Teaching Comparative

Why Unions in China's Wal-Marts

The September 23rd issue of The Economist has a good article (pp. 41-42) that describes not an abstract concept, but some of the nuts of bolts of how the political system there worked in the past and how the Party is trying to make it work again. It's not just Wal-Mart that's being unionized in China.

A little solidarity: China's unions

"THE Chinese Communist Party has always been swift to crush independent organisations of workers, but even its own puppet trade unions have had a hard time in recent years. Until recently at least, the burgeoning private sector has eschewed them and so too has its workforce...

"Unions in China are controlled by the Communist Party through an umbrella organisation, the All-China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU)... Two decades ago, when China's economy was still mostly run by the state, almost all urban workers belonged to trade unions set up in the state-owned enterprises to which they belonged. At best these unions acted as mediators between management and workers rather than as champions of workers' interests. They had little bargaining power—strikes and other forms of collective pressure being effectively banned...

"Since the 1990s the rapid growth of private, including foreign, enterprise and the widespread closure of state-owned firms has gutted unions from the urban workforce. It has also stripped the party of its own network of cells in workplaces...

"This has been a blow to the authorities. For a party used to all-pervasive control, the withering of its grassroots organisations has left it feeling increasingly uneasy... The party wants its unions back in place in order to keep workers off the streets, which, it accepts, sometimes means restraining employers too. Giving government-controlled unions a little bit more muscle, the party feels, helps to deter desperate workers from trying to establish independent unions. The party still shudders at the recollection of Solidarity's growth in Poland in the 1980s...

"Some companies are worried. A new labour-contract law, which may be passed within the next year or so, contains provisions that critics (inside both foreign and Chinese enterprises) say could give unions a greater say in company decision-making...

"However, there is little likelihood that trade unions in China will acquire the clout that some of their counterparts exercise in Western countries. For all its Marxist pretensions, the party is still more interested in business than in the grievances of the proletariat."

posted by Ken Wedding @ 6:28 AM