By Paul Garver
Democratic Left Fall 2008
While Americans were focused on their November presidential election, equally momentous decisions were being made in the Pearl River Delta area of China’s Guangdong Province. The industrial belt stretching from Hong Kong north through the cities of Shenzhen and Dongguan to the provincial capital city Guangzhou (formerly Canton) has become a crucible for an epic struggle over the future direction of Chinese society.
In the 21st century the fate of the American and global labor movements is increasingly linked to the future of workers’ organizations in China. By 2010, 60 percent of the world’s labor force will be concentrated in Asia, with 25 percent in China alone. China already comprises one-eighth of the global economy, and its economic growth rate is the highest of any major economy. China is fast becoming the “workshop of the world,” exporting not only mass-produced consumer goods to North America and Europe, but also highly sophisticated industrial products to all the world’s markets. China’s 700 million-member labor force includes a vast reservoir of relatively inexpensive migrants from rural areas to sprawling industrial districts as well as a growing number of highly educated and skilled workers in urban centers. The workforce’s size, coupled with the rapid growth of Chinese industry and its increasing role in the global economy, means that whatever happens in China greatly influences developments affecting workers elsewhere.
New Developments in the ACFTU
Key to the future of the Chinese working class is whether the All China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU) can reform itself into a genuine labor movement. Although 200 million of the 700 million Chinese workers are already members of its enterprise-level unions, the majority of those unions are controlled by management, and few engage in effective collective bargaining with the employer. Although the ACFTU might be regarded as part of a ruling trinity in China, its senior partners at all levels – government and the Communist Party – have clearly overshadowed its role. But the Chinese media, international labor, international business, and even its harshest critics are reporting significant developments within the ACFTU. Business China noted (5/26/08) that “the ACFTU is gradually evolving beyond its previous role as a lapdog for the Communist Party.” China Labour Bulletin’s Han Dongfang noted (8/26/08) a “critical turning point in the history of China’s trade union movement” as union officials are openly stating that the union should represent the workers and local governments are enacting ordinances implementing new national legislation concerning labor contracts that places collective bargaining at the core of union activity.
Because of its proximity to the semi-autonomous regions of Hong Kong and Macao, developments in the Pearl River Delta are often viewed as portents for changes in other regions of China. Mingling and often colliding in the Pearl River Delta region are giant restless streams of internal migrant workers, entrepreneurs from Taiwan, Hong Kong and other regions of China, international representatives of global capital, and a smaller number of labor rights campaigners based mainly in Hong Kong. This maelstrom challenges the abilities of the Communist Party, local government, and officials of the ACFTU to maintain political stability while managing needed change.
Experiments to reform labor federations already underway in the Pearl River Delta region of Guangdong province are now widely reported in Chinese newspapers, publicized on the Internet, and may indeed be emulated throughout China. In the Dalian Economic Zone of northern China, the local federation of the ACFTU is experimenting with direct election of union officers by the rank and file. The ACFTU’s Bulletin reports with some excitement that of the thirteen union elections conducted under the new system, incumbent chairmen were ousted and replaced in all thirteen!
The ancient city of Guangzhou is now home to more than 11 million people, including nearly 4 million internal migrants seeking work in its burgeoning workplaces. In Guangzhou alone, 464 plants are operated by the top 500 global companies. Thirty miles to the south, Dongguan’s population of 8 million includes 6 million internal migrants who staff factories owned by or producing for most of the Fortune 500 global companies. Another 55 miles south lies Shenzhen, whose skyscrapers rival those of adjacent Hong Kong, and which is home to China’s first great export-processing special economic zone.
ACFTU Campaign at Fortune 500 Companies
International media coverage has intensified since the ACFTU, following a directive from the Communist Party, announced its intention to increase trade union coverage of Fortune 500 companies’ factories operating in China from some 50 percent to 80 percent by the end of September 2008. This goal would entail requiring untrained officials to establish thousands of local unions in a short time, and self-evidently might lead to setting up more of the management- dominated “Potemkin Village” unions that now prevail in most private sector workplaces in China.
