, will also have real effect. Therefore, we expect these Regulations currently being deliberated by Guangdong’s legislature to play a deep and far-reaching role in bringing greater harmony to industrial relations, benefiting all three main parties involved—labour, management and the government.