Walkouts protest exploitation
Chinese law helps workers organize union at Wal-Mart
By Deirdre Griswold
The All-China Federation of Trade Unions
announced in November that Wal-Mart, which employs 20,000 workers at its stores
in China, has agreed to allow a union to represent them if its "associates"--its
euphemism for employees--show that they want one.
This chain of
mega-stores has tried to close the door to unionization anywhere in the world it
operates. Given Wal-Mart's deserved reputation for ruthless exploitation and
preventing its workers from organizing, this development could have tremendous
repercussions for low-wage retail workers everywhere.
Chinese law requires
that all companies, whether private or state-owned, allow the establishment of
unions. But the law has not been vigorously enforced in foreign-owned companies
until recently. Now the ACFTU says it will concentrate on organizing large
corporations like Wal-Mart, Kodak and Samsung.
Economic growth
and class struggle
China has been undergoing a rapid
expansion of its manufacturing base--the largest such growth in the world. While
the state still employs the most industrial workers, investment by overseas
capital has been extensive and many millions now work in foreign-owned firms,
where conditions are much worse than in the mostly unionized state
enterprises.
In recent years, protests by workers over low wages, long
hours and working conditions in these factories have become tumultuous.
Walkouts, work stoppages and even strikes have broken out in many of China's
industrial cities.
In December, the New York Times ran a series of
articles about China that focused on its rapid industrial growth and the grow
ing confidence of workers to raise demands. One article, about a walkout by
mostly women workers at a Uniden plant making wireless phones for Wal-Mart, told
how they had met secretly to draw up a list of demands and then walked off the
job.
"Analysts of China's labor scene say strikes like this are becoming
far more common as younger migrant workers exposed to the wealth of China's
relatively rich eastern cities grow increasingly angry over what many see as
their exploitation. ... All the women interviewed seemed determined to press
their demands, the most important of which, they said, were shorter work hours
and enforcement of minimum-wage laws. Asked if they were afraid of losing their
jobs, they scoffed at the idea, saying workers were in short supply in
Shenzhen's vast manufacturing zone." (New York Times, Dec. 17, 2004)
This
fall, the Washington Post reported that an "unprecedented series of walkouts"
had shaken Chinese factories. (Nov. 27) This grassroots militancy has both
stimulated the official trade union movement to act and been encouraged by dev
elopments in China's political leadership.
Last August, the Standing
Committee of the National People's Congress launched a nationwide inspection of
the implementation of the Trade Union Law, according to Beijing Review. "Results
indicated that less than 10 percent of the 500,000 foreign-funded enterprises
registered in China have established trade union organizations."
Under
Chinese law, "no organization or individual has the right to obstruct and pro
hibit the establishment of trade unions. ... China's Trade Union Law stipulates
two ways for the establishment of trade unions: One is a request from employ ees
on a voluntary basis, and the other is a suggestion from the trade unions at a
higher level. Trade unions in the upper level of the national union hierarchy
are authorized to send union officials to enterprises and help them establish
trade unions. Enterprises have no right to interfere in the process," says the
Chinese daily.
The attention now being paid to union organizing in the
Chinese press indicates that this development has the support of the Communist
Party at the highest levels. It comes at a time when not only has the robust and
growing working class been militant in pressing its demands, but economic
development has created greater demand for skilled labor.
The ACFTU has
also begun organizing community-based trade unions for migrant workers, who
often are scattered in small worksites, as well as the unemployed. Last October,
the union federation set up a hotline and by the end of December had received
60,000 complaints from workers nationwide. (Xinhuanet, Jan. 6) It then estab
lished 1,763 aid centers "to offer needy workers job opportunities, legal ser
vices and policy consultations," Dong Li, director of the union's Financial
Auditing Com mittee, told a press conference in Beijing.
'Independent'
trade unions?