Management Dominated Unions
Simply creating more management-dominated unions in Fortune 500 companies will not help the ACFTU win the support of skeptical Chinese workers. For example, Nestlé operates a large Nescafé factory in Dongguan. For more than a decade the union chairperson has also held a top Nestlé general manager post. The union does not bargain, conducts no union activities, collects no dues, and does not permit workers to run for union office. When one worker circulated a petition asking for new elections for union chairperson and committee members, he was summarily fired the next day for “serious misconduct.” He filed a legal complaint for the illegal failure to conduct periodic union elections, which is pending. Although the Dongguan municipal trade union federation is “investigating” the complaint, in 2006 the same federation had awarded the management-controlled Nescafé union the award for “excellent trade union organization” of the year.
Also in Dongguan, the Nine Dragons cardboard factory, owned by Chinese billionaire Zheng Yin (the richest woman in China), came under fire in a report issued by the Hong-Kong- based Students and Scholars Against Corporate Misbehavior (SACOM), for numerous violations of Chinese labor law. These included dangerous working conditions, extensive systems for fining workers, and replacing permanent workers with sub- contracted workers at lower wages. Thousands of workers at the Nine Dragons Dongguan plant went on strike in December 2007 to protest these company actions, designed to circumvent the new labor contract law supported by the ACFTU that went into effect early this year. Zheng Yin as a prominent member of the Chinese People’s Political Consultation Committee continues to lead employer opposition to the implementation of the labor contract law, calling the requirement to provide workers with permanent work contracts a relic of the “iron rice bowl” and stating that “a nation cannot be rich without the polarization between rich and poor.”
The Guangdong provincial labor federation took the unprecedented and positive step of meeting with SACOM members on May 12 to discuss the report. Although it admitted to the local media that there were violations at the Nine Dragons plant, it denied that these were serious. To be called a “sweatshop,” the spokesman for the Guangdong federation claimed, Nine Dragons had to meet all four of the following criteria: refusing to sign contracts with workers, failing to provide legally required insurance, forcing workers to work overtime and providing unsafe working conditions. SACOM, the federation claimed, libeled Nine Dragons as a sweatshop since it did not meet all four of the conditions set out by the Guangdong labor federation.
Two weeks later the federation denounced SACOM as an organization funded by a “human rights foundation” (actually the Swiss Protestant “Bread for the World”) and supported Zheng Yin’s claim that SACOM was part of the anti-Olympic games boycott movement. Faced with either supporting oppressed workers and their student supporters or backing a billionaire capitalist who was undermining the very legislative reforms sought by the ACFTU, the provincial labor federation sided with the capitalist, who was critically placed in the national and regional power elite.
Officials of regional labor federations are squeezed between directives emanating from certain reforming elements in the ACFTU and Communist Party at the national level, and their own close alliances at the regional and local level with governments desperate to keep the good will of employers, whether they be foreign companies or native capitalists. Most of the time the labor federations and local governments tend to side with employers against the workers. But fortunately this is only part of the complicated story of the ACFTU in Guangdong. Several large municipal labor federations in Guangdong are beginning to change such entrenched patterns of behavior.
The Dongguan municipal federation supported the enactment of heavy fines against employers who knowingly hire child laborers – this after a crusading local newspaper revealed that more than 1000 children from one poor Sichuan village had been lured to work at factories in a single industrial district in Dongguan.
On August 1, 2008 the Shenzhen municipal authorities enacted implementing legislation for the new labor contract aw that defined the major responsibility of trade unions as representing workers in collective bargaining negotiations with management (and did not mention the usual injunction to maintain labor peace). This Shenzhen document on the Rights and Obligations of Trade Unions was welcomed by Han Dongfang of the China Labor Bulletin as an opening making it possible for the Shenzhen Federation of Trade Unions to become a “much more effective representative of workers’ rights and interests,” by allowing it to take “practical steps to create a successful bargaining model that others can follow to make collective bargaining a key part of China’s emerging civil society.”