Critics of China in the imperialist countries, many of
them adherents of social democracy, have been demanding that Chinese workers
have the right to establish unions independent of the ACFTU, claiming it is too
close to the government and local authorities. The president of the ACFTU, Wei
Jianxing, rejected this position in August 2002, saying the union "must
resolutely uphold the unity of the working people and trade union organizations,
and guard against the plot of hostile forces at home and abroad to 'westernize'
and 'split up' the working people and trade union organizations." Wei is also a
member of the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee. (Quoted in China
Labor Bulletin, based in Hong Kong.)
These critics almost unanimously view
China as a capitalist country because of its introduction of market reforms
after the death of Mao Zedong. And there certainly is a capitalist class in
China today, just as there is class struggle. The growth of private ownership
along with the phasing out of many social guarantees for workers and farmers has
created a growing income gap in a country once noted for its relative social
equality.
However, it would be wrong to write off the state structures
erected by the Chinese Revolution, which was an earth-shaking development of
world historic significance. There has been no counter-revolutionary breakup of
the Chinese state, and while the party has made tremendous concessions to
foreign and domestic capitalism in order to get technology and capital for
development, and has been severely altered in the process, it has neither been
broken up or destroyed.
China, with its tremendous development of recent
decades, stands in great contrast to the lands of the former Soviet Union, where
capitalist reaction and imperialist penetration have brought economic chaos and
terrible hardships for the masses of people. Wages and living standards in China
are rising--workers in China now earn three times what Indian workers do--and
infant mortality in Beijing is now 4.6 per thousand live births (compared to 6.5
in New York City!). In the former Soviet countries, all the health and social
welfare indices have moved in the opposite direction since the breakup of the
USSR.
Lessons of Poland
Wei Jianxing may very well also have
been thinking of Poland when he cautioned against any "westernization" of
China's unions. Some of the very same political forces that today are pushing
for "independent" unions in China wholeheartedly embraced "Solidarity" in
Poland, the organization that mobilized for the restoration of capitalism there.
Far from being a true expression of the workers--although it certainly became an
outlet for their frustrations and grievances--Solidarity had a petty-bourgeois
leadership that was advised and supported by the CIA, the Pope and,
unfortunately, the AFL-CIO leadership as well.
In the first year after
Poland's weak socialist government fell, the economy imploded. Living standards
took a nose-dive. Even today, 15 years later, unemployment in Poland is 18
percent and the shipyards where Solidarity first appeared have been either
closed down or sold to Western corporations.
The ACFTU has taken on a huge
task in trying to organize Wal-Mart, as U.S. unions have already found out. It
takes genuine international solidarity among the workers of many countries to
force these transnational corporations to sign a union contract. That should be
at the top of the agenda of unions in the U.S.--not a campaign to defame China's
national union organization.
What do the bosses and executives of these
corporations think about China's "official" union movement? On the one hand,
they want workers everywhere to take a cynical attitude toward the ACFTU, and
spread the word that it is little more than a company union. But they're not
acting like it is.
"Multinationals resist introduction of Chinese
unions," was the headline of an article from Shanghai that appeared in the
Financial Times of London on Jan. 5.
"Large multinational investors in
China are resisting aggressive attempts to establish trade unions in their
workplaces," said the article. "U.S. business associations have held seminars in
Shanghai and Beijing in recent weeks to advise their members how to respond to
the unions' campaign."
The article quotes an anonymous U.S. executive who
cares soooo much about the workers. "This is about money and getting party cells
into private enterprise," he says. "If they are so concerned about workers, why
aren't they recruiting members in places like coal mines?"
And if this
business executive is so concerned about workers, why is he resisting
unions?
"Some executives worry that, as China's economy becomes
increasingly attuned to market forces, a more strident union movement could
emerge from the docile federation's framework," the business paper concludes.
Yes, that's what it's all about. The pressure of tens of millions of new
workers has raised the specter that China may be moving leftward once again..
Reprinted from the Jan. 27, 2005, issue of Workers World newspaper
This article is copyright under a Creative Commons License.
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