Of course the various levels of the ACFTU must seize upon the state-sponsored opening of opportunities, or they will remain meaningless. The Chinese labor official who understands this most clearly is Chen Weiguang, chairman of the Guangzhou Federation of Trade Unions (GZFTU). At a conference promoting the establishment of unions in the Fortune 500 TNCs in Guangzhou on July 15, Chen said, “The trade union is a matter for the workers themselves,” adding that the role of enterprise unions must change from “persuading the bosses” to “mobilizing the workers.”
“Unions Belong to the Workers”
“Unions belong to the workers,” Chen stressed, “so it basically does not matter whether the bosses agree or not.” And Chen has put large numbers of Federation staff into the Guangzhou industrial districts to go into the factories and mobilize workers to set up unions. The “organizers” (the concept is new to the recent history of China) will not as usual demand that the company itself sets up unions, but will demand that the companies provide them with times and places to talk directly to workers.
But the immediate goal of increasing union coverage from 50 percent to 90 percent of the Guangzhou factories is subordinate to wresting existing unions from employer control. As Chen pointed out when visiting the USA in May, more than half of the some 5,000 trade union chairs in Guangzhou are managers. A new Guangzhou ordinance prohibits managers from holding local union office. As elected workers replace managers, it will be necessary to protect genuine worker chairpersons from retaliation by the employer.
Internationatonal Labor Community and Chinese Labor
The international labor community is intently observing these developments in the Pearl River Delta region from its Hong Kong outpost just across the border from Shenzhen. The Hong Kong liaison office of the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC), Global Union Federations and the Hong Kong Confederation of Trade Unions (IHLO) has been using its website to report on positive new developments within the municipal federations of the ACFTU. In December 2007 the executive committee of the ITUC decided to initiate a “dialogue” with the ACFTU. Although the criteria for membership in the ITUC demand that affiliates be free of control by government, political party or employer, none of which the ACFTU meets at this time, the case for increasing international dialogue with the ACFTU is greatly strengthened by the hopeful signs of internal reform.
In an Aug. 28 letter from ITUC General Secretary Guy Ryder to the local labor bureau in Yantai (where the Danish electronics firm Ole Wolff had fired six workers’ representatives of the enterprise union), the ITUC stated: “It has been brought to our notice that your office has been unsupportive of the official Yantai enterprise union, a formal branch of the ACFTU. We wish to remind you of the legality of the enterprise union at Ole Wolff (Yantai).” In a parallel letter dated the same day to Ole Wolff headquarters in Denmark, Ryder supported the enterprise union’s demands not only for reinstatement of the fired worker representatives, but also for “recognition of the officially registered trade union and its members.” Past ITUC protest letters never included demands to recognize an enterprise union affiliated with the ACFTU. Most representatives of the international workers’ movement fear the negative consequences if the governing Chinese system would collapse in the same way that Communist institutions did in the USSR and parts of Eastern Europe. Building genuine unions and recreating civil society in the aftermath of that collapse has been difficult, and incremental democratic reforms of the ACFTU now underway in the Pearl River Delta and elsewhere might well provide a better alternative for workers in China. In the next period the major tasks for Chinese labor are to eliminate domination of enterprise unions by management, provide for democratic participation of workers in grassroots enterprise unions as chairpersons and committee members, and undertake massive training programs in union building and collective bargaining, both for workers elected to union office and for ACFTU staff at all levels. We should not only welcome these efforts, but also do whatever we can to support those fighting to accomplish these goals.
For a discussion of concrete steps sympathetic foreign unionists can take (and are taking) to support reform of labor organizations in China, see: http://talkingunion.wordpress.com/2008/02/26/imaginging-international-solidarity/.
Paul Garver is a consultant to the International Union of Food Workers. He thanks Anita Chan, Jenny Chan, Ellen, David Friedman and Cathy Walker for their comments on this report which appeared in the Fall 2008 Democratic Left. Garver is active in the Boston DSA.
Filed under: Global organizing, Solidarity | Tagged: ACFTU, Chinese workers, Paul Garver